MATHEW Brady left his tent, called his assistants, had them hitch up the darkroom wagon, and drove over the rutted fields to the headquarters at City Point. He was supposed to take Grant’s photograph around one o’clock. Grant was ready for him when he got there; Brady stepped into the tent for a minute, saw that it was plain and neat, that there were no bottles or evidence of liquor, and that, as he had heard, there was no map. They went outside; the other officers cleared away, and Brady suggested that Grant stand next to the bare tree in front of one of the low tents. Grant walked over in his measured way, and Brady and his assistants moved quickly to get the camera set up, using weights they carried for this purpose to steady the tripod on the uneven, rocky ground. Brady brought over a folding camp chair and angled it away from Grant. He had an instinct for furnishing photographs. Sometimes, he added a pair of shoes to a battlefield picture. Shoes gave corpses more humanity.
Grant leaned against the tree, his right hand and forearm slightly above shoulder height. Brady looked at Grant’s hand reaching forward, thumb down. The photographer could just, at that distance, distinguish the clear spread of the fingers; it was a graceful hand. Grant’s left hand was hidden, his knuckles against his hip. He wore a long coat with nine buttons running down each side and a band of stars sewn over each shoulder, a vest, a small, neat tie, and a white collar, turned down. His pants were soft and wrinkled, as if they had been worn several times since they were last brushed. He had flat, pale boots, too soft to polish. And he had pushed his military hat back from his forehead so that it looked like an ordinary workingman’s hat.
Ulysses S. Grant by Mathew Brady, 1864.
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Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant had arrived at City Point, Virginia, in June of 1864 in a state of the most complex and defended tenacity imaginable. He had sent and intended to continue to send tens of thousands of young men to their deaths. Grant was forty-two. He had begun his military career as a quartermaster in the Mexican War, where the men who would later be generals on both sides of the Civil War had fought together to take the territories of Texas and California from Mexico, a war that Grant later said was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” He thought the connection between the two wars was evident: “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”
After Mexico, posted to California and lonely for his family, Grant had retired from the army. He had built a farm he called Hardscrabble; he had freed the one slave he owned when he again went north; he had worked in a leather goods store in Ohio. Reentering the army when war broke out, he had fought and won a major series of victories for the Union Army at Vicksburg and Chattanooga. Some months before he posed for Brady, he had been named lieutenant general of all the armies of the United States, second in command only to President Lincoln.
For the awarding of the commission, Grant had traveled to Washington from his then headquarters in Tennessee and had gone to the White House and said, in graceful response to Lincoln’s speech, that he felt “the full weight of the responsibilities now devolving on me.” At the Lincolns’ regular evening reception, an unusual number of people had come in the hope of seeing Grant; the guests insisted he stand on a couch so that they could all get a good look at him. He was not tall, with brown hair; his eyes were a fine, clear blue. He was shy, taciturn, and self-assured—qualities that were frequently mistaken for one another.
Up to that point, Grant had won all his victories in the western theater of war, but he knew that the heart of the war—especially the politics and newspapers that fed and were fed by the conflict—was in the eastern theater, between Washington and the southern capital, Richmond, which he needed to take from General Robert E. Lee. Rather than returning to the Army of the Tennessee, he chose to take up the command of the Army of the Potomac. He sent a letter to his wife, Julia Dent Grant, quite soon after, indicating that she and the children would probably have to come to Washington, which they did. He liked to have her with him in camp; she was unwavering and canny and devoted and she made it easier for him not to drink. She used quite often to come out from the house they had found in Georgetown and she was regularly at City Point during the last year of the war. The Grants’ ambitions were political as well as military, and they both knew that their lives needed to be centered on Washington.
Six years earlier, in 1858, the possibility of war had drawn everyone’s attention to Washington, and Mathew Brady had moved part of his operation from New York down to a new studio on Pennsylvania Avenue. He was then in the midst of his campaign to take the picture of every famous person in America. In 1860, as people were starting to suspect that Congress was in its last unified session, Brady took the photograph of every man in the House and Senate and made prints of two giant composite photographs showing all 250 of their heads. These sold quite well. In 1861, Elmer Ellsworth had stopped by Brady’s Washington studio to have small-size cartes de visite made; when Ellsworth was shot tearing a Confederate flag off a hotel in Alexandria, the newspapers covered his death as the first Union casualty, and Brady sold thousands of copies of his photograph. Brady was among the first photographers to think of going into the field to take photographs, and he jury-rigged a darkroom wagon that allowed him to carry all his plates and developers with him. He was at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg. Or, at least, it seems likely that he was at those places, though many of the photographs he took credit for were actually taken by his assistants. It was Alexander Gardner who made the images of the Civil War that changed how the country imagined the war—the pictures showing the stacks of bodies left in the fields after battles. Photography still required a long exposure; it remained impossible to take pictures of the active battlefield.
