Credit: Library of Congress
Almost as soon as the cannons fell silent and the fighting was over, photographers swarmed the battlefield to document the carnage, at times posing the bodies. These photographic entrepreneurs sold both single pictures and photo albums of the Gettysburg battlefield to a public eager to see images of the greatest battle of the war. Alexander Gardner and his team of photographers arrived at Gettysburg on July 5, 1863. These dead Confederates, probably of Georgia soldiers, were laid out to bury by their comrades before Lee's army evacuated the battlefield. Gardner captured this image on the Rose Farm, and several others of this group, sometime on July 5 or 6.
