Rebel Artillery Soldiers, Killed in the Trenches of Fort Mahone, Called by the Soldiers "Fort Damnation," at the Storming of Petersburgh, Virginia
Thomas C. Roche American
Publisher Selden & Ennis American
Not on view
This stereograph of Confederate dead in Petersburg, Virginia, reveals the intensity of one of the war’s last great battles as well as the sophistication and complexity of late war stereo photography. Thomas C. Roche arrived on the scene one day after Union forces took Confederate Fort Mahone, just six days before Appomattox. Roche well understood the poetics of the stereo medium and photographed from an extremely close and low vantage point, as if he were a soldier fighting hand-to-hand.
To appeal to memorabilia collectors after the war, E. & H. T. Anthony sold this view on bright yellow card mounts in their popular series “Photographic History, The War for the Union.” Despite the publisher’s extended printed caption stating that both the subjects were “Rebel Artillery Soldiers, killed in the Trenches of Fort Mahone,” the figure in the background is just playing dead. He is a civilian, not a Confederate artilleryman. And he is African American. The “corpse” was a teamster, alive and free, and the photographer’s field assistant.
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