Corporal Hiram Warner, Company C, Second United States Sharp Shooters

One day along a small creek in Sharpsburg, Maryland, the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac met; by nightfall some twenty-six thousand Confederate and Union soldiers had been killed, wounded, captured, or gone missing. One of those who died in action at Antietam was Corporal Hiram Warner, a sharpshooter. Born on New Year’s Day, 1833, he was twenty-eight years old and unmarried when he enlisted on April 24, 1861, for three months in Company I of the Eighth Pennsylvania Infantry. After reenlistment he joined the Second United States Sharpshooters. Warner died just after dawn on September 17, 1862, along the Hagerstown Pike in fierce fighting against the Second Louisiana Brigade. What resonates in this sixth-plate tintype is the sitter’s direct stare at the camera and the simplicity of the composition. Warner’s slightly tinted, “sunburned” cheeks and vacant look—as if he has been to the abyss and back—strongly suggest that he has already witnessed firsthand the killing fields. In period jargon, he had “seen the elephant.”