This is the memory palace. I'm Nate de Mayo. A postcard from Manhattan, October 1862.

They lined up for hours in Broadway as the rest of the city hustle past, as the shadows stretched up the brick wall in the

shortening day and the deepening bite of autumn. And then their turn would come to wait some more in the warmth of the stairwell,

watching people come down the stairs from the second floor gallery.

who looked different than they had on the way up.

The sign outside told them what to expect, though it couldn't prepare them.

The dead of Antietam, 20 images taken on the battlefield barely a month before.

Matthew Brady who owned the gallery up the stairs had sent a team of photographers a great

expense to document this of a war. In its earliest days he took the photos himself,

barely avoided capture at bull run, but he wasn't at Antietam. A vision problem that had

dogged him most of his life had been getting progressively worse. A cruel fate for a photographer,

but it was a time of cruel fate. Brady's name was on the gallery and would appear in the papers as

reviewers wrestled with what they saw upstairs, but a man named Alexander Gardner took the pictures.

He was a Scotsman with a beard fit for the cysteine ceiling, who'd come to America with a dream

of starting a socialist colony on the frontier, but found his calling in the Washington DC branch

of Brady's studio. He got good portraits, and on the eve of the war he would pose the young

man who lined up on Pennsylvania Avenue to get their pictures taken, so people who loved them

would have something of them to hold onto while they were gone. Or if it turned out they always would be.

Gardner arrived in Antietam two days after the Confederate retreat.

It was two years into the war and he had seen battles before. He had led teams of fellow Brady

employees as they trailed the Northern Army, hauling supplies and volatile chemicals,

a tent they tricked out to serve as a darkroom. He had taken photos of field hospitals and generals,

...