Courage Under Fire
It was rare for Elijah Wooster to leave his parents' farm in northeastern Massachusetts except to attend services of the Religious Society of Friends. Consequently, the young man experienced little of the world outside of his small New England town. He knew next to nothing about politics, world events or advances in technology. Art, music and literature were as foreign to him as the Chinese alphabet. His life was limited to the planting and harvesting of crops, the care of livestock and the fear of adverse weather conditions.
Then one day Weldon Holgate, a law student from Concord who was attending Harvard College, was visiting relatives that lived nearby and attended the Friends' meeting with his aunt and uncle. Although the visitor was only a simple Quaker himself, compared to Elijah, Weldon was as cosmopolitan as Great Britain's Prince Albert.
After the religious services were concluded, it was common practice for people to split into groups with similar interests and socialize. Older and middle-aged men got together with their contemporaries to discuss farm prices while women gathered in a different area to share recipes and children went outside to play. Since the two young men were only a few months apart in age, they naturally gravitated toward each other.
Elijah and Weldon spoke about trivial matters for only ten minutes before their conversation progressed to a subject that was often on the mind of young men: women. Elijah admitted to being fond of a girl from a neighboring farm.
"What about you?" he asked Weldon. "Have you found a young lady yet?"
"That I have!" the visitor replied with a proud smile. "And once I'm done with school, I'm going to ask her to marry me. Do you want to see a portrait of her?"
Without waiting for an answer, Weldon reached into his jacket pocket and took out a small silver frame. Elijah, who had expected a miniature painting, was stunned to see a photographic likeness of the comely young woman.
"What is this?" he asked, never having seen a photograph before.
"It's a daguerreotype. Elizabeth had it made in Boston for me."
"How was it created?"
"I'm not entirely sure," Weldon confessed. "After all, I'm studying law, not science. But from what I understand the subject sits in front of a boxy object called a camera that contains a light-sensitive silver-lined copper plate treated with iodine and bromine. The image of the subject is captured on this plate, and the daguerreotypist then removes the plate and processes the image using mercury and ...."
Weldon fell silent when he realized that Elijah, who had never studied chemistry, had no idea what he was talking about.
"I suppose all that talk must sound like Greek to you."
"Yes, it does. But it also sounds fascinating," Elijah said, as he reluctantly handed the framed daguerreotype back to Weldon. "I suppose it's quite an expensive undertaking, having one of these portraits made."
"No, not at all. People from all walks of life are having their portraits taken. In fact, it has become quite the rage in Boston."
For centuries wealthy people had hired artists to paint their portraits on canvas. Was it possible, Elijah wondered, that the masses could now have an affordable means of capturing and preserving the likeness of their loved ones?
Elijah's younger sister died at the age of four. Nothing remained of her but her name and a lock of blond hair preserved in the pages of the family Bible. Many times over the years Elijah tried to recall his sister's face, but his mind had long since forgotten her angelic features.
If only I had a daguerreotype of my sister ....
He pushed the painful thought aside. That sweet, innocent, beautiful child was forever gone, reduced to being a faceless inhabitant of the past. Present and future generations, however, might have the advantage of a visual keepsake to refresh their fading memories of their departed loved ones.
This camera Weldon spoke of could be of great importance to future generations, he concluded. It could have as great an impact on the world as the printing press did.
A young man of eighteen years, Elijah was spurred by the optimism and passion of youth to leave his parents' farm and venture to Boston where he apprenticed himself to Byron Newcombe, one of the city's most successful daguerreotypists. The former farm boy proved to be a quick learner and was soon as familiar with the photo-taking process as his employer was. Furthermore, he was able to quickly adapt to the nearly constant advancements in the nascent field of photography.
"What's that you've got there?" Byron asked one morning when he entered his photographic studio and found his employee unpacking supplies.
"It's called collodion," Elijah replied. "Used on glass plates, it reduces the exposure time of a photograph. Also, the quality of the images produced from the negatives is much greater."
Byron, like many older men who were resistant to change, scoffed, "Another blasted newfangled idea! I ask you. What's wrong with the way we're doing things now?"
