With the Compliments of . . .
Winter 1997, Vol. 29, No. 4 | Our Heritage in Documents
By William Gladstone
© 1997 by William Gladstone
While sifting through photographs at the annual Civil War show in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1996, I came across an albumen print that sparked my interest. The image itself was unremarkable—a dark-haired Union officer, sporting a kepi on his head and either a newspaper or map in his lap, sits in a camp chair outside his tent, apparently deep in thought. To the right is a man in civilian attire, sitting cross-legged on the ground. To the left is a well-dressed African American man holding the reigns of what is presumably the officer’s horse.1 The mat measures 16¼ by 13¼ inches; the print, 10¾ by 7½. Like so many photographs of the period, it bears the “Brady Washington” imprint. On the lower right-hand corner of the mat, however, is a feature that makes the print very unusual—an inscription that reads, “To Capt Janes with compl of M. B. Brady.” Intrigued by my find, I purchased the print.
The Civil War was a watershed event in American history. More than two and a half million men joined the ranks of the Union and Confederate armies; tens of thousands more men, women, and children aided their respective sides as civilians. With enthusiasm for their causes abounding and long absences from loved ones guaranteed, Americans flocked to photographic studios, and the industry boomed.
In 1860, the year before the war officially began, there were at least 3,154 photographers in the United States; within a decade, fueled in large part by the public’s demand for news and images of the war, the number had more than doubled to 7,558.2 While many photographers made names for themselves during the conflict, one stands out as synonymous with Civil War photography. His name was Mathew Brady, the very M. B. Brady cited on my print.
Even before the war, Brady was one of the most successful and well-known American photographers. His operation comprised three galleries in New York City and Washington, D.C. The Washington gallery had opened on Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, in 1858, under the management of Alexander Gardner, another notable figure in Civil War photography. Meanwhile, the New York galleries at 359 and 643 Broadway were touted in the prewar days as among the few establishments in the city worth visiting. At one, a then-beardless Abraham Lincoln sat for his now famous Cooper Union portrait on February 27, 1860. By his own admission, the image served Lincoln well. He would later note that two things elected him President in 1860: his Cooper Union speech and his Mathew Brady photograph.3
When war broke in 1861, Brady had a healthy clientele of nineteenth-century celebrities, but he envisioned for himself a place in history beyond the role of photographer to the stars. He was convinced it was his fate to preserve the war on film. “I can only describe the destiny that overwhelmed me by saying that, like Euphorion, I felt that I had to go. A spirit in my feet said ‘Go.’ and I went.”4
It is unknown how many war-related images were taken by Brady photographers and their colleagues, but Civil War historian William C. Davis wrote, “it is not outrageous to estimate that over one million photographs were made from 1861 through 1865 as a direct result of the war.”5
Although thousands of images bear the Brady imprint, it is doubtful that the poor-sighted Brady took any of the field photographs with which his company is credited, although he probably supervised the creation of many. He was, after all, present at a number of engagements, beginning with the first Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. As early as October 1862, the New York Times acknowledged the unique contribution Brady photographs were making to the pictorial account of the war: “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought the bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”6
Armed with this knowledge and my newly acquired Brady photograph, I began to delve into the story of Mathew Brady and the man I assumed to be Captain Janes. Like documents, photographs can reveal much about our past. With some effort and an occasional dash of inspiration, researchers using photographic records can make history more tangible, adding faces to the narrative. In this case, a simple photograph provided a point of departure—the image hinted at a story, and I was going to uncover it.
As I began my search, several questions arose: Who inscribed the mat? Who was Captain Janes? What was his relationship to Mathew Brady? Where and when was this photograph taken? And of course, why? To answer these questions, I first turned to several organizations with large collections of Civil War photographs, including the National Portrait Gallery, the George Eastman House, the Special Collections Branch of the U.S. Army Military History Institute (MHI), the Library of Congress, and the National Archives and Records Administration. None of these institutions had a Brady photograph with a similar inscription, but each added a piece to my historical puzzle.
