Images found on Civil War battlefields: Who were they?

On March 23, 1924, the Des Moines Register reported about the image a young woman
discovered by a Confederate soldier on the Winchester (Va.) battlefield.

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For decades, the tiny photograph of the unidentified young woman charmed — and mystified — scores of visitors to the old Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va.

She stared straight ahead, her hair parted down the middle and smoothed behind the ears. A watch chain double looped around her neck — the shorter one included a heart-shaped charm. She wore a black ribbon on the crown of her head. For eye appeal, the photographic artist tinted the young lady’s lips and cheeks pink.

In late-summer 1864, a Rebel plucked the image — a 1/16-plate tintype enclosed in a 1.5-x-2-inch case — as a souvenir from a fallen U.S. Army soldier on a Virginia battlefield. In the late 1890s, the veteran donated the photograph to the museum, the home of Jefferson Davis while he was president of the Confederacy.

But who was she?

Image of  Georgiana (or Georgia Ann) Oxley Secrist
 of Marion, Iowa. It was found by a Rebel 
soldier on the Winchester (Va.) battlefield.
(The American Civil War Museum collection)

During an early 1920s visit to the museum, a couple from Cedar Rapids, Iowa recognized the photograph. Months later, they provided museum archivists with details. The brother of the young lady in the battlefield photograph supplied an early 20th-century image of his sister for comparison to the museum likeness. That evidence, along with snippets of information gleaned from the Confederate veteran, convinced museum authorities of the identity of the photograph.

The image that had long captivated museum visitors was of Georgiana (or Georgia Ann) Oxley Secrist of Marion, Iowa. The fallen soldier whom the Confederate snatched the image from was her fiancé, Albert Carmichael of the 24th Iowa, Company F. At the Battle of Winchester on Sept. 19, 1864, the 24-year-old private was mortally wounded by an artillery shell that also nearly severed the legs of another comrade, according to Georgiana’s brother, James Oxley, who also served in the regiment. Carmichael’s younger brother John — a private in the 24th Iowa, Company H — was mortally wounded in the same battle.

After the revelation, newspapers throughout the country published a long feature story about the discovery of the photograph’s subject and her long-dead fiancé. "Faded Portrait in Confederate Museum reveals Romance of Iowa Lovers," read one paper’s headline. "Old Picture of Civil War Days Breathes Pathos," read another.

Georgiana later in life
(Richmond Times-Dispatch,
March 23, 1924)

Secrist and Carmichael attended school together in a small, log structure in Iowa. She was the youngest of 10 children and four years younger than Carmichael. A romance blossomed. Albert continued the relationship while he attended Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. They intended to marry and settle on a farm. But the war spoiled those plans.

Eager to aid the Union, male students at Cornell College formed a company in the 24th Iowa. Before Albert Carmichael enlisted in the summer of 1862, Secrist handed him the tintype — an image taken when she was 15 and lived in Pennsylvania. They most likely maintained their relationship through letter writing, although none are known to exist.

War rocked Carmichael’s family as it did thousands of others. At the Battle of Champion Hill in Mississippi on May 16, 1863, Albert was severely wounded. While convalescing in a New Orleans hospital, he wrote a poem that appeared in James Oxley’s journal. It included this grim reflection of the war’s cruelty:

Oh, the glorious cheer of triumph

When the foemen turned and fled 

Leaving us the field of battle 

Strewn with dying and dead 

Oh, the waiting and anguish 

That I could not follow on

 So, amid my fallen comrades I must wait til morning’s dawn

At Winchester National Cemetery, John’s remains rest in section 76, under gravestone 3545. Albert’s final resting place, however, is unknown. In 1885, nearly two decades after Albert Carmichael’s death, Georgiana married Albert Secrist, an old family friend. In 1913, more than a decade before the photo revelation, she died in Iowa. “She was a good woman,” wrote an obituary writer. 

While fortuitous, the unmasking of the identity of the photograph was not unique. Early 20th-century U.S. newspapers published accounts of at least two other, similar photographic revelations.

An image found near a fallen soldier in Virginia

In spring 1908, nearly 45 years after a daguerreotype of a young man and a girl was found near a fallen Union soldier on another Virginia battlefield, Edgar Whritenour returned the photograph to one of the subjects, Ellen “Nellie” Stowe. The New Jersey mineral water manufacturer’s effort astonished the 63-year-old woman.

“My husband is glad that I am to get [my] picture back,” Stowe wrote Whritenour. “I had forgotten that my name was in the case. Do you not believe that this is one case in a thousand — a picture restored to the original owner after forty-five years?” 

After the Battle of Chancellorsville in early May 1863, a Confederate soldier had picked up the photograph off the body of a dead Union soldier lying on the battlefield. Later, the soldier gave it to a 13th New Jersey soldier to take back north. He in turn gave it to his daughter, who married Whritenour. She gave it to her husband.

In 1875, Whritenour began a dogged search to trace the origin of the image. The names "John Rawson and Nellie Augusta Nettleton" were written on the back of the case. Also in the case were a needle, a piece of thread, and a lock of hair.

Whritenour “communicated with every Grand Army of the Republic post in the country” until he finally located “Nellie” in Milford, Conn. Rawson, a 27th Connecticut private, was killed May 3, 1863, during a desperate rearguard action at Chancellorsville that decimated the regiment. In Army of Northern Virginia commander Robert E. Lee’s greatest victory, eight of the 27th Connecticut’s 10 companies became prisoners of war. For nearly 10 years after the battle, Rawson’s fate was unknown to Stowe, believed to be the soldier’s sweetheart.