Brady took some photographs of corpses and some photographs of the fields themselves, though generally after the bodies had been cleared, but mostly he did what he had always done. He took portraits of generals and groups of officers and soldiers, portraits suffused with the faith that their subjects were justly celebrated. Many soldiers and civilians had begun to wonder about military heroism, but people at home still wanted to see the living faces of the men who were fighting. Brady was a completist, and this was an anxious proclivity during a war. Always driven, he became a recording fury, pushing, pushing, pushing to get people into his collection before they went to the grave.
Grant’s army started crossing the James River on June 14 of 1864, the first two corps approached Petersburg the next day, and within a few days Grant’s whole army had arrived. Grant established his headquarters at City Point; he was to remain there for three months, until he went to Appomattox for Lee’s surrender. Brady, with his usual celerity, was there by June 19 through the offices of Julia Dent Grant, whom Brady’s wife, Juliette Brady, née Handy, had asked for help in the matter. Julia Grant certainly knew that it would only be good for her husband if there were Brady photographs of him in circulation, and would have been pleased to get the letter from her husband announcing that “Brady is along with the Army and is taking a great many views and will send you a copy of each.” Brady saw almost everything as an opportunity, and seems to have made a little extra money by relaying information about Grant’s plans to friends of his on Wall Street. Grant must have agreed with his wife that he needed Brady, for, though rumors of Brady’s indiscretions got back to Grant, he didn’t send Brady home.
City Point hadn’t been the first headquarters of the Army of the Potomac on its way toward Richmond. When they first crossed the Rapidan River in Virginia, they entered the Wilderness. In that battle, twenty-seven thousand men died in two days. A terrible fire took hold in the woods, but Grant did not call the troops back, though the officers could hear the men shrieking as they burned. The Wilderness was followed by Spotsylvania and its battle of the Bloody Angle, which brought the combined casualties for the week to fifty thousand. In his Personal Memoirs, Grant acknowledged the next engagement, at Cold Harbor, to have been an unmitigated failure. He wrote, with characteristic understatement, “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made. . . . No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.” After Cold Harbor, Lee and Grant sent each other messages trying to arrange a cease-fire so that they could tend to their wounded. These messages kept missing first one and then the other commander, but neither seems to have felt too much urgency about it. The negotiation took four days, by which point all the wounded men, who had been groaning on the fields, were dead.
At Cold Harbor, Grant might have hoped to gain a personal advantage. It was possible that, had he been able to push through from Cold Harbor on to Richmond, he would have been nominated as the Republican candidate in the 1864 elections. Grant seems to have thought so, and Lincoln was rumored to have said, “If Grant takes Richmond let him have the nomination.” In the event, though, by the time Grant’s army slogged into City Point, Richmond and the presidency had receded.
In the final months of the war, Grant and Lee both had massive armies, nearly one hundred and seventy-five thousand men at Richmond and Petersburg, which were heavy and awkward to move. Grant, in fact, didn’t expect to move much, as he was largely intent on keeping Lee and all his men defending Richmond, leaving Grant’s two favorite generals, William Sherman and Philip Sheridan, free to follow their orders to lay waste to Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley respectively. Grant had told Sherman and Sheridan to pursue the enemy “to the death,” a command seconded approvingly by Lincoln, who added in a letter to Grant that pursuit to the death “will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it.”
In his Personal Memoirs, Grant describes August at City Point—Sherman approaching Atlanta with heavy casualties and his rear guard strewn all the way up through Georgia; Confederate general Jubal Early strengthening against Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley; and Early’s recent threat to Washington itself—and he says, in an unusually personal and endearingly awkward phrase, “It kept me pretty active in looking after all these points.”
Unlike Brady, who claimed as his own work that had actually been done by other people, Grant was terribly proud of Sherman and Sheridan, and protective of them. Even when he lost communication with them entirely and only found out later what they had accomplished, he was pleased by their initiative. He trusted them. Though there was never any question that his part in it was the largest and most important, in his memoirs Grant didn’t seem possessive of victory.