I first showed the photograph to Mary Panzer, curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, and Will Stapp, a recognized authority on photographs of this period. Both agreed that the handwriting was consistent with the style of the mid-nineteenth century. Identifying who wrote the inscription, however, was impossible. There is little evidence of Brady’s handwriting other than an 1843 letter held by the George Eastman House and signatures inscribed between 1845 and 1849 on three photography awards won by Brady. These signatures can now be found at the New‑York Historical Society, which holds the American Institute Register of Premiums listing the gold and silver photography awards given to and signed for by M. B. Brady.7 The three signatures, however, were written on pages with ample space for signatures. On my print the signature is crammed into the lower right-hand corner and probably is not a true representation of the inscriber’s signature. Then as now, it was often customary for a secretary or someone with similar responsibilities to sign for an employer, so any number of individuals may be responsible for it. Regardless of who signed it, however, the important phrase is that it was given with the compliments of M. B. Brady. This statement is very rare. My best hope for discovering what prompted it was to find out more about the image’s subject. Perhaps the history of Captain Janes would shed some light on why the mount featured such an inscription.
I confirmed the identity of Captain Janes with a carte de visite located by Mike Winey, the curator of the MHI’s Special Collections Branch. The carte de visite’s subject was identified as Capt. Henry Warner Janes, and coincidentally, it, too, bears the Brady Washington imprint. The two men were the same. The MHI provided additional information with a bust of Janes identified as “Capt. & Asst. Q.M. Henry W. Janes, USV & USA.”
I now had enough details to locate Janes’s muster and pension files in the National Archives of the United States in Washington, D.C.8 Capt. Henry Warner Janes originally served in the Fifty-fifth Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry, having enrolled as the regimental quartermaster on August 20, 1861, when the regiment was being organized. In November and December 1862, he served as acting brigade quartermaster and by January 1863 was acting division quartermaster, having been detailed to that position on the third per Special Order No. 2, issued by Gen. D. Stuart, Headquarters, Second Division, Milliken’s Bend.9
Later that year, on August 10, First Lieutenant Janes resigned from the Fifty-fifth Illinois to receive an appointment as captain and assistant quartermaster of the U.S. Volunteers. He served as such until November 17, 1863, and a short time later accepted an appointment as captain and acting quartermaster, U.S. Army. From August 1863 to March 18, 1864, Janes was stationed at Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters as staff quartermaster in the Military Division of the Mississippi. From March to August, he was in the field with Grant in Virginia. He was then assigned to the Schuylkill Arsenal in Philadelphia, where he remained until August 1867.10 The Fifty-fifth Illinois had fought under Grant at the Battle of Vicksburg, and I suspect that Janes came into contact with the future President at this time. Janes is mentioned in General Order No. 7, Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, issued February 27, 1864, as assistant quartermaster by order of Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant.11 Less than two months later, his name appears in General Order No. 155, issued by the War Department on April 8, 1864. “The General-in-Chief announces the following named officers as composing his staff in the field.” The list includes Capt. H. Janes, assistant quartermaster, on special duty at headquarters, by command of Lieutenant General Grant.12
Janes’s service as a quartermaster for Grant provided my link to Brady. The Brady Company day book records from the New York studios reveal that Brady gave complimentary photographs to certain staff officers.13 Janes would have been a good candidate. A field photographer with military friends would have a distinct advantage over his colleagues, especially if he counted among those friends a quartermaster who would know about future encampments, where to obtain necessary supplies, and who to turn to for wagon repairs.
