September - Essay

[Mark Hall:] "Those images, the ones from that dark September day, are the ones that stick in my mind the most.

"As a historian, I have seen thousands of pictures of the past; some recorded on film and many others just an imprint on my mind. But those September photos have stayed with me always. They were first seen in New York City and gradually throughout the world. Not the recordings of our September, but the September of our ancestors.

"Images of a small Maryland town, near a creek called Antietam. The destruction framed by cornfields and rolling countryside, not the sprawl of a metropolis. We were stunned by the events of our September, but no more than our ancestors were in 1862, when the first photographs of war reached out from a gallery window.

"A photographer named Alexander Gardner, an employee of Matthew Brady, traveled to Sharpsburg, Maryland, a place where 28,000 men lay dead and wounded from a single day's combat. It was a hellish place, filled with unparalleled destruction. The Union and Confederate armies had contested viciously over a few acres of Maryland farmland until both sides were virtually bled dry. The next day they simply stared across the lines at one another, too exhausted and horrified by the previous day's slaughter to continue. The Confederates left, and the Federals claimed the field to bury thousands of dead.

"Gardner arrived shortly after and began recording the first photographic images of warfare. As was the custom of the time, the pictures were displayed at a gallery - in New York City. The public was enthralled and repulsed by what they saw. How far the politics of the time had come, far from the days of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the election of Lincoln. East to a cornfield near a creek called Antietam, to a photographer's lens and a gallery window.

"What will we do with the history of our September? Those from the fall of 1862 survived and made something better. They recorded what came and kept going, much as I think we will do. One could argue that our Septembers haven't changed that much, but that wouldn't be true. For today that Maryland creek is a peaceful place, especially in September.