Photo taken from the top floor of Planter’s Hotel in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1866.
The American Antiquarian Society
In this image made in April 1866 from the top floor of Planter’s Hotel in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the camera looks toward the battlefield of December 13, 1862, where thousands of Union soldiers fell in Major General Ambrose Burnside’s ill-considered assault on Marye’s Heights.
The four white pillars of the Marye House are visible at left center just below the horizon. This was one of 121 stereo images known to have been made of the central Virginia battlefields during a forensic pathology research expedition conducted by Dr. Reed Brockway Bontecou, chief surgeon of the wartime Harewood Hospital in Washington, D.C. Only about 80 of the images had been seen and identified until 2017, when photo historian Keith Brady found about a dozen of the missing ones in a digital collection of 879 Civil War stereoviews (pairs of photographs that appear in 3D when viewed through a stereoscope) at the American Antiquarian Society.
Bontecou, after a 10-day expedition documenting soldiers’ wounds, returned to Washington with the first extensive series of images of the battlefields at the Wilderness, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and Fredericksburg—as well as skulls of some of the carelessly buried Confederate dead, which generated controversy for Bontecou.
Bob Zeller is president of the nonprofit Center for Civil War Photography, an organization devoted to collecting, preserving, and digitizing Civil War images.