I next turned to the question of where and when this photograph was taken. In my search, I discovered that several versions of this and other Janes photographs exist, and some had dates associated with them. My first attempt, however, led me astray. Captain Janes is listed in the index and shown in volume 10 of Miller’s Photographic History of the Civil War. Janes stands behind and to the left of General Grant in this group photograph entitled “Grant in his Working Clothes.” The caption accompanying the photograph seems to place these officers at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Grant.14 No photographers were present at the surrender, however, so this photograph could not have been taken at that time. The ten-volume history’s editor-in-chief, Trevelyan Miller, had merely chosen this image as a cosmetic accent to the section on the surrender.15 Further, even if photographers had been present for the ceremonies in April 1865, Janes would not have been pictured with Grant. By April, he had been in Pennsylvania for eight months. For now, this photograph was of little help.
This Mathew Brady image now in the National Archives is a duplicate of the inscribed print the author found in 1996.
Another photograph of Janes appears in the MHI’s MOLLUS-Massachusetts Collection16 with the caption “Capts. Jane [sic] and Clark” and the E. and H. T. Anthony stereo number 2356. This number refers to an original Brady negative number and matches that used for the same image in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress (LC-B-2356).17 I found the same photograph, captioned “Officers and Horse,” in the Still Picture Branch of the National Archives and Records Administration as photograph number 111-B-59. (The first number designates Record Group 111, Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer. The letter “B” refers to the series within the record group.) It can also be found in a recent book of photographs discovered in the collection of the Medford Historical Society (Massachusetts). That photograph bears a nondescript caption but does list the date as circa 1864.18
A variation of the image in Miller’s Photographic History described above is used in the book Grant and Lee by noted Civil War photohistorian William Frassanito. Frassanito identified the image as “Gen. Grant and staff, City Point, Brady & Co. (number unknown), ca. July or August 1864 (MOLLUS-Mass).”19 Janes stands behind Grant. A number of photographs were taken of Grant’s command in Cold Harbor, Virginia, in June 1864, according to Frassanito, who also notes that “six known photographs were recorded of Grant and his staff at the City Point headquarters during the summer of 1864, all of which were taken by Brady’s firm.”20 Captain Janes was with Grant in Cold Harbor and City Point when this series was taken.21 Brady or one of his photographers would definitely have come into contact with Janes at this time, so there was a good chance my print was among the 229 photographs in the series. With a little additional help from Mr. Frassanito, to whom I wrote about my research and suppositions, I was finally able to confirm this.
In this photograph, Henry W. Janes stands behind and to the left of General Grant.
Using a reference I made to Landscapes of the Civil War, Mr. Frassanito was able to identify my photograph, proving that images such as mine can reveal a great deal to someone who knows what to look for.22 My image was in this book, but I had not recognized it. To quote his letter, this “version is most interesting because you can see the original Brady negative numbers. The crossed-out and backwards number which seems to read 9339 doesn’t make much sense, since Brady issued that scene as a stereo of Gen. Martingale and staff (Cold Harbor). But near the lower-left corner is another backward number, which appears to read 9559 (Brady’s 1864 campaign series began with 8891). This makes much more sense.”23 Further, “According to Brady’s original 1864 numbering system, numbers 9547–9557 were all City Point stereos. The next two numbers, 9558 and 9559, are unaccounted for but two additional City Point scenes follow, i.e., plate numbers 9560 and 9561.” Frassanito concluded, “It is my opinion that your image was taken at Grant’s City Point headquarters between late June and August 1864, during the period Brady produced the views on pp. 264–266 in my Grant and Lee. Brady apparently felt that 9558 and 9559 were not of sufficient interest for the general market probably because of their peripheral and/or personal nature.”24
