Crossing Rapidan River at Germanna Ford

The Army of the Potomac crosses the Rapidan River at Germanna Ford on May 4, 1864. Wide pontoon boats, turned upside down, form the base of the bridge, allowing the horse-drawn artillery and, at other moments, infantry to gain a foothold on Robert E. Lee's side of the river. Just a few miles to the east lay the dense, twelve-mile-wide tract of scrub known as the Wilderness. It was there almost exactly a year earlier that Union general Joseph Hooker had failed to outflank Lee and was humiliated at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Now, the new Union general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant, would try the same thing and meet Lee in the same place, a day after this photograph was taken, on May 5. The two-day battle was a tactical draw but a strategic victory for Grant, who was able to keep maneuvering south in an attempt to outflank Lee.

This stereographic image was taken by Timothy O'Sullivan from the south side of the Rapidan. Sullivan was employed at the time by Alexander Gardner, the Scottish-born photographer who, while in the employ of Mathew Brady, had taken a famous series of portraits of the dead at Antietam in 1862. Now Gardner's Gallery in Washington was a major competitor of Brady, and O'Sullivan was one of Gardner's best men in the field. Indeed, O'Sullivan was the only photographer to capture this important crossing, taking three images in all. They would be his last for two weeks. The fighting to come, at the Wilderness and then at Spotsylvania Court House, would be too intense and the weather too wet for photography.

Original Author: Timothy H. O'Sullivan
Created: May 4, 1864
Medium: 1 negative : glass, stereograph, wet collodion

Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division

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