A Thousand Words a Battle: Seeing the Light

Part of a series.

Photographer’s Note by Chris Heisey

Light has long fascinated me with its divinely cosmic source that combines with atmospheric forces to illuminate this globe with a profound glow that, day after day, is never the same. To chase this providential light as a photographer is an immense challenge and, still more, a gift received with a grateful heart.

In 1990, I began journeying to Civil War battlefields to share the tragic irony that abides at these richly hallowed grounds. “A spirit in my feet said ‘Go’, and I went,” famed Civil War photographer Mathew Brady said after the war.[1] My feet have gone to some 400 American battlefields with camera and tripod slung over my shoulder. These are sacred places, where more than 700,000 Americans died. How can these places be so tranquil today after witnessing four years of relentless bloodletting between the blue and the gray?

Fifty years ago, my Civil War obsession was born when, as an eight-year-old, I stood atop Little Round Top in Gettysburg in the pouring rain with my parents. I grew up in a small town only 50 miles north of the rocky, rounded prominence, so it was no great journey to get there. It poured all day just as it had on July 4, 1863, the day after the three-day battle in which 50,000 casualties fell. The rocky hill mesmerized me with its boulder-strewn slopes and heavenly vista of the surrounding Pennsylvania landscape. Awe strikes me still every time I go, some 20,000-plus times now, and one of my favorite things to witness is when a visitor comes there for the first time. Their eyes speak to this truth: this place humbles a person; this wholly American place grabs you with enormity.

When my son was growing up in the 1990s, it became my turn to take him to Little Round Top. He would climb the rocks for hours, sometimes perilously so, but the peace he found ably climbing those rocks thousands of times over was worth the danger in this father’s eyes. I never had to tell him I loved this place—he just knew.

Thunder clapped and lightning struck me figuratively quite recently at a family reunion dinner when my astute cousin Raymond casually brought up Grandpa Gus. I had never heard a word about Augustus Henry Heisey, who came to America as toddler from Hanover, Germany, with his four brothers and mother to settle near Pittsburgh in the 1840s. My great, great grandfather started famed Heisey Glass Company in northwest Ohio after the Civil War and was quite the benevolent factory boss. He gave the family prosperity by making decorative glassware well into the 20th Century.

As we were talking about this family stranger, I leafed through a vintage mail-order catalog many decades old, and there on page seven I saw what made my heart nearly stop. With a boyish grin, kepi tilted a bit left, an 1862 daguerreotype portrait of Grandpa Gus half-filled the page, showing an innocent 20-year-old who had just volunteered for the 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers. I could hardly breathe at discovering this treasure so unexpectedly.

I left the reunion early and drove the hour to Gettysburg and arrived at Little Round Top in the dimming summer twilight on Little Round Top. I sat there upon a rock just where Captain A. H. Heisey did on July 2, 1863, as his Fifth Corps comrades repulsed Texans trying to storm the heights near dark 156 years earlier. In the retreating light, I drove over to the Pennsylvania Memorial, and there under Co. C, 155th Pennsylvania, was listed my great, great grandpa’s name. He was wounded at Gettysburg, survived to be hit a year later in the hellish fight in central Virginia’s Wilderness. In 1920, he died after a battle with pneumonia and is buried in a humble graveyard in Atlantic City, New Jersey, close to that ocean he journeyed across to America and his destiny on many a great battlefield. To survive three years of fighting against Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia surely went against the odds.

[1] “Matthew Brady – Biographical Note,” “Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints,” Library of Congress <https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/cwp/bradynote.html>