George Barnard Comes to Charleston

George Barnard was the photographer of Sherman’s campaigns. When Sherman’s 60,000 troops marched out of Atlanta in mid-November, headed for Savannah, Barnard accompanied them. He took no pictures during the march, in good part because Sherman kept his army moving. After Sherman reached Savannah on December 21, Barnard kept busy printing some of the negatives he had taken in Atlanta, and giving them to Federal officers. When Sherman headed out of Savannah for South Carolina in late January 1865, Capt. Orlando Poe, his employer, told him to stay behind and take some more photographs of military scenes. Then Poe ordered him to New York, presumably where he could drop off the glass plate negatives of all the photographs he had taken. Afterward he could take thirty days’ leave of absence. Barnard sailed to Charleston in March 1865, intent on taking more pictures for the photographic album he was already envisioning. In the several weeks he spent in the city, in March—possibly early April 1865, Barnard took this photograph of three of his assistants on Broad Street in the Burnt District.

This is the caption as printed in 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War. It has not yet been through this site’s research and fact-checking pass.