Kind of an awkward title...but I was looking over the Library of Congress collection of negatives from the Battle of Gettysburg. In pictures of dead soldiers, there are usually no more then maybe 6 bodies shown in any shot. I would have thought that given massive casualties sustained by both sides, especially in areas like Rose Wood, McPherson's Wood, and The Slaughter Pen the fields would be littered with bodies.
Were these pictures taken so far after the battle that most of the bodies had already been removed? Was the actual death rate just lower then I'm thinking and most casualties on the field were just wounds and not deaths? Any info would be appreciated. Thanks!
The name of the set is “A Photographic History of the Civil War” published in 1911.
I suspect part of what the issue may be is that there are a few different things that need to be untangled when talking about casualties in the Civil War (or any war, for that matter).
First: "casualties" doesn't equal "dead". It includes those wounded, missing and captured, as well as those killed. The National Park Service's website for Antietam National Battlefield notes that in US Civil War battles, 20% of the casualties were killed, and the rest were wounded, missing, or captured. So the Battle of Antietam (the bloodiest day in American history and one of the bloodiest battles in the war) had about 23,000 casualties overall, but only about 3,600 of these casualties were deaths.
Another thing to disentangle is killed in action does not equal all deaths in a war. For most wars prior to the 20th century, deaths from disease tended to kill more soldiers than battle. The National Park Service notes that something like 2/3 of all military deaths in the Civil War were actually from disease.
A final point to note from the same source is that of deaths from battle, a large proportion were actually wounded soldiers succumbing either to their wounds, or the attendant infections.
So the long and short is that while civil war battles often had tens of thousands of casualties, they "only" resulted in thousands of deaths, and many of these would have been off the field.
There is another issue around Civil War battlefield photographs being staged by photographers like Matthew Brady, up to and including moving and posing bodies, and therefore the photographs not actually being hyperrealistic, but I'm not an expert in the history of Civil War photography so I would leave that to someone better qualified to develop.