25 Horrifying Images of The Civil War

Confederate soldiers standing guard at Fort Walker on Hilton Head, South Carolina – a fort hastily built by slave labor in 1861 to guard the entrance to Port Royal Sound.

Black laborers digging a trench in front of a new stockade in Alexandria, Virginia, circa 1864 – possibly formerly enslaved men who’d fled there after the city was occupied by Union troops and found paid work.

Defensive fortifications, including earthworks, established by the Confederacy in front of Atlanta in 1864, before General Sherman led his troops into the city.

Dead horses of Capt. John Bigelow’s 9th Massachusetts Battery lay where they died in the Battle of Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania on July 2, 1864.

The ruins of a lighthouse in the aftermath of the Battle of Mobile Bay, Alabama, fought on August 5, 1864, and considered a major victory for the Union, since Mobile was the largest Southern port they captured after New Orleans.