Highlights
- More than 4,000 photographs capture the carnage of the battlefield and put a face to the men and women who experienced it. Includes albumen prints (many unmounted), cartes de visite, stereocards, ambrotypes, and other types of photography. A rare 10 x 8-inch collodion glass plate negative of Robert E. Lee (circa 1867) – contact print available.
- More than 250 broadsides, including recruitment posters
- The Battle of Gettysburg is represented by more than 170 items, including soldiers’ letters, photographs, official documents, maps, and sketches. These materials can be found in the Collection for almost every battle of the Civil War.
- The impact of volunteer nurses in the Civil War is evident in the more than 140 letters written to Sarah Ogden from the men she treated and their families.
- 89 letters detailing the service and death of Confederate General Paul Semmes. Particularly poignant are the letters in which Semmes contemplates his mortality (written a month before his death) and describes being wounded at Gettysburg. The collection also includes several letters from medical personnel who tended to him at the time of his death.
- From satirical cartoons and sketches of battles to scenic views and observations of camp life, illustrations made in the field by Civil War soldiers offer a glimpse of the war as seen through the eyes of the participants.
- More than 80 Civil War–era maps
- A collection of more than 60 rare newspapers printed on wallpaper due to wartime shortages document the Southern view of the war and serve as a physical representation of the deprivations caused by it.
- The papers of George Powell, a former US congressman who signed the Thirteenth Amendment, include 28 letters from soldiers attempting to get prosthetics from the Condell Lifelimb Company using government subsidies.