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#AceHistoryDesk – Today in History – Longfellow attended Bowdoin College. A classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Longfellow returned to the college to teach in 1829. From 1836 to 1854, he served as Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University.

At home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Longfellow and his second wife, Frances (Fanny) Appleton, raised six children. In his sentimental portrait of family life, “The Children’s Hour,” first published in the September 1860 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Longfellow immortalized his daughters:

Mathew Brady

Mathew Brady photographed presidential aspirant Abraham Lincoln before his February 27, 1860, speech at Cooper Union in New York. Harper’s Weekly published Brady’s image as a woodcut on its cover with a biographical profile of Lincoln and the title Hon. Abram Lincoln, of Illinois, Republican Candidate for President. [Photographed by Brady.]

From the first, I regarded myself as under obligation to my country to preserve the faces of its historic men and mothers.

Mathew Brady quoted in George Alfred Townsend, “Still Taking Pictures. Brady, the Grand Old Man of American Photography. Hard at Work at Sixty-Seven.” The World (New York). Vol. 31, Issue 10,827, Sunday April 12, 1891, p 26.none

When he became President, Marshal Lamon said: ‘I have not introduced Mr. Brady.’ Mr. Lincoln answered in his ready way, ‘Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President.’… I remember when I took Mr. Lincoln, in 1859, he had no beard. I had to pull up his shirt and coat collar; that was at the Tenth-street gallery

Mathew Brady quoted in George Alfred Townsend, “Still Taking Pictures. Brady, the Grand Old Man of American Photography. Hard at Work at Sixty-Seven,” The World (New York). Vol. 31, Issue 10,827, Sunday April 12, 1891, p 26.none

Brady studied photography under Samuel F. B. Morse, a friend of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre who had recently introduced the daguerreotype process to America. In 1844, Brady opened his own elegant gallery and studio on Broadway in New York City. He excelled at portraiture and actively sought sittings with prominent figures in the spheres of art and politics.

At the advent of the Civil War, Brady recognized the historical imperative of comprehensive documentation of the conflict. In spite of the inevitable physical and financial perils and risks, Brady organized a corps of photographers and assistants to document the characters, events, and settings of the battles of the war:

My wife and my most conservative friends had looked unfavorably upon this departure from commercial business to pictorial war correspondence, and I can only describe the destiny that overruled me by saying that, like Euphorios, I felt that I had to go. A spirit in my feet said ‘Go,’ and I went.

Mathew Brady quoted in George Alfred Townsend, “Still Taking Pictures. Brady, the Grand Old Man of American Photography. Hard at Work at Sixty-Seven,” The World (New York). Vol. 31, Issue 10,827, Sunday April 12, 1891, p 26.none

Brady supervised his large corps of talented traveling photographers and preserved their negatives, augmenting the images with others that he bought from private photographers freshly returned from the battlefield, always seeking to tell the sweeping saga of history as it occurred. When photographs from his collection—which were, in fact, the work of many people—were published, whether printed by Brady or adapted as engravings in publications, most images were credited “From a photograph by Brady.”

In his endeavors to share the images of the war with the public, Brady shocked many by displaying photographs of battlefield corpses from Antietam. He posted a sign on the door of his New York gallery that read, “The Dead of Antietam.”

Brady succeeded in his goal of truly comprehensive photo-documentation of a war, but he paid a great price for his collection. He risked his fortune on the Civil War enterprise and fell into bankruptcy. Brady said, “No one will ever know what I went through to secure those negatives. The world can never appreciate it. It changed the whole course of my life.” He died in poverty in 1896. The New York Seventh Regiment Veterans Association paid a portion of his funeral expenses.

Go into the Gallery when you may and you will see crowds gathering around these pictures, some with tearful eyes, some with eyes that brim with pride and all with swelling hearts. To one who has moved in the scenes represented, these pictures are pregnant with strange, sad reminiscences…You recognize the very sycamore to whose base a young Lieutenant had crawled to die. You knew him…

“Photographic Phases”. New York Times. vol 11, no. 3300, July 21, 1862, p 5.none

If the men themselves whose physiognomies are here displayed, would but meet together for half an hour in as calm a frame of mind as their pictures wear, how vastly all the world’s disputes would be simplified; how many tears and troubles might mankind still be spared! And why should they not? For here at one end of the grand saloon behold a company of famous men who have in very truth so met. These are the dead of history.

“A Broadway Valhalla: Opening of Brady’s New Gallery”. New York Times. Vol. 10, No. 2822, Oct. 6, 1860, p. 4.none

Mathew Brady’s and his colleagues’ photographs document the sites and the carnage of the battles of the war quite powerfully. However, because of the long exposure times necessary to make readable images, capturing action on film was difficult, if not impossible. The public relied on written accounts and on images rendered by sketch artists printed in the news publications of the day, to get a sense of the battles. Among the writers was Walt Whitman, whose portrait Brady captured after the war.

Learn More

• Search the collection Civil War Glass Negatives and Related Prints on camera or photographic wagon to view images of the field equipment and facilities which photographers used during the Civil War.
• The Time Line of the Civil War provides a year-by-year overview of the Civil War.
• The American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition contains examples of the work of sketch artist Alfred Waud. Waud ventured dangerously close to the fighting to eloquently fix on paper information that could not be captured by cameras at that time. Among the images in the collection is a sketch entitled Attack of the Louisiana Tigers on a Battery of the 11th Corps at Gettysburg which depicts an attack on the first day of the Gettysburg battle.
• The Library of Congress collection of Daguerreotypes includes the largest collection in existence of daguerreotypes from the studio of Mathew Brady.
• View Brady’s letter to President Lincoln asking him to sit for a portrait.
• The essay Mirror Images: Daguerreotypes at the Library of Congressprovides an introduction to the Library’s daguerreotype collection. See the Timeline of the Daguerreotype Era to learn more about the period.
• Descriptions of the process developed by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and the equipment used by daguerreotype photographers are included in the essay, The Daguerreotype Medium; to find them, scroll down to the appropriate headings.
• For more daguerreotypes, see two online exhibitions: In Focus: Daguerreotypes from the J. Paul Getty Museum and Daguerreotypes at Harvard from the Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard University Library.
• Search Today in History on Civil War to locate features highlighting:
  • General Lee’s evacuation of Richmond
  • Military engagements at Bull Run, Gettysburg, Nashville, and Antietam
  • Other key figures from the Civil War era such as Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson as well as Civil War-era events including Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the execution of Andersonville Prison’s Henry Wirz.
• See Today in History features on other photographers including Samuel Herman Gottscho, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Carl Van Vechten.

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