“The living that throng Broadway care little perhaps for the Dead at Antietam, but we fancy they would jostle less carelessly down the great thoroughfare, saunter less at their ease, were a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement.



Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it. “

New York Times, October 20, 1862



In the days that followed the battle, Alexander Gardner and his assistants, notably James Gibson, photographed the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam.  For the first time in American history the human cost of battle would become public spectacle. The Matthew Brady studios put some these photos on display in New York that October following the battle. That showing has never been forgotten.

 

Over 23,000 Americans fell in battle that day. It was and remains the single bloodiest day in American history. But because of the work of Alexander Gardner and his assistants, a permanent record of that spectacle will forever be preserved.

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes stated, “It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinets as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.” He was on that battlefield looking for his son, future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.