I now knew who and where and when, and I had a good idea of why the mount was inscribed, but my photograph was just a moment in Captain Janes’s life. His story did not end in City Point in the summer of 1864. He was first brevetted to major and then, on March 16, 1865, to lieutenant colonel “for faithful and meritorious service during the war.”25 After the fighting ceased, he remained on active duty in the Quartermaster’s Department as assistant quartermaster, and on June 19, 1879, he was promoted to major. His life then took a dramatic turn. Less than a month after his promotion, Janes retired from the army “for incapacity resulting from long and faithful service,” in conformity with section 1251 of the Revised Statues.26 He was sent to the Hudson River State Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York, to be near his wife and brother. The report of a retiring board of the army convened at the War Department after visiting Janes states that the members “are of the opinion that he is permanently insane and his disease was contracted in the line of duty.”27
Major Janes, U.S. Army (retired), died suddenly of apoplexy on February 16, 1883, at the Hudson River State Hospital. His brother, in a letter to Gen. R. C. Drum at the time of Janes’s death, wrote, “he was in a compatible frame of mind, tho’ full of delusions? I think his death was a happy release for him.”28
Although he suffered a less tragic fate, Mathew Brady’s fortunes also changed after the conflict. By his own admission, he had spent more than $100,000 on his war endeavors.29 He had hoped to recoup the expense with the publication of a photographic history of the war, but America was weary of the carnage, and the volume did not sell well. Brady was broke. To pay an E. and H. T. Anthony bill for supplies, he gave the company a duplicate set of his war negatives. This and a second group of negatives, purchased from the family of Levin C. Handy, Brady’s nephew-in-law and assistant, are now housed in the Library of Congress.30 In 1874 the War Department paid $2,840 for a final set of some six thousand negatives being sold at auction because Brady could not pay the bill for their storage. The following year, Gen. Benjamin Butler, congressman from Massachusetts, believing Brady had been slighted by the deal, pushed through an appropriation for an additional $25,000 to be paid to the famed photographer—a small price given that the collection had been valued at $150,000.31 This set of negatives is in the Still Picture Branch of the National Archives and Records Administration. Several more Brady photographs can be found in the National Portrait Gallery and private collections.
Despite the sum given to him by Congress, Brady’s financial woes continued. He died in New York City on January 15, 1896, in the midst of plans to exhibit his war photographs and is buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
Although Brady was never fully compensated for his photographic efforts, he will be remembered for his significant contribution to the documentation of the Civil War. He and his fellow photographers have provided us with a key to the past. More than 130 years later, the men and women whose faces and deeds they captured on film are long dead, but their stories will always remain, awaiting the curiosity of strangers to reveal themselves.
William Gladstone is the author of The United States Colored Troops, 1863–1867, and Men of Color as well as several articles. Exhibits of his photographic collections have appeared at Gettysburg National Military Park, the U.S. Military History Institute, and other institutions. He is a Fellow of the Photographic Historical Society of New York and the Company of Military Historians.
Notes
1. The inclusion of both the horse and groom is common in photographs of this period. Civil War officers, for whom a trusted horse was an invaluable and envied asset, often posed with their animals. The groom’s presence is due to the technological limitations of contemporary photography. Long exposure times made the process extremely sensitive to movement, and animals had to be held to keep them still. As an added benefit, a statement in German on the reverse of my mount reveals the name of the horse, Tomy: “Photograph with permission, ‘Tomy’ Army of the Potomac, 1864–1865.”
2. William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photographs (1981), p. 12.
3. Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf, Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose (1963), p. 35.
4. George Alfred Townsend, “Still Taking Pictures. Brady, the Grand Old Man of American Photography,” The [New York] World, Apr. 12, 1891, p. 23, quoted in Jonathan Heller, ed., War and Conflict: Selected Images from the National Archives, 1765–1970 (1990), p. 4.
5. William C. Davis, ed., The End of an Era, vol. 6 in Image of War: 1861–1865 (1984), p. 10.
6. The New York Times, Oct. 20, 1862. Quoted in Robert Leggat, A History of Photography: From its Beginnings till the 1920s (1996), Apr. 30, 1997.
