Jefferson Davis CDV?

[L Verge]

Can anyone make out the date on the photo (at the end of Brady's signature)? It appears to be 1879 to me, and that may give us a clue.

Brady expected the U.S. Government to buy his wonderful Civil War collection when the war ended, but they never did. Finally, in 1875, they gave him a small stipend for his services. By that time, he had been declared blind and had to close his studio and declare bankruptcy. Here's what one source described:

"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.[19]

"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."

Brady remained destitute until his death in 1896, when he died in a charity ward in New York's Presbyterian Hospital. It was then that his nephew resurrected the business.

Brady did photograph a number of Confederates, including Lee, Stonewall Jackson, PGT Beauregard, and Davis. However, I think all of those were done during or shortly after the war. The copyright date on your CDV might help determine the identity, if it is of an elderly Davis.

BTW: Is it a small CDV or a larger cabinet card?