History on Plates

MR. LINCOLN'S CAMERA MAN -- Roy Meredith--Scrlbner ($7.50).

One blazing hot day in July 1861, a little bespectacled man with a Vandyke beard, a big nose, and wearing a white linen duster and a straw hat, hurried across the Long Bridge at Washington, D.C. on to the territory of a newly proclaimed nation, the Confederate States of America. He joined the crush of junketing Congressmen, society ladies in carriages and pleasure seekers who had jaunted out to see the Union Army trounce General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard's Confederates at Bull Run. The little man in the linen duster was Mathew Brady, a popular portrait photographer of Washington and Manhattan.

In the wild rout that followed the battle, Brady reached Washington with his duster begrimed and his straw hat limp with sweat. But in his negative box were the first of his series of great war photographs. As soon as the plates were developed, he exhibited them in his Washington gallery. Their success was instantaneous. Wrote Humphrey's Journal: "The public is indebted to Brady of Broadway for his excellent views of grim-visaged war. . . . His are the only records of the fight at Bull Run. . . . Brady has shown more pluck than many of the officers and soldiers who were in the fight. He went . . . with his sleeves tucked up and his big camera directed upon every point of interest in the field. It is certain they [the soldiers] did not get away from Brady as easily as they did from the enemy."

Brady had found his war work. Soon President Lincoln gave him a nodded permission to accompany the Union armies even on the battlefields. Soon Brady and his "Whatizzit," the wagon that carried his camera and supplies, were familiar features of the Civil War. Brady's equipment was heavy and he was usually forced to make his pictures after the fighting was over. But he was under fire at Bull Run and Petersburg, was nearly killed at Fredericksburg. The result was a magnificent pictorial record of war (the first and perhaps the best ever made).

The 368 pages of this intelligently edited, handsomely bound book include a Brady biography (unfamiliar to most Americans) and over 400 superb Brady photographs, together with a number made by his assistants (at the height of his activities, he had 21). There are also some 200 Brady portrait photographs, some of them (notably Phineas T. Barnum, side-showman extraordinary--see cut--and Walt Whitman) never published before. Outstanding is the series of photographs of Lincoln taken by Brady in his studio.

Like his portrait sitters, the Civil War was more for Brady than a chance to practice his art. It was a calling, a dedication. Said he years later: "I felt I had to go. A spirit in my feet said go, and I went."

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