“I wish I could make good to you all the expense you have gone to find the owner,” she wrote Whritenour, who sent the daguerreotype to Stowe after he received photographic confirmation of her identity. “I am thankful that this little bit of my life's history has been handed down to me over the silence of so many years, and I admire your perseverance under such almost insurmountable obstacles.”

A remarkable reunification

Five years after Whritenour’s search concluded, a veteran reunited another battlefield-found photograph with its subject.

In a battle near Williamsburg, Va., in 1862, William H. Dunham picked up a knapsack lying among bodies of fallen U.S. Army soldiers. Inside it he discovered a daguerreotype of a young woman along with the usual kit equipment and a fork engraved with the initials “R.C.” and “11th P.V.” After he mustered out in 1865, Dunham — a Massachusetts 5th Light Artillery private — returned home with the image and the inscribed utensil. For more than 50 years, he figured the knapsack and his war souvenirs belonged to a soldier with the initials “R.C.” in the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry.

In 1913, the image was published in the New Bedford (Mass.) Sunday Times and a local resident, Rebecca Randall, found herself staring at her own photograph. Newspapers reported the photograph, knapsack, and utensil must have belonged to 7th Massachusetts Private Andrew Lawton, Randall’s friend, who was killed near Williamsburg, Va., on May 6, 1862. (How he acquired the engraved fork is unknown. A Massachusetts newspaper misidentified Lawton’s death site as the Wilderness.)

During an attack near Fort Magruder, the 20-year-old — a teacher as a civilian — was struck by an artillery shell. He “lived but a few moments,” a comrade recalled, “and died regretting he could not have been spared long enough to have got just one shot at the enemy before he died.”

Lawton’s friendship with Randall never turned to love — “on her part at least,” the Fall River (Mass.) Daily News later reported. A year before her friend was killed, Randall had married. But even in 1913, 51 years after Lawton’s death, the 66-year-old woman kept a darkened photograph of her friend.

"War Time Mystery Solved," read a headline in a Massachusetts newspaper about this remarkable reunification of photo with subject. But many other images — of families, sweethearts, and others — remain shrouded by the fog of war.

A mystery image with an Antietam connection

In the 1860s, Bascom William Tell Phreaner created this image, "copied from an
ambrotype found in the grave of a soldier" on the Antietam battlefield.

In the 1860s, Hagerstown, Md.-based photographer Bascom William Tell Phreaner created cartes-de-visite — small photographs pasted to a cardboard backing — of a young woman. Clad in a plaid dress, she stared intently at the camera. Her hair was pushed back in a popular, Civil War-era style. But the subject was unknown to the photographer, who didn’t even know if the woman were still alive. On the reverse of Phreaner’s CDV appeared these words:

"Copied from an ambrotype found in the grave of an Unknown soldier, on the Battle Field of Antietam."

An unknown number of the CDVs was distributed. But the effort to unmask the identity of the woman in the image — as well as the soldier in the grave where it was discovered — proved fruitless.

More mysteries linger

Efforts to identify photographs found on Civil War battlefields continue even today.

In a feature story published in 2012, Steve Szkotak of the Associated Press wrote about unidentified images in the vast collection of the American Civil War Museum (formerly Museum of the Confederacy) — a long-shot publicity effort the museum hoped would lead to the names of the subjects. Two poignant photographs were of little girls — one with pink-tinted cheeks and hair in ringlets, the other with her hair parted in the middle. 

A CDV of a young girl found
on a fallen soldier at Gettysburg.
(Jeff Kowalis collection)

A Confederate soldier found the former photograph at Port Republic (Va.), between the bodies of two soldiers — one U.S. Army, one Confederate. Another Rebel retrieved the later image from the haversack of a fallen U.S. Army soldier on a Virginia farm in April 1865. Days later, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia in nearby Appomattox Courthouse.

The story mentioned six other unidentified images from the museum’s holdings. Some had been in its collection for 60 years or more. None included any identification. One, found by a U.S. Army soldier on the Fredericksburg battlefield, was of a couple with two young children. All these photographs remain unidentified.

In 2021, avid Civil War photography collector Jeff Kowalis shared copies of unidentified images — of a toddler, a young girl, and a woman — found by a New York colonel with a fallen U.S. Army soldier at Gettysburg. The officer believed the dead man served with the 9th Massachusetts Battery. Fred Cross, military archivist for the State of Massachusetts from 1918-38, believed the colonel was wrong. But the images moved him nonetheless. (For more on Cross, see my August 2018 story in Civil War Times).

“Who the owner was will probably never be known,” Cross wrote. “But some soldier carried them close to his heart, took them out at evening and gazed lovingly at them by light of flickering campfires, and murmured a prayer for his absent loved ones as he tenderly put them back into their accustomed place. And then came GETTYSBURG.”

SOURCES 

• Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Daily Republican, Jan. 9, 1913
• Des Moines Register, March 23, 1924
• Fall River (Mass.) Daily Evening News, Sept. 25, 1913
• Hutchinson, Nelson V., History of the Seventh Massachusetts volunteer infantry in the war of the rebellion of the southern states against constitutional authority, 1861-1865, 1890
• Los Angeles Daily News, April 10, 1924
• The Berkshire Country Eagle, Pittsfield, Mass., July 23, 1863
• The Delphos Herald, Delphis, Kansas, April 25, 1879
• Tyrone (Pa.) Daily Herald, May 21, 1908