"As I recall," his employee teased, "you weren't too eager to adapt to the use of negatives either. And look at how much more profitable your business is since we've switched over to Mr. Talbot's methods."
Newcombe grudgingly admitted that by using negatives, which allowed the printing of more than one photograph, he had improved sales and considerably increased his company's worth.
"You have to admit," Elijah continued, "the ambrotypes are less expensive to create than your old daguerreotypes. In fact, I ...."
"Enough already," the photographer cried, throwing his hands up in mock surrender. "You can show me how to use that collodion later."
"Why not now? We don't have any customers at the moment. By this afternoon, the place might be packed."
"Because I can't think about taking photographs right now. I just read that President Fillmore is considering sending federal troops to Boston to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law."
Elijah, whose knowledge of current events was not as great as his employer's, had a perplexed look on his face.
"Good God, man! Don't you ever read a newspaper?" Byron cried. "This is about Shadrach Minkins, the slave who fled captivity in Virginia and came here to Boston. One day federal marshals walked into the coffee house where he worked and took Minkins into custody. At his hearing at the federal courthouse, members of the Boston Vigilance Committee forcibly whisked him away and helped him escape to Canada."
"And now the president wants to send troops here to make sure Boston returns all runaway slaves to the South?"
"That's right. Massachusetts abolished slavery in 1780. If that damned fool in the White House hasn't the courage to put an end to it in the South, the least he can do is leave those lucky few who manage to make it to the North live in peace and freedom."
Elijah knew the abolition of slavery was a fiery topic across the country and that Boston had more than its share of dedicated abolitionists, many of them Quakers; but while his sympathies were for the enslaved race, he had no intentions of personally getting involving in the ongoing struggle for the black man's liberation. He had decided when he left his parents' farm that he would put all his energies into learning his craft and sharpening his skills. Byron wasn't getting any younger, after all, and Elijah hoped someday to buy the business from him. Until that time arrived, the young photographer chose to seek the sanctuary of his darkroom and let men such as William Lloyd Garrison wage war on slavery.
* * *
During the following decade, Elijah Wooster continued to remain in the dark—metaphorically speaking—when Byron ranted about the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and John Brown's execution. The older man's mood somewhat improved when Abraham Lincoln was elected but soured again when South Carolina seceded from the Union.
Following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for volunteers to fight for the Union Army. This entreaty resulted in a surge of business for Newcombe since many of these new soldiers wanted to present photographs of themselves to loved ones before heading south. Women also flocked to the photographer's shop, intent on having their husbands and sweethearts carry their portraits into battle.
Oddly, as hostilities between North and South grew worse and fighting escalated, Elijah noticed a growing number of customers specifically asking for Byron to personally take their photographs, a puzzling trend since Elijah's portraits were clearly of better quality than his employer's.
What have they suddenly got against my work? he wondered.
He soon discovered that it was not his skill as a photographer that people found fault in. One day while working in the darkroom, Elijah overheard two mothers talking while waiting to pose for the studio's owner.
"It's a damned shame," one woman declared. "He's an able-bodied young man. He ought to be in uniform. Our sons joined up, didn't they? What makes him any better?"
"I suppose he's not in the Army because he's a Quaker. They don't believe in fighting, you know," her companion suggested.
"There are lots of things he can do that don't involve carrying a gun and shooting people. If you ask me," the woman said, lowering her voice, but not to the point where Elijah could no longer hear what she was saying, "it's not that he's a Quaker so much as he's a coward."
Elijah felt as though he had received a forceful blow.
Is that what they think of me? That I'm afraid to fight?
The young photographer remained in the darkroom until after the two women left. When he returned to the studio, he felt as though every customer was silently accusing him of cowardice. He read the unspoken accusation in each person's eyes, male and female alike.
"Is something wrong, Elijah?" Byron asked that evening after he locked the front door of the shop. "You've been unusually quiet all day. You're not sick, are you?"
"No, I ...," Elijah replied hesitantly, unsure of his words.
Byron waited patiently for an answer to his question.
Finally, the young man bluntly blurted out, "Do you think I'm a coward?"
"Why! Whatever gave you that idea?" Byron exclaimed as though the notion were outrageous, yet all the while avoiding looking his assistant directly in the eye.
