It has been the privilege of a lifetime to have walked the battlefields of the American Civil War, where Timothy O'Sullivan walked, and where he exposed the photographic plates that render him as a photographer of high distinction.

His photographs now populate a civil war media space, mostly without due credit: The name Timothy O'Sullivan is now largely familiar only to enthusiasts and historians.

I hope that this book will span some of this distance, and carry him further forward in public understanding.

If so, it will have served its purpose.

The Walt Whitman valediction as accorded to Alexander Gardner, applies, equally, to Timothy O'Sullivan - “saw farther than his camera”.

This book is dedicated to a photographer who does not deserve to be such a fragile whisper on the sorrow of the American Civil War.