FHGWHILE MANY PHOTOGRAPHERS DID A BRISK business during the Civil War creating studio portraits of newly uniformed soldiers, others followed armies into the field and served as photojournalists, documenting this struggle on camera in a way that no conflict had ever been covered before. Among those who ventured out was Mathew Brady, arguably the most famous photographer in America, with studios in New York and Washington, D.C. He believed that such images would complement his earlier “Gallery of Illustrious Americans” in providing a historic record of the era. Ever the entrepreneur, he also hoped to reap a financial windfall.
Granted permission to photograph war scenes by Winfield Scott, the head of the Union Army, Brady set out with assistants in a horse-drawn wagon loaded with equipment to join Federal troops led by General Irwin McDowell as they advanced against Confederate forces holding a vital rail junction at Manassas, Virginia. On July 21, 1861, the largest and bloodiest battle yet fought on American soil unfolded along Bull Run, near Manassas. Brady’s plans to document the anticipated Union victory there were upset when Confederates rallied and routed their foes, who retreated to Washington in disarray. Amid the chaos, Brady secured a sword from a New York Zouave for protection and made it back to Washington safely, but his nerves were rattled and much of his equipment was lost.
After Bull Run, Brady seldom got close to the action again. Yet he invested much time and money recording the war with the help of the talented photographers he employed. The images that they and other photojournalists produced circulated widely in years to come. By portraying the woeful carnage and destruction left in the wake of battle, they altered the public’s understanding of this conflict and of war itself. FHG
BLASTED BATTLEGROUND Eight months after the First Battle of Bull Run, two of Mathew Brady’s employees, George Barnard and James Gibson, visited the scene and recorded the war-ravaged landscape in photographs such as this one showing a ruined stone bridge across which Union troops had advanced and retreated during the fighting. The bridge was destroyed by Confederate forces when they withdrew from Manassas in March 1862.
BRADY AFTER BULL RUN Brady took this self-portrait just after he returned from Bull Run, wearing a sword he acquired as Union troops and spectators fled the scene. Brady never profited as he hoped by documenting the Civil War, but he recouped some expenses by selling his negatives, many of which ended up in the Library of Congress or in Smithsonian collections.
