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Scene of Battle, Fredericksburg, Virginia [Caissons destroyed by Federal shells]

Creator

American Photographer · 1830–1902

Artist

Andrew Joseph Russell, a captain in the volunteer infantry, became a photographer during the American Civil War. As photographer-engineer for the United States Military Railroad Construction Corps, he was assigned to photograph battlefields and campsites in Virginia. He also photographed engineering projects and contributed images to what was probably the world's first technical manual illustrated

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Date: May 3, 1863
Medium: Albumen silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

The second battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, on May 3, 1863, took place at Chancellorsville, a hamlet ten miles west of Fredericksburg. From the vantage point of Marye's Height above the town, Russell photographed wrecked and overturned Confederate gun caissons or ammunition transports. The massacred corpses of the horses that had pulled the caissons lie strewn across the now-impassable road. Herman Haupt, Chief of the Bureau of Military Railways and employer of photographer Andrew Russell, leans against a stump, surveying the destruction caused by a single shell. On May 4, 1863, the Union army was driven from the Fredericksburg Heights in Confederate General Robert E. Lee's last great triumph.

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