Your earlier description of the photograph brought that image to mind. The basic narrative given below was used in the Ken Burns series on the Civil War --

http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/images/

In late September 1862, Mathew Brady opened an exhibition entitled "The Dead of Antietam" at his New York gallery. The photographs were made by Brady's assistants, Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson. Nothing like them had every been seen in America.

"The dead of the battle-field come up to us very rarely, even in dreams," wrote a reporter for The New York Times.

"We see the list in the morning paper at breakfast, but dismiss its recollection with the coffee. There is a confused mass of names, but they are all strangers; we forget the horrible significance that dwells amid the jumble of type...We recognize the battle-field as a reality, but it stands as a remote one. It is like a funeral next door. It attracts your attention, but it does not enlist your sympathy. But it is very different when the hearse stops at your front door and the corpse is carried over your own threshold...Mr. Brady has done something to bring to us the terrible reality and earnestness of the War. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along [our] streets, he has done something very like it."

Photgraphed by Alexander Gardner, these are General Starke's Louisianans, lying dead along the Hagerstown Pike near Sharpsburg MD --