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Civil War Through Pictures

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Submitted By corinnenicole
Words 1557
Pages 7
Corinne Roels
November 6, 2009
English 105 9:40 Zillmer
Essay 3 Final Draft

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words:
Documenting the Civil War through Pictures

The American Civil War of 1861 is one of the most revolutionary events that the United States has experienced in its young history. The eleven states of the south declared their secession from the United States in response to Abraham Lincoln’s campaign against the expansion of slavery into the northern states where the importation of slaves was considered illegal. Confederate forces instigated war against the north by attacking a United States military installation at Fort Sumter, South Carolina in retaliation to the law against the importation of slaves. Considered the deadliest war in American history, 620,000 soldiers were left dead among a plethora of undocumented civilian casualties. There to document the casualties of war was Mathew Brady, a name basically synonymous with Civil War photography, and his well-known accomplices Timothy O’Sullivan, Alexander Gardner, and Egbert Guy Fox (Wert). Altogether, these photographers can be accredited with documenting the entire war from beginning to end. Their collection of photographs comprises the majority of the overall for contributing to the majority of our collection of photographs from the Civil War, as well as the majority of the known photographs of the war (Trachtenberg). Some of the earliest forms of photography appeared in the 1830s, just a handful of decades before the American Civil War. Due to the fact that the transfer of real life images onto paper was a relatively new technology its efficiency was low and each photograph would take between thirty seconds and two minutes for the frame to be captured (Trachtenberg). Because it could take up to several minutes for a picture to be captured, photographers who were employed to

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