7. New-York Historical Society, negative numbers 70668–70670.
8. Researchers interested in finding information about Civil War soldiers in the National Archives need to provide a full name, dates of service, and the state from which the soldier entered service as well as other identifying information. General Information Leaflet 7, Military Service Records in the National Archives of the United States (1985), provides information that may be helpful to researchers. To obtain a free copy of this brochure, please write to the Product Sales Section (NWPS), National Archives and Records Administration, Room G7, 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20408-0001. Several articles in Prologue also explain how to research Civil War veterans, including DeAnne Blanton, “Confederate Medical Personnel” 26 (Spring 1994): 80–84; Michael T. Meier, “Civil War Draft Records: Exemptions and Enrollments” 26 (Winter 1994): 282–286; Lee Bacon, “Civil War and Later Naval Personnel Records at the National Archives,” 27 (Summer 1995): 178–182; Desmond Walls Allen, “Which Henry Cook? A Methodology for Searching for Confederate Ancestors” 27 (Fall 1995): 290–293; Reginald Washington, “The Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company and African American Genealogical Research” 29 (Summer 1997): 170–181; and Michael P. Musick, “Civil War Records: An Introduction and Invitation” 27 (Summer 1995): 145–150, “The Little Regiment: Civil War Units and Commands” 27 (Summer 1995): 151–171, “Honorable Reports: Battles, Campaigns, and Skirmishes—Civil War Records and Research” 27 (Fall 1995): 258–277, and “War in an Age of Wonders: Civil War Arms and Equipment” 27 (Winter 1995): 348–368.
Researchers might also find Military Service Records: A Select Catalog of National Archives Microfilm (1985) useful. It can be purchased from Product Sales at the address above for $3.50 or accessed online via “The Genealogy Page” located on the National Archives and Records Administration Web site at http://www.nara.gov.
9. Compiled military service record (CMSR) of Henry Warner Janes, Fifty-fifth Illinois Infantry, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Record Group 94, National Archives and Records Administration. The widow’s pension record is in pension application file C 1201752, Records of the Veterans Administration, RG 15, NARA.
10. Ibid.
11. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (1890), series 1, vol. 30, part II, p. 487.
12. Ibid., p. 820.
13. Brady Company New York City day book, New York City Public Library, Fifth Avenue.
14. The caption reads in part, “Thus appeared on the day of the surrender the man whom Lee had so long resisted. . . . He rode to the McLean house in his fatigue blouse, just as we see him here.” Francis Trevelyan Miller, ed. Miller’s Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes (1911), vol. 10, p. 81.
15. Researchers should remember to consult the original sources of photographs for complete citation and caption information before using them to identify other images. Often photographs chosen as illustrations were not taken on the date and location discussed in the caption.
16. “MOLLUS” stands for Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. The MHI collection came from Boston, Massachusetts.
17. E. and H. T. Anthony, New Catalogue of Stereoscopes and Views (ca. 1867), p. 46.
18. Constance Sullivan, ed., Landscapes of the Civil War: Newly Discovered Photographs from the Medford Historical Society (1995), p. 48.
19. William A. Frassanito, Grant and Lee: The Virginia Campaigns, 1864–1865 (1983), p. 266.
20. Ibid., p. 263.
21. Ibid., pp. 13–23 and 172–179.
22. Sullivan, ed., Landscapes of the Civil War, p. 48.
23. William A. Frassanito to author, Aug. 9, 1996.
24. Ibid. A brevet officer usually received his rank as an award for gallant or meritorious service in combat or to allow him to serve in a staff position. The honorary title had none of the authority, precedence, or pay of the real or full rank.
25. The Story of the Fifty-fifth Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (1887), p. 269.
26. Muster and pension files, Henry Warner Janes, Fifty-fifth Illinois, NARA.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Townsend, “Still Taking Pictures,” p. 23, quoted in Heller, ed., War and Conflict, p. 5.
30. Peter Pollack, The Picture History of Photography: From the Earliest Beginnings to the Present Day (1969), p. 190.
31. Francis Trevelyan Miller, Original Photographs Taken on the Battlefields During the Civil War of the United States By Mathew B. Brady and Alexander Gardner (1907), pp. 7–9, quoted in Heller, ed., War and Conflict, p. 5.