Thanks for the additional information. You're probably right about the Suttons being missed during the 1860 census, as well as Lemuel Sutton's death occuring during the Civil War. You're not assuming that his death was due to hostile causes, so there's nothing else to add here, either.

Returning to the subject of "Colonel Sutton's Last Raid", photography made outside the studio was quite limited during the Civil War. Only a relatively small number of skilled professionals with access to special equipment and supplies could produce such images --

Mathew Brady and his associates, most notably Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, and Timothy O'Sullivan, photographed many battlefields, camps, towns, and people touched by the war. Their images depict the multiple aspects of the war except one crucial element: battle. Photographs show camp life, routines, war preparations, the moments just prior to battle, and the aftermath of battle. The primitive technology of photography required that subjects be still at the moment the camera's shutter snapped. Battle scenes are, therefore, missing from the record of history of this era.

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/brady-photos/

Most of the Civil War images available to our parents (and grandparents) were published in F. T. Miller's Photographic History of the Civil War, (1911). [See image below] As a high school student waiting on a ride home, I thumbed through every page in Miller's PHCW and read most of the text more than once at the library. My ride might arrive anytime between 4 and 6:00 PM, and alternatives were (a) reading novels, (b) napping, or (c) doing my homework. None of these was nearly as fun as devouring every book about the Civil War on the shelves. My reading experiences at the library are quite vivid, and a photograph of Confederate dead with a title as provocative as "Colonel Sutton's Last Raid" would have made quite an impression on my young mind.

What if this picture was published in Miller's but someone tore that page out of the set available at the Ensley Public Library? We still have a problem.

There are no images of the most famous battlefields of many campaigns. Photographs made immediately after the fighting at Fort Donelson TN, Shiloh TN, Perryville KY, Murfreesboro TN, Champion Hill MS, Tupelo MS, Selma AL and many other battles are non-existant. As best we know today, none were ever made. Scenes from skirmish sites, raids and lesser actions are quite scarce, too. For those reasons I'm inclined to believe that the image described under the title "Colonel Sutton's Last Raid" may have been made at another place during a later time in another war. That may explain why they couldn't be found in a book about the American Civil War.