The U.S. Civil War was the very first war where the daily life of soldiers, as well as the carnage that accompanies the battlefield, was able to be documented by photographs on a grand scale. Mathew Brady, who is often considered as having founded photojournalism, was at the forefront of bringing these photos to the American public, as well as to the world at large.

Brady was born in 1823 in a small town near Lake George, New York.


 As a teenager, Brady became a student of William Page who was a well-known portrait artist. In 1839, he traveled with Page to New York City where he later became acquainted with Page’s former teacher, Samuel Morse who would go on to fame for his role in the development of the telegraph and the Morse code.

Morse had recently returned from France where he had met a gentleman named Louis Jacques Daguerre. Daguerre had invented the “daguerreotype” which was the first method of obtaining a permanent image with a camera. Morse opened a studio in New York City for those who wanted to study photography. One of his first students was Mathew Brady. Brady would later go on to open his own photography studio in New York City in 1844 and later in Washington, D.C. as well.

Brady’s early photographic portraits included the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Millard Fillmore, Daniel Webster, Zachary Taylor, and Henry Clay. In 1850, Brady published a compilation of photos called "The Gallery of Illustrious Americans," that sold for $15, quite a tremendous sum at the time.

Shortly after the initial shots were fired at Fort Sumter, Brady decided that he was going to document the US Civil War through photography. He personally paid for a number of photographers to follow troops in the field including the likes of Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson who were the first to ever photograph a battlefield of dead soldiers before troops began removing them. In 1862, Brady opened an exhibit in New York City titled “The Dead of Antietam” that caught the nation by complete surprise. The American people were appalled at what was for most their first image of the carnage of war.

On October 20, 1862, the New York Times wrote that "Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us that terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”¹   In addition to Antietam, Brady’s photographers produced battlefield images from the First Battle of Bull Run and Gettysburg.

At the onset of the war, Alexander Gardner was in charge of Brady’s Washington, D.C. studio and that enabled him to be in position to photograph Union soldiers as they were leaving for the war.  Further, Gardner was of Scottish descent, as was Allan Pinkerton, and the two maintained a friendly relationship. Pinkerton had a pre-war relationship with Union General George McClellan and Abraham Lincoln from their mutual involvement with the Illinois and Rock Island Railroad. Gardner was able to use his friendship with Pinkerton to assist Brady in making contact with President Lincoln.

Somewhere in November 1862, Alexander Gardner quit working under Brady and went out on his own, allegedly due to Brady’s practice of taking credit for all photos taken by his employees.  Gardner began following General Ambrose Burnside and photographed the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Gardner took what many consider to be the last photograph of President Abraham Lincoln, just five days before his assassination. Gardner also photographed the conspirators including John Wilkes Booth who were convicted of killing Lincoln, as well as their execution.

Supposedly Brady spent $100,000 of his own money to use photography to document the Civil War causing him to go deeply in debt. After the conclusion of this conflict, Americans did not want to be reminded of the horrors of the Civil War, causing Brady to be unable to sell the images that told the story of those four devastating years. In 1875, Brady finally sold his entire Civil War portfolio consisting of over 10,000 photographs to the U.S. Government for the paltry sum of $25,000.

¹http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/Mathew_Brady_Civil_War_Photographer_Article_pdf