Ghosts of Andersonville: A haunting Civil War photograph revisited
The notorious Andersonville Prison, the largest and deadliest of the Confederacy’s prisoner-of-war camps during the Civil War, operated for only 14 months. But by the time the open-air camp shut down in May 1865, following the South’s surrender, close to 13,000 Union soldiers had died there, primarily from disease, malnutrition, and exposure.
Within a few months, Clara Barton (the nurse who would go on to found the American Red Cross) traveled to the site in Georgia to help identify the dead, see to their proper burial, and notify their families. (The camp is now a national historic site.)
But she also collected what was left behind: the mundane items of the prisoners’ daily lives, objects crudely made by hand from metal, wood, and bone and found in the little caves the prisoners had dug for shelter in a hillside. A cup. A bucket. A tin baking dish. A checkerboard. Barton took these relics back to Washington, D.C. and displayed them at her Missing Soldiers Office, a government-funded agency she had founded to manage the enormous task of naming the missing and the dead.
In 1866, she arranged the objects more formally in a shrine-like display and had it photographed; the image was then widely distributed by the studio of the well-known Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. That photograph is the basis for a new book, “Relics of War: The History of a Photograph” (Princeton University Press) by Jennifer Raab, an associate professor of the history of art in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The book argues that the photograph of the relics was an important part of Barton’s work to identify the missing and the dead because it represented “a materialization of the absent body, a sacred site for mourning and remembrance, a political and legislative appeal mounted on behalf of the women and children left behind, as well as a blunt testimony to the inhumanity of Andersonville indelibly shaped by the earliest use of photographs as legal evidence in a war crimes trial.”
Raab, who specializes in the art of the United States and the history of photography, sat down with Yale News to talk about her first encounter with the photograph, offer a description of the arrangement of the relics, and relate a spine-tingling discovery in Barton’s archives. The conversation has been condensed and edited.
At the time this photograph came out, in the 19th century, it was circulated widely. But you say in your book that it has received almost no attention since. What drew you to it?
Jennifer Raab: I first saw it at a Civil War exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [in New York]. The large-format print is in the Met’s collection, and it just did not look like anything else in the room. It was fascinating. It was evocative. The notion that these were relic objects was really compelling. It was one of those works that stayed with me as I was thinking about a range of other projects, and I found myself continually coming back to it. I sensed that it could be the nexus of something much larger. Years later, the question became: what would it look like to center an entire book on a single photograph? Such a seemingly radical limitation actually became an opportunity to be more conceptually expansive and to listen for the silences in the archives.
Clara Barton went to the Andersonville Prison site to help identify the dead and notify their families. Why did she feel the need to also gather these relics?
Raab: That’s an interesting question and the answer is not so clear. Relic collecting after battles was a widespread practice during the war. By the end of the war, collecting relics had as much to do with keeping a piece of history as it did about creating a sense of collective memory. For Barton, the relics had another form of efficacy as part of the bureaucratic and legislative work of advocacy that she was undertaking. What could she bring back that would visually and materially manifest her work? The idea of relics both being haptic indexes of this traumatic site, but also not being specific to individuals, has an important relationship with the work she was doing to identify the missing and the dead.
Let’s look closely at the photograph. What would you like viewers to notice?
Raab: What’s immediately apparent is that these objects are all very specifically labeled. That gives it a kind of anthropological sensibility. Also, these are things associated with domestic life, and yet they look so entirely different than, say, a plate or a spoon would typically look. In the center is a portion of the “dead line” — a wooden fence that went around the open-air camp. If prisoners crossed that line, they would be shot from the guard towers above. To have that as the center of the photograph is to put the violence of the prison front and center. Then there’s this table-like structure above it that serves as a kind of religious offering: a bowl of soup bones. They call to mind saints’ bones and medieval relics.
And then the checkerboard at the top is so strange. The circular shape — an adapted barrel top — gives the whole tableau an anthropomorphic quality that echoes the notion of a relic having a direct relationship with a body. It also alludes to the daily life of prisoners: the passing of time and even of play amidst subsistence conditions.
What’s particularly striking about it, in thinking about the majority of photographs from this time, is how visibly haphazard the backdrop is. There’s this wrinkled butcher-block paper that consumes the background and has a very improvisational effect. That leads me to believe that it was not staged in a photographer’s studio, and that Barton decided rather spontaneously to have it photographed.
You talk about how the families of the deceased were entitled to a government pension, but only if they could prove their loved one’s death. In that way, you say, the photograph can be interpreted as a kind of political advocacy.
Raab: It was a tremendous problem that veterans’ families were facing: not having proof of death and thus not being able to access the pensions necessary for their livelihood, for their future. What Barton was doing was not only trying to name as many as could be named, but also acknowledging that this may be impossible. Bodies might not be recoverable, and this has everything to do with the Civil War being one of the first modern wars. And yet Barton insisted that the missing must be recognized, and their families cared for by the state. The photograph helps her to circulate a political argument: names may not be able to be attached to bodies in the same way that these relics could not be attached to individuals. To place photography in that space was, for me as an art historian and a historian of photography, particularly provocative and powerful.
Barton displayed the relics in Washington, D.C. in 1866 at the National Fair, a huge event to raise money for soldiers’ orphans. How were they received by the public?
Raab: With a good bit of curiosity. They were unlike anything else that was there. This was a philanthropic fair — one that I discuss in the book in terms of racial exclusion, as proceeds only went to white orphans — and it featured all kinds of things for sale. The relics were not for sale. They were meant to remind people of the inhumane conditions of Andersonville. The whole fair had an insistent tone of national reconciliation, but Barton’s display was really dissonant.
Your book also considers the relics and the photograph within the context of the racial inequalities of the time.
Raab: Despite all of Barton’s advocacy work, her endeavor very much relied on narratives of white suffering. In her public lecturing and political lobbying, she conveyed stories that presented the trauma of being a prisoner of war as being worse than enslavement. That kind of comparative logic elides the brutal history of chattel slavery and the particularly horrific experiences of African-American POWs. And so the tragedy of Andersonville becomes remembered as the tragedy of white prisoners who were temporarily unfree. But Andersonville was both a prisoner-of-war camp and a massive slave-labor camp.
You came across some of these relics in Barton’s archives. What was that like?
Raab: Most of her archives are at the Library of Congress, but there are also archives at Smith College. Early on in my research, I requested a box that was simply called “Oversized Materials,” and when I opened it a few of the relic objects were inside. They were all swaddled up in tissue paper. One of the tin “baking dishes” still had the label on it. It was incredibly moving to hold this delicate little object in my hand, more than 150 years later.