"I overheard two customers talking."
"I'm sure that as a Quaker you've had to deal with that sort of thing in the past."
"Only from the occasional bully who tried to provoke me into a fistfight."
"I wouldn't pay their talk any mind if I were you, son," the employer advised. "People are just upset that their own loved ones are going off to battle—especially since many of them won't be coming home."
"There must be something I can do to be of use, some way I can serve my country instead of staying here taking cartes de visite while others are dying in battle."
Byron sympathized with Elijah. Had he been a younger man, he would have answered Lincoln's call for volunteers himself.
"I heard about a photographer down in New York—a man by the name of Mathew Brady—who hopes to document the war for future generations. He hired a number of men to take photographs at the battlefields."
"How is that possible? Plates need to be developed quickly."
"Brady and his men use wagons fitted out as portable darkrooms."
As Byron watched the wondrous transformation of Elijah's facial features, he was amazed. It was as though the young photographer had had a religious epiphany.
"There's nothing in my religion to prevent me from doing the same," he announced joyfully. "I hate to leave you shorthanded, especially with business going so well, but I ...."
"There's no need for you to apologize. A man has to do what he believes is right. You go ahead and catch up with our boys in blue while I stay in Boston and mind the business. And when the war is over, you come back here. I promise I'll have your old job waiting for you."
As he watched Elijah headed off to his room above the studio to pack his belongings, Byron said a silent prayer that the young photographer would not become another casualty of the war.
* * *
There was not a cloud in the sky. The morning sun shone brightly.
Perfect lighting for an outdoor photograph, Elijah Wooster thought as he urged the horse to move faster, hoping to take as many pictures as possible before the sun set.
As he made his way along the dry, dusty, tree-lined dirt road, he heard only the clopping of his horse's hooves and the rattling of his wagon. Although a battle had occurred in the vicinity only the day before, there was now only silence where the armies recently trod.
It was an odor, not a sound, that alerted him to the close proximity of the battlefield. There is no adequate way to describe the smell of death. It was a strange mixture of blood, perspiration, urine and excrement added to the pungent scent of decay. Elijah breathed through his mouth, hoping to mitigate the foul stench.
If the smell is this bad here, how strong is it on the battlefield?
Moments later the horse slowed its pace. Up ahead, the unbroken line of trees stopped.
That must be the place.
Like his horse, Elijah found himself reluctant to continue.
Maybe everyone was right; maybe I am a coward aft all, he thought despondently, but the unpleasant memory of the accusing looks on his customers' faces quickly bolstered his resolve. I came all this way to photograph the battlefield, and I refuse to turn back now.
The horse continued to head toward the clearing, revealing more of the combat zone with each step it took. Growing up on a farm, Elijah was no stranger to death. He'd had to slaughter animals for their meat and kill predators to protect his family's crops. The only three human bodies he ever saw, however, had been respectfully laid out in coffins, freshly washed and dressed in their Sunday best. He was in no way prepared to see the extent of the carnage left in the aftermath of battle. He had foolishly expected to see bodies still intact with neat bullet holes and a minimal amount of bleeding. What he saw was a nightmare of blood, brains, intestines and scattered limbs.
Sickened by the grisly sight, Mathew Brady's newest battle photographer jumped down from his wagon and vomited.
It was nearly an hour before Elijah steadied his nerves and his stomach enough to set up his camera. Not long after he took his first photograph, he was joined by a group of Union soldiers who had been assigned the grim task of burying their fallen comrades. As Elijah continued photographing the battlefield, he morbidly mused that many of those gravediggers would themselves be in the ground before the end of the war.
Later that evening, Elijah wrote to Byron Newcombe back in Boston, describing the horrific scenes he had witnessed.
"I can't help believing that if people could see what I saw out on that field they'd try to put an end to this war," he wrote. "And they would probably think twice about going off to battle again. I'm beginning to think that it is God's will that I show the world through my photographs what war is really like. With this sacred trust in mind, I intend to follow in the Union Army's footsteps, to visit the bloodiest battlefields and to photograph the brutal destruction to both property and human life."
