Picture the Dead

casualties on both sides, and Ulysses S. Grant was commander of the Union Army. And yet some of the war’s most vicious battles had yet to be fought.

Will and Quinn Pritchett, Tobias Lovell, and Nate Dearborn all helped comprise the Twenty-eighth Massachusetts Infantry. Also known as one of four “Irish Brigades,” the Twenty-eighth enlisted soldiers hailed from a variety of backgrounds, including Canadian and other non-U.S. citizens, newer recruits who were mustered in the last years of the war. The boys of the Twenty-eighth fought the Union Army’s major battles of the eastern theater; Antietam, Gettysburg, and of course, the Wilderness. Collected in the National Park Service Archive is proof of prisoners from the Twenty-eighth who had been captured in the Wilderness and brought to Andersonville to serve their sentences.

Andersonville, also known as Camp Sumter, was a Confederate prisoner of war camp in Georgia. Built in 1864 to house the spillover of Union prisoners captured by the Confederate Army, it saw more than 45,000 men pass through its gates. Of these, thirty percent never made it out. Overcrowded, rife with disease, and lacking adequate food and shelter, Andersonville became an infamous symbol of cruelty and death. The jailers were not only to blame, as the imprisoned themselves often had a hand in their own downfall. Most notoriously, a group of prisoners known as the “Andersonville Raiders” terrorized fellow inmates with theft and murder. Hunted down and rounded up, the ringleaders were summarily executed, while other suspected Raiders were beaten to death by their peers in an attempt to serve “justice.”

The death and despair brought on by the Civil War eventually gave rise to the Spiritualist movement. Spiritualism was a religious ideology popular from the mid-nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth century. Its followers believed not only that people lived on after death, but could be contacted with the help of “mediums”: people who were unusually sensitive to communication with the spirit world. Spiritualists believed in a progressive ideology, and those who followed Spiritualist teachings were more than likely to be abolitionists, suffragists, and labor reformers. Spiritualism was not relegated to society’s fringes: figures as respectable as the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, had partaken in séance circles, desperate to communicate with her deceased beloved. As the war progressed and casualties mounted on the battlefield, increasing numbers of the bereaved became obsessed with contacting the dead.

During this same time, people on both sides of the Atlantic were developing a new way of recording one’s experience of the visual world. Photography, still a new technology at the time of our story, was becoming more accessible and cheap enough to be consumed by the masses. By the late 1850s, albumen prints on photographic paper were supplanting the more expensive and labor-intensive daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, which were printed on glass and metal. Cartes de visite, photographic prints mounted on small cards, were inexpensive and easily reproduced. Uniformed Civil War soldiers ordered cdv portraits to send back home to their families, while sweethearts and family members sent their own pictures to the soldiers in the field as mementos. Photographs also played a part in bringing home the horrors of the battlefield. This would be the first time that a war would be so realistically paraded in front of civilian eyes.

In the early 1860s, a Boston photographer named William Mumler began to produce visual evidence of ghostly presences. A typical “spirit photograph” consisted of a sharply detailed portrait of a living person with a spectral figure “floating” in the background. Occasionally, one could make out a transparent white arm or a piece of gauzy clothing draped over the shoulder of the sitter. Some spirits looked like photographs; others seemed to be oil paintings. To modern eyes, these photographs appear to be nothing more than double exposures. But nineteenth century viewers were so frightened and convinced of the supernatural images that truth-seekers forced Mumler to trial, where he had to explain in a court of law the science behind his process.

Our illustrated “photographs” are based on old daguerreotypes and albumen prints, most of them of anonymous sitters. We found them in the Online Prints and Photographs Reading Room of the Library of Congress, copied them, altered them, and made them our own. The background patterns are based on actual Victorian designs. Other pieces of Jennie’s scrapbook had their origins in the New York Public Library’s online Digital Gallery and in the online image archives of the Brookline, Massachusetts Historical Society. We are deeply indebted to an excellent video that clearly demonstrates the nineteenth century photographic processes, part of the online video gallery of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The illustrations were done with Adobe Illustrator CS3 and a little old-fashioned pen and ink.

We would like to thank our agent, Charlotte Sheedy for her preternatural foresight in throwing us together, and her stalwart colleague, Meredith Kaffel, for all her additional assistance along the way. Thank you to our editor, Kelly Barrales-Saylor, for loving this book as much as we do, and to our families for putting up with our abiding obsession with the ghostly past.

ADELE GRIFFIN has written a number of novels for middle grade and young adult readers, including the Witch Twins and Vampire Island series, as well as the novels Sons of Liberty and Where I Want to Be, both National Book Award Finalists. She lives with her husband and daughter in Brooklyn, New York.

LISA BROWN is the illustrator and/or author of nine books, including How to Be, The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming, and Baby, Mix Me a Drink. She draws the Three Panel Book Review cartoon for the book section of the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in San Francisco with her son and her husband, who is rumored to be Lemony Snicket.