The Liljenquist family collected thousands of photographs of Civil War soldiers over the years. Brandon Liljenquist saw a collection of war photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan and was inspired to make the Civil War photos public. This year, the family donated 400 of those pictures to the Library of Congress for a collection called The Last Full Measure.
Laying out the photographs at home for the last time, and thinking about the collection in a whole new light, I couldn’t help but notice how similar the faces of these boys were to those we’d seen in The Washington Post. Here were the young men who did most of the fighting and dying. In their eyes and the eyes of their loved ones, I could see the full range of human emotion. It was all here: the bravado, the fear, the readiness, the weariness, the pride and the anguish. The loneliness in their long, distant stares overwhelmed me.
The original photographs will be on display next year in Washington, but are available now online.
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