George Barnard's Photographs of Sherman's Campaign

This collection comprises 61 black-and-white photographs taken and printed by Civil War-era photographer George N. Barnard. Barnard held the post of official photographer for the United States Army, Division of the Mississippi, and traveled with Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman on his Atlanta Campaign and his March to the Sea in 1864. Sherman started the destruction of the Southern railroads in Chattanooga, but Barnard began his work with the Army in Atlanta. He returned to the South in 1866, after the war ended, to record images of the aftermath of the fighting. Barnard solicited advance sales and then published a book of the photographs that he hand printed and mounted. He produced 100 to 150 copies of the book, approximately 50 of which went to European collectors, and Union generals ordered many of the other copies. The Wisconsin Historical Society holds a copy in the archives, which archivists scanned to create this image gallery.

Barnard Before and After the Civil War

George Barnard was born in Coventry, Connecticut in 1819. After his father's death in 1826, his family moved to Sauquoit in central New York state. After relocating to Nashville, Barnard returned to Sauquoit for a few years and married his wife, Sarah Jane Hodges. The couple next moved to Oswego, New York, where he began a career as a daguerreotypist in 1846. He ran a successful portrait studio and campaigned to have photography elevated to an art form. In 1853 Barnard took at least two daguerreotypes of the great Oswego fire, considered some of the first products of photojournalism. Barnard stayed current with changes in photography, experimenting with new processes as they were developed.

Starting in the late 1840s or early 1850s the Barnard family had some private complications. While his wife Sarah and daughter Mary Grace stayed behind, Barnard focused on New York City for his photographic career. It was there that he started working relationships with Edward Anthony and Mathew Brady. Anthony owned the largest American business devoted to photographic supplies, and they employed Barnard to shoot stereoscopes around New York as well as sending him to Cuba in 1860.

After the Civil War Barnard continued working as a photographer. He worked in New York first and then relocated to Charleston in 1868. In 1871 he moved to Chicago, only three months before the great fire. He took photographs of Chicago after the fire, images reminiscent of the destroyed Southern cities he had photographed during the war. He then returned to Charleston in 1873. In 1880 he moved to the suburbs of Rochester, New York, to be near his daughter. He stayed current with new technologies in photography and became acquaintes with the new dry-plate process being developed by George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak. Eastman hired Barnard to introduce more photographers to the process. He retired from active work in 1888 but continued to experiment with photography until his death in 1902.