Original Photographs
Taken on the
BATTLEFIELDS
During the
Civil War of the United States

By Mathew B. Brady and Alexander Gardner

Who operated under the Authority of the War Department and the Protection of the Secret Service

Rare Reproductions from Photographs Selected from Seven Thousand

Original Negatives Taken under Most Hazardous Conditions in the

Midst of One of the Most Terrific Conflicts of Men that the

World Has Ever Known, and in the Earliest Days of

Photography—These Negatives Have Been in

Storage Vaults for More than Forty

Years and are now the

Private Collection of Edward Bailey Eaton

Valued at $150,000

FIRST PRESENTATION FROM THIS HISTORIC COLLECTION

MADE OFFICIALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY

BY THE OWNER

Hartford, Connecticut

1907

COPYRIGHT 1907 BY E. B. EATON

COPIES OF THIS ALBUM MAY BE OBTAINED

BY A REMITTANCE OF THREE DOLLARS TO

EDWARD B. EATON

HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT

PUBLISHER

Martyrs on Altar of Civilization

by

FRANCIS TREVELYAN MILLER

Editor of the Journal of American History

MATHEW BRADY, FIRST WAR PHOTOGRAPHER IN AMERICA

He followed the Armies during the Civil War and secured these remarkable Negatives—In conference with Major-General Burnside at the Headquarters of the Army of the Potomac near Richmond, Virginia—Brady occupies the chair directly in front of the tree while General Burnside is reading a newspaper—This picture was found amoSng his negatives

THIS is undoubtedly the most valuable collection of historic photographs in America. It is believed to be the first time that the camera was used so extensively and practically on the battle-field. It is the first known collection of its size on the Western Continent and it is the only witness of the scenes enacted during the greatest crisis in the annals of the American nation. As a contribution to history it occupies a position that the higher art of painting, or scholarly research and literal description, can never usurp. It records a tragedy that neither the imagination of the painter nor the skill of the historian can so dramatically relate.

The existence of this collection is unknown by the public at large. Even while this book has been in preparation eminent photographers have pronounced it impossible, declaring that photography was not sufficiently advanced at that period to prove of such practical use in War. Distinguished veterans of the Civil War have informed me that they knew positively that there were no cameras in the wake of the army. This incredulity of men in a position to know the truth enhances the value of the collection inasmuch that its genuineness is officially proven by the testimony of those who saw the pictures taken, by the personal statement of the man who took them, and by the Government Records. For forty-two years the original negatives have been in storage, secreted from public view, except as an occasional proof is drawn for some special use. How these negatives came to be taken under most hazardous conditions in the storm and stress of a War that threatened to change the entire history of the world is itself an interesting historical incident. Moreover, it is one of the tragedies of genius.

While the clouds were gathering, which finally broke into the Civil War in the United States, there died in London one named Scott-Archer, a man who had found one of the great factors in civilization, but died poor and before his time because he had overstrained his powers in the cause of science. It was necessary to raise a subscription for his widow, and the government settled upon the children a pension of fifty pounds per annum on the ground that their father was "the discoverer of a scientific process of great value to the nation, from which the inventor had reaped little or no benefit."

This was in 1857, and four years later, when the American Republic became rent by a conflict of brother against brother, Mathew B. Brady of Washington and New York, asked the permission of the Government and the protection of the Secret Service to demonstrate the practicability of Scott-Archer's discovery in the severest test that the invention had ever been given. Brady was an artist by temperament and gained his technical knowledge of portraiture in the rendezvous of Paris. He had been interested in the discoveries of Niepce and Daguerre and Fox-Talbot along the crude lines of photography but with the introduction of the collodion process of Scott-Archer he accepted the science as a profession and, during twenty-five years of labor as a pioneer photographer, took the likenesses of the political celebrities of the epoch and of eminent men and women throughout the country.

Brady's request was granted and he invested heavily in cameras which were made specially for the hard usage of warfare. These cameras were cumbersome and were operated by what is known as the old wet-plate process, requiring a dark room which was carried with them onto the battle-fields. The experimental operations under Brady proved so successful that they attracted the immediate attention of President Lincoln, General Grant and Allan Pinkerton, known as Major Allen and chief of the Secret Service. Equipments were hurried to all divisions of the great army and some of them found their way into the Confederate ranks.

"THE black art," by which Brady secured these photographs, was as mystifying as the work of a magician. It required a knowledge of chemistry and, considering the difficulties, one wonders how Brady had courage to undertake it on the battle-field. He first immersed eighty grains of cotton-wool in a mixture of one ounce each of nitric and sulphuric acids for fifteen seconds, washing them in running water. The pyroxylin was dissolved in a mixture of equal parts of sulphuric ether and absolute alcohol. This solution gave him the ordinary collodion to which he added iodide of potassium and a little potassium bromide. He then poured the iodized collodion on a clean piece of sheet glass and allowed two or three minutes for the film to set. The coated plate was taken into a "dark room," which Brady carried with him, and immersed for about a minute in a bath of thirty grains of silver nitrate to every ounce of water. The plate was now sensitive to white light and must be placed immediately in the camera and exposed and developed within five minutes to get good results, especially in the South during the summer months. It was returned to the dark room at once and developed by pouring over it a mixture of water, one