Mr. Lincoln's Photographer

[L Verge]

I had a lengthy phone conversation today with a gentleman who said that, years ago, Mathew Brady's granddaughter had given him (this gentleman) copies of many of Brady's photographs. This gave me a bit of pause because I had never even thought about Brady being married, let alone a father.

Well, I found that Mathew Brady had been married to a Juliet Handy of D.C., but they had no children. This gentleman on the phone had promised me copies of his copies of Brady materials, so I chalked up another question mark as to their provenance. It appears that what was left after Brady's failure in business went to a nephew by marriage. Maybe it was the nephew's granddaughter who had the materials. I may never know.

However, in the process of digging for heirs, I ran across an interesting item in a Wikipedia bio: Brady and his Studio produced over 7,000 pictures (mostly two negatives of each). One set "after undergoing extraordinary vicissitudes," came into U.S. government possession. His own negatives passed in the 1870s to E. & H. T. Anthony & Company of New York, in default of payment for photographic supplies. They "were kicked about from pillar to post" for 10 years, until John C. Taylor found them in an attic and bought them; from this they became "the backbone of the Ordway–Rand collection; and in 1895 Brady himself had no idea of what had become of them. Many were broken, lost, or destroyed by fire. After passing to various other owners, they were discovered and appreciated by Edward Bailey Eaton," who set in motion "events that led to their importance as the nucleus of a collection of Civil War photos published in 1912 as The Photographic History of the Civil War.[15]

Some of the lost images are mentioned in the last episode of Ken Burns' 1990 documentary on the Civil War. Burns claims that glass plate negatives were often sold to gardeners, not for their images, but for the glass itself to be used in greenhouses and cold frames. In the years that followed the end of the war, the sun slowly burned away their filmy images and they were lost.[16]

Another thing that this gentleman mentioned as having was a copy of the last letter written by Mary Surratt. He said that he received a call years ago from an ancient librarian at Gettysburg College asking if he wanted a copy of the letter. Supposedly, the original was found hidden in a wall at the old Arsenal building.

Since the early-1900s, there has been a hard-to-read copy of a note said to have been written on the morning of Mrs. Surratt's execution asking a woman (whose name we cannot make out) to take care of Annie, "because for some reason I must suffer."

The story of that note is that it supposedly came into the hands of a Baltimore drinking man who bartered it away in a tavern for a bit of the good stuff. It has pretty much died a quiet death, and we have even packed away the copy that we were given. I asked this gentleman on the phone today if it could be the same letter/note, and he said no.

In any event, this was an interesting 45 minutes or so of listening to an elderly gentleman recount moments in his life as well as historical treasures that he may or may not have. Keep your fingers crossed that he truly does have some gems.