In May of 1864, General William T. Sherman and his Union force of 110,000 soldiers invaded Georgia from Chattanooga, beginning a series of battles with Confederate forces in north Georgia that historians later referred to as the Atlanta Campaign. Union troops captured the city of Atlanta on September 2 that same year. Following a brief occupation of the city, Sherman divided his army and began a march to the sea, passing through Milledgeville (Georgia’s capital at the time) and eventually capturing Savannah in December of 1864 before marching north through the Carolinas.
United States Army photographer George N. Barnard followed Sherman’s forces through Georgia and captured the aftermath of the battles in Atlanta and Savannah. Following the conclusion of the war, Barnard traced back through Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina to photograph the battle sites of the Sherman Campaign. The result of his work can be found in the Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Barnard’s Photographic Views of the Sherman Campaign collection, which contains digitized versions of sixty-one albumen prints taken by Barnard around 1866. These powerful photographs portray both the natural beauty of the South and the destructive consequences of the war.
This is one of the first wars to have been relatively copiously photographed and documented … and these are often still extant. In Europe, ironically, the photographs from the German-French war, the campaigns in China (boxer revolt) and a lot of stuff photographed during the first world war has sadly been destroyed during bombardments and lootings towards the end of the second!
love the PHOTOS and FACTS!!
For those like Eve interested in Sherman’s invasion through the eyes of the South, you can browse through the Digital Library of Georgia’s historic newspaper collections, which can be found here:
http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/MediaTypes/Newspapers.html
I was just looking at an exhibit related to Barnard’s photos and maps in the new Russell Special Collections Building!
Looking forward to everyone being able to enjoy the collections now that we have lovely exhibit space for them.
It’s so strange to read the NORTHERN accounts of these battles, but the ones published in the southern newspapers are sometimes quite different! Wonder if they were even in the neighborhood at that time!! ;>