The extraordinary thing about the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor was that Grant did not treat them as defeats. Grant was moving, ponderously but in some senses miraculously, to encircle Richmond. He just kept sending his men down, cleverly, carefully, guessing when Lee wouldn’t think to attack his vulnerable columns. The North could keep drafting to fill the now empty places; the South was running out of men to die. As long as southerners got killed, battles were not defeats. Grant was, quite coldly, measuring in men, and he knew he had more than Lee.
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Grant and Brady may not have had much to say to each other on the afternoon the photograph was taken, though they would have appreciated each other’s immediately apparent organizational capacity, which was, in both of them, akin to a visual sense. They marshaled equipment and supplies, they kept assistants and telegrams moving back and forth between the front, their field headquarters, and Washington, and, somehow, they kept the map of the whole country and its battles in mind.
Grant saw the world geographically. He could look at a map and immediately and for the rest of his life know all the features of terrain he had never walked. Instead of entrenching and fighting, his armies moved around their enemies. His engineers built bridges and tunnels and dams to get soldiers over and through barriers. Grant, the first general to start a battle by having his commanders synchronize their watches, realized that failing to move through landscape in a certain amount of time was the surest way to lose the war. Victory was on the side of motion. Grant saw his forces emerging out of the terrain, taking shape across it.
At West Point, the only class Grant had liked and done well at was a drawing class taught by Robert Weir, who, ten years later, also at West Point, taught drawing to the future painter James McNeill Whistler. Sketching was taught at West Point because good generals had to have a visual grasp of terrain. During the Civil War, the military began to see similar uses for photography. Initially, Brady had been allowed to photograph the war simply because he knew the right people in Washington. But as the war dragged on, it became clear that topography, the planning of battles, and the documenting of soldiers, hospitals, and the dead were all aided by the new medium. Photography—including the first aerial photographs, taken from hot-air balloons—became an active tool in fighting the war. And photographers, like the members of that other increasingly important profession, engineers, came to have their place in the service of generals.
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While Grant was at City Point, Lincoln survived two political tests: the Republican convention, at which Grant, though explicit that he was not running, received a few votes, and the general election. In late August, Lincoln, so sure was he of coming political defeat, began making plans for handing the government over to the Democratic candidate, George B. McClellan. Then Sherman took Atlanta on September 2, Sheridan defeated Early at Cedar Creek on October 19, Union soldiers who wanted to be there for the victory started reenlisting, and Grant attacked Petersburg again. The battles were fought for many reasons, but it was, in some sense, the most brutal campaign for the presidency ever waged.
The central issue in the election was whether or not there would be a negotiated peace, allowing the South to continue, self-determined and slave-owning. Slavery had, by that point, become intolerable to Grant and Lincoln. A different president and a negotiated peace would have ruined not only Grant’s war but his chance to be president after Lincoln, something that Grant wanted very much. Because he could not, himself, move decisively from City Point, he needed Sherman and Sheridan to deliver the victories that would get Lincoln back into office so that Grant could win the war his way. Grant and Lincoln wanted unconditional surrender.
And that’s what Brady’s photograph was really in service of. Grant needed to look like a sure thing, and Brady, who had been photographing presidents and generals since 1849, knew how to give a portrait inevitability. Brady had taken more portraits of Lincoln than anyone else had; he had bet his collection on the Union, and he knew exactly what would happen if Lincoln was elected, the war was won, and Grant was up for president in 1868.
The nearsighted entrepreneur and the man who was trying to win the bloodiest war in American history were not especially concerned to make a beautiful photograph. But as soon as the photograph was developed, Grant and Brady would have seen that the wide wings of the tent, the contrast of the white ground with the dark figure, and the graceful posture of the hero would all help to confer the immortality both the general and his photographer were seeking.
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Brady, standing behind the camera, looking at Grant leaning against the tree, felt something was still not right. He sent one of his assistants to stand off to one side and told Grant to look just above the assistant’s head. Grant’s eyes refocused; his whole face became stronger, more resolute. The photographer nodded with satisfaction. The general no longer seemed stiff, not at all posed. There would be no feeling that he was listening for the sound of the cover closing over the lens. People seeing the photograph would sense the authority with which he held the whole war in his hands. They would imagine that he always looked like this, in the midst of carnage, still standing calmly, as if he were merely waiting for someone to come.