George Barnard Photographer

As photographer of the Military Division of the Mississippi George Barnard wanted to capture Atlanta with his camera so he followed Sherman’s army as it moved south from Chattanooga in 1864. Barnard expected Atlanta would provide elaborate fortifications and war-scarred ruins.

At the end of the war he published a book of sixty-one large photographs. Reception in the North was as expected, Barnard was lauded for his “care and judgment in selecting the point of view, for the delicacy of execution, for scope of treatment, and for fidelity of impression.”

In the South, reaction was equally as high, but entirely different in nature. Ex-Confederates saw the photographs as indisputable evidence that Sherman had destroyed Atlanta as had no other military leader in any other city.

One photograph was of railroad iron piled on crossties, soon to be set afire so the rails could be bent into “Sherman neckties’. Another showed the ruined roundhouse of the Atlantic & Western Railroad, while a companion photograph portrayed a bank building gutted beyond recognition.

The photograph people found to be the most compelling showed iron wheels and axles of railroad cars against the background of a burned-out factory. As far as could be seen, the desolate wreckage stretched along the track. Those first to see this photograph concluded, that it clearly proved, Sherman had destroyed anything and everything he couldn’t take with him.

There was no doubt about it, Barnard had captured the Atlanta campaign as no other photographer captured any other campaign. His caption for photograph no. 44 was quite accurate also, “Destruction of Hood’s Ordinance Train.”

But what Barnard did not say, because it is thought that he assumed everyone knew it, was that General John B. Hood, C.S.A., not Sherman, was responsible for the destruction Barnard had captured. Records show that on the evening before pulling out of Atlanta, General Hood ordered his troops to burn or to blow up everything the enemy might be able to use. When his men fired his own eighty-one–car ammunition train, explosions set the nearby Atlanta Gas Works on fire, a scene of destruction later brought to life in the movie Gone With the Wind.

Had Barnard not been along to document the destruction and had he not failed to label it as the work of the Confederates, Sherman would still be hated in the South, but possibly not so vehemently.

As we know photographs are subject to interpretation from the standpoint of the viewer .