Gyroscopic Investing

On Sept. 19, 1862, just two days after the Battle of Antietam, Alexander Gardner, an employee of the photographer Mathew Brady, began documenting the battle’s grim aftermath. One of Gardner’s photographs, titled “Dead Horse of Confederate Colonel; both killed at Battle of Antietam,”? depicted a milky-white steed lying on the field in an eerily peaceful repose. Another showed a line of bloated Confederate bodies along the Hagerstown Pike. Titled “View in the Field, on the west side of Hagerstown road, after the Battle of Antietam,”? it is one of the most reproduced photographs of Civil War dead.

In October, Brady displayed Gardner’s photographs in his New York City studio. “The Dead of Antietam”? both horrified and fascinated people. It was the first time in history that the general public was able to see the true carnage of war. One reporter wrote, “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 door-yards and along streets, he has done something very like it.”?

The photographs of the dead horse and the Confederate bodies along Hagerstown Pike stood out among the horrific images, and yet their subjects’ identities remain a mystery. Arriving just days after the worst fighting in the war so far, Gardner was working amid the slow-moving post-battle chaos. The Union troops who held the field had other priorities than identifying the Confederate dead, a near-impossible task anyway in the days before soldiers carried dog tags. Still, there is a haunting coincidence between these two photographs: in his book “Antietam: A Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day,”? the historian William A. Frassanito makes a compelling case that they were associated with the same unit, the Louisiana Tigers.

Louisiana infantrymen in the Army of Northern Virginia, regardless of their unit, were nicknamed Tigers, partly because of their ferocity on the battlefield, but more so for their highly publicized drunken exploits in camp. The Tigers made up two brigades in Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall”? Jackson’s corps, and at Antietam they were held in reserve a few hundred yards behind the front line that ran through D. R. Miller’s cornfield: Gen. William E. Starke’s brigade was positioned west of the Hagerstown Pike, while Gen. Harry T. Hays’s brigade was to the east.