The following five recent significant Civil War revelations are subjective, but historians of the period point out each has either altered historical understanding, supplied exceptional visual evidence or opened a major new avenue of research.
1. A scientific explanation for the loss of the H.L. Hunley
The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley [above] sank the USS Housatonic in 1864, becoming the first submarine to destroy an enemy warship in combat. But the Hunley and all eight crewmen also disappeared immediately afterward.
In 2017, biomedical engineer Rachel Lance published experimental research proposing that the shock wave from the submarine’s own spar-torpedo explosion passed through the iron hull and caused fatal lung and brain trauma. This helped explain why the crew remained at their stations, why the remains showed no obvious escape attempt and why relatively little skeletal trauma was evident. The blast-wave explanation is highly influential but should be presented as a leading scientific theory, not a universally settled verdict; investigators associated with the submarine’s conservation project have considered other combinations of damage, flooding and crew incapacitation.
Factoid: The weapon that made the Hunley famous may also have killed its crew within milliseconds.
###
2. The youthful Harriet Tubman photograph
In 2017, an album assembled by abolitionist and educator Emily Howland yielded a previously unknown portrait of Harriet Tubman [above], probably taken in Auburn, New York, around 1868–69. Tubman appears about 48 or 49—far younger than in the elderly portraits familiar to most Americans. Its importance goes beyond appearance.
The photograph places Tubman visually close to her Civil War years, when she worked for the Union as a nurse, scout, intelligence operative and leader associated with the Combahee River Raid.
The album also contained the only known photograph of John Willis Menard, the first Black man elected to Congress. The Library of Congress and Smithsonian jointly acquired the album.
Factoid: The best-known image of Tubman had made her seem permanently elderly; this discovery restored the face of the formidable middle-aged woman who had only recently completed her wartime service.
###
3. The Manassas battlefield surgeon’s burial pit
Construction work at Manassas National Battlefield Park led to the discovery in 2014 of a field-hospital burial pit [above] connected with the Second Battle of Manassas, fought in August 1862. The find was publicly announced after archaeological and forensic study in 2018. Inside were two Union soldiers buried among eleven amputated arms and legs.
Researchers found bullet and surgical evidence showing both the destructive power of Civil War ammunition and the desperate work performed by battlefield surgeons. It was the first Civil War surgeon’s pit to be professionally excavated and studied, and the first in which complete soldiers were found buried with amputated limbs. The two soldiers were later reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery.
Factoid: Civil War surgeons were not casually “sawing off limbs.” Amputation was often the only available means of preventing catastrophic infection after a Minié-ball shattered bone.
###
4. Artificial intelligence begins returning names to unidentified soldiers
Launched publicly in 2018, Civil War Photo Sleuth combines facial-comparison technology, crowdsourcing, military records and visual clues such as uniforms, insignia and photographer locations. It does not simply tell users, “This is your soldier.” It narrows thousands of possibilities into candidates that must be checked against regimental histories, ages, ranks and verified photographs.
The project represents a major change in Civil War photographic research: anonymous tintypes that sat unidentified for generations can now sometimes be connected with names and biographies.
Important caution: Facial recognition is evidence, not proof. Period photographs may be reversed, poorly exposed, retouched or taken decades apart. A responsible identification still requires documentary corroboration.
Factoid: The Civil War may eventually become the first nineteenth-century conflict in which thousands of previously anonymous photographed combatants regain their names through digital comparison.
###
Liljenquist Family. In 2010 Businessman Tom Liljenquist from the Virginia/DC area donated 700 images of Civil War soldiers to the Library of Congress. Tom and his sons (left to right) Jason, Christian and Brandon built the collection over 15 years.
5. Thousands of ordinary Civil War faces are becoming a searchable historical record
Since 2013, the continuing expansion and digital organization of the Library of Congress’s Liljenquist Family Collection has transformed the visual history of the war. The collection now contains more than 8,000 ambrotypes, tintypes and cartes de visite representing Union and Confederate soldiers, African American servicemen, sailors, nurses, women and children.
In 2022, Library researchers announced that hundreds of these portraits had been mapped to battles, hospitals, prisons and other wartime locations. Instead of presenting the Civil War principally through generals and famous Brady photographs, the project connects individual faces with the places where ordinary people fought, suffered, nursed and died.
Factoid: The most important new Civil War “photograph” may not be one dramatic image, but the accumulation of thousands of private portraits once kept in family albums, lockets and dresser drawers.
