Confederate Sharpshooter?

Three days after the Battle of Gettysburg, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan photographed a dead Confederate soldier near this spot in one of Gettysburg's most famous images. The scene showed a stone wall probably built and used by Confederate sharpshooters, a rifle-musket propped against the wall, and the body of a Confederate soldier with a knapsack under his head. Although the elements in the image were authentic, they had been rearranged for dramatic effect. Gardner and O'Sullivan found the soldier, probably a Texas or Georgia infantryman, about 40 yards away on the hillside, photographed him there along with three other views, then moved the body on a blanket to the wall and placed beside it a weapon that was not a sharpshooter's rifle. Gardner titled the image "The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter" and took it near this spot on July 6, 1863, while Union soldiers were still removing and burying the dead. In a later caption, Gardner said he returned four months afterward and found the rusting rifle-musket and decomposing body in the same position. Though the photograph was staged, the loss was real: a young Southern soldier lay dead far from home and family.

Pennsylvania · United States