Ruins of the Pinckney Mansion, Charleston, South Carolina,

1864, printed 1866

At the conclusion of the Civil War, George N. Barnard, a former staff photographer for Mathew Brady, retraced General William Tecumseh Sherman’s bloody march through the Carolinas and Georgia. Barnard compiled sixty-one landscape views into a deluxe album that he published in time for the Christmas market in 1866.<br>The Pinckney Mansion in Charleston was damaged in 1861 in a fire unrelated to the war. Barnard nevertheless put the picturesque ruin at the center of a photograph he described as illustrating the vandalism of Confederate soldiers fleeing<br>the city. The house of Ephraim Ponder sheltered Confederate sharpshooters during the siege of Atlanta; its perforated facade testifi es to its absorption of countless rounds of Union shellfire.