Description
On August 9, 1864, Captain John Maxwell and his guide R. K. Dillard talked their way past Union pickets and entered City Point, site of the Union army’s huge supply depot during the Petersburg campaign. Maxwell carried a box with a “horological torpedo,” or time bomb, that consisted of a timer mechanism and twelve pounds of gunpowder. Upon approaching the wharf, he handed the package over to a man working on the General Meade, where it soon exploded, igniting nearby ammunition stores. A Union ordnance officer who witnessed the blast wrote, “From the top of the bluff there lay before me a staggering scene, a mass of overthrown buildings, their timbers tangled into almost impenetrable heaps.” Some 58 people were killed and 126 wounded. Grant noted that “every part of the yard used as my headquarters is filled with splinters and shells.”
This tintype is very similar to a view pictured on page 206 of The Image of War, Vol. 6. It is quite rare, as most photographic documentation by war photographers was on glass plate negatives, which were used to produce albumen copies. Found in New England, the image could have been a soldier’s souvenir. Even with the scratches across the image, it is a compelling and rare tintype from the Petersburg campaign.