After he signed and sealed his letter, Elijah examined the shots he'd taken earlier that day. Although nothing could compare to seeing the mangled corpses firsthand, the pictures did convey much of the horror of the battlefield.
While he carefully examined the finished ambrotypes, Elijah noticed that one had a blurry image on it. He attributed this defect to movement on the field. (Due to the amount of exposure time needed, subjects had to remain motionless while having their pictures taken. Even the slightest movement would cause a blur.) Since the dead were obviously stationary, most likely one of the gravediggers had unintentionally wandered into the scene that was being photographed.
When he finished examining the remaining prints, Elijah packed them up along with the negatives and plates, which were to be shipped to Mathew Brady in New York.
* * *
Summer had arrived, and with it came the unbearable heat. Elijah longed to return to his home in Massachusetts, preferring even the frigid New England winters to the Virginia summers.
Had it really been only a year since he'd left Boston? It seemed like an eternity. During that twelve-month period he had taken hundreds of battlefield photographs and seen the bodies of thousands of dead warriors.
And still the fighting continues with no indication that the war is drawing to an end, he thought, deeply discouraged by the Union losses at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.
Although he no longer felt the urge to vomit when he approached a battlefield, he had not become so jaded that he was immune to the sight of mutilated corpses. Every morning when he woke, he fought the urge to point his wagon north, to flee the war-ravaged South and return to Massachusetts. Two things prevented him from doing so: the fear of being thought a coward and the strange blurry image that appeared on many of his developed photographs.
"I can't explain it," he wrote to Byron. "I don't know what causes this problem to keep reoccurring, but I will do my damnedest to find out."
Frankly, he confessed to himself, it is trying to discover the origin of that mysterious blur that keeps me sane. If I had nothing to take my mind off the bloated bodies of the poor men I photograph, I'd surely go mad.
At the end of June, Elijah learned that Robert E. Lee had taken his army into Pennsylvania. It could mean the end of the war was in sight, yet that end was not necessarily one to his liking.
On the first of July, the Army of the Potomac, under the command of General George Meade, encountered Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in the town of Gettysburg. As the armies clashed on the first day of the battle, Elijah sat in a tavern talking shop with two of Brady's other photographers. In the course of their conversation, Elijah took an ambrotype out of his pocket.
"What do you think happened here?" he asked.
"It looks this poor guy got his leg taken off by artillery and then bled to death," one of his colleagues replied.
"No, I'm talking about the blurry spot above the body," Elijah clarified his question.
The other two men looked closely at the photograph.
"I don't see any blurry spot. The image is perfectly clear."
The second photographer agreed. There was nothing at all wrong with the picture.
* * *
For three days battles raged in the previously quiet Pennsylvania town. Elijah heard snippets of news stories about places called the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Little Round Top and Devil's Den. Finally, on the evening of July 3, news reached the group of photographers that General George Pickett had made a failed attempt to charge up Cemetery Ridge. Only when word came of Lee's retreat the next day did Elijah and his colleagues climb aboard their wagons and head to the field to photograph the aftermath of the skirmishes.
With so many casualties, it was difficult to decide where to start. While his fellow photographers headed toward the site of George Pickett's ill-fated charge, Elijah rode out to the rocky region known as Devil's Den.
I'll start over here, Elijah decided when he spied a group of dead bodies wedged between two large boulders.
After setting up his camera, he took his first shot and then brought the plate to his portable darkroom for developing. At first sight of the negative, he knew what to expect: another unexplained blurry spot. This time, however, the cloudy image was different from the others, containing much more detail. When Elijah examined the positive image, he saw what appeared to be a human face. There was only one possible explanation for the diaphanous countenance: he had captured a ghost with his camera.
What about the other blurs I've photographed? he wondered. Have they all been spirits? But why is this one more pronounced than any of the others?
Elijah had no response to these questions. Furthermore, he wasn't sure he even wanted to know the answers. When it came to ghosts, he was indeed a coward.
With trembling hand, he put the picture in the back of his wagon. Then he collected his camera, secured it with his other supplies, climbed up to the driver's seat and signaled his horse to move. As he headed away from Devil's Den, the wind kicked up and the sky began to darken.
There must be quite a storm headed this way!
Anxious to leave Gettysburg behind as quickly as possible, Elijah prodded the horse to move faster. The beast was going at a hardy gallop when suddenly it reared in fright.
Standing—or rather floating—in the middle of the road was a semitransparent soldier, its facial features indistinct. Elijah, speechless and motionless with terror, could only watch silently as it glided up to the passenger side of the wagon, climbed aboard and sat beside him.
"W-what do you w-want?" the frightened photographer managed to ask.
"Don't be afraid of me, Elijah Wooster. I won't hurt you."
"You know my name?"
"Yes. I've travelled a great distance to see you. I need your help finding someone who fell in battle."
"Why me?"
"I'll explain everything in good time, but now you must head to Culp's Hill. That's where he is."
The two traveled the Pennsylvania roads in silence. As they neared the breastworks on Culp's Hill, a feeling of dread came over Elijah.
"Do you know where he is?" he asked the wraith with a shaky voice.
"Just south of here, near Spangler's Spring."
They drove until they heard the peaceful gurgling sound of Spangler Spring Run.
"Stop here," the ghost commanded.
Although the scene was not nearly as ghastly as the one at Devil's Den, Elijah was horrified nonetheless.
"Over there," the specter said, pointing to a group of bodies near the spring.
As Elijah walked toward the corpses, the specter floated just ahead of him.
"Which one is he?"
"Turn them over. I'll know him when I see his face."
The photographer rolled the nearest body onto its back. The face looked familiar although he hadn't seen it in many years.
"I know this man," he said, more to himself than to the ghost. "His name was Weldon Holgate. I met him at the time he was studying law at Harvard."
When the photographer looked up into the face of the ghost, he saw that the spectral companion was none other than the fallen Holgate himself.
"Weldon?" he asked with surprise.
"Yes, Elijah. It's me."
The ghost indicated with a nod of his head that the photographer was to continue his search.
Elijah turned over four more bodies and was able to put a name to two of the faces. The other two looked vaguely familiar.
"These men are all from the Second Massachusetts Volunteers," Weldon explained. "That's why you know them."
As he approached the fifth body, Elijah's outstretched arm suddenly froze.
"Go on," the ghost urged.
"Let the dead rest in peace," the photographer suggested, pulling his hand back.
"You have to do it. Don't let your courage desert you now."
"I'm no coward," Elijah argued defensively.
"Then turn that body over and look at the face."
When Elijah's hand finally touched the fallen soldier, a shock resonated down his spine. He quickly rolled the corpse over and stared into the sightless eyes.
"This isn't possible!" he cried, aghast at seeing his own lifeless body clothed in a torn, bloody uniform. "I'm a photographer, a noncombatant."
"You were a photographer, but when you and I met after the battle of Chancellorsville you decided to join up."
Elijah shook his head in denial.
"I wanted to show the world the folly of war. My photographs were supposed to reveal just how bloody and atrocious a business it is."
"Despite your noble intentions, my friend, you were caught up in the fervor of patriotism. After yet another Union defeat at Fredericksburg, you were demoralized. You feared the South might actually win the war. Then after Chancellorsville, you decided your only course of action was to join in the fight, and, as you can see, you suffered the same fate as I did. Only when your body took its last breath, your spirit convinced itself that you were still a photographer, observing the war from a safe distance."
Elijah looked down at the corpse below him. There was no denying its face was his. When he finally accepted the truth of his fate, the world he knew vanished and images of the past, present and future flashed before him like a kaleidoscope. Scenes of early Native Americans were mixed with those of the recent battle and its aftermath as well as scenes of tourists from the future who would visit Spangler's Spring as part of their tour of the Gettysburg National Military Park.
His head spinning, Elijah cried, "Take me away from here."
Weldon Holgate reached out a translucent hand, and when he clasped it, Elijah Wooster took his first step toward eternity, leaving behind nothing but an ambrotype of a young Quaker from New England wearing the uniform of the Second Massachusetts Volunteers.
I found this old daguerreotype of Salem and me in a trunk in my attic. It was taken before my hair turned gray and while Salem was on his second life.
