Young Missouri Confederate Soldier and his uniform

I will. It could be a few weeks
Be sure to keep us update as I am sure many of us would love to read it.

I will. I'm having to tweak it daily, as I keep stumbling on new, trivial, bits of information that 'have' to be added. It started off as notes to share with my buddy for the 'history of photography' display we are doing this summer, and to hand out to kids who visited our table, but it keeps growing. Civil War photo collecting is only a part of it - you guys are responsible for my interest in that area!

Our main areas of expertise are pre-wwi photography, only going back to 1860's albumen photos, although my friend has written books that contained quite a bit about dags and ambros. He got me into albumen collecting around 15 years ago and we've been doing card shows now for several years. With this paper I've tried to go non-technical with mainly hands-on information for collectors;i.e-if you want to know how any of the various photographs are created, you can pick up such information online.
 
We played football against Kemper Military School in High school. The Cadets wore long grey overcoats and we called them "Squirrels." And they called us "Boondogs." This was in the early 1970's
Booner remembers this with utmost clarity. The only rivalry which trumped the Squirrels and the Boondogs was between Kemper and Wentworth. OMIGOSH! That was a bloody rivalry!
 
background is questionable at best.

1860's photographic backdrops were indeed simpler then...but not in all cases. The more exclusive and popular photographers of the day were beginning to use and in some cases overuse props and backdrops. Check out the Frederic Gutekunst image below. In his day, which includes the era of Brady and Gardner, Gutekunst of Philadelphia was perhaps the most popular photographer in America.

Frederick Gutekunst #1.jpg

Compare that staged photographic environment to the backdrop from the less skilled frontier photographers of the day. (By the way- this image appears to be an early albumen cdv of an even earlier photograph that appears to have been tacked to a board and photographically copied).

Tureman, Boonville.jpg
 
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Regarding the similarity of our original poster's photo to a Confederate uniform and the similarity of a Kemper Military School cadet uniform to a Confederate uniform, allow me to say this: Professor Kemper was the brother of Confederate Gen. James T. Kemper. Prof. Kemper had among his first pupils a boy who would become a boy soldier of the Confederacy: Thomas A. Johnston. Johnston survived the war and came back to join Prof. Kemper's faculty, later taking over the reins of the institution when Kemper retired. It was Col. Johnston (honorary rank) who changed the place into a military school. It should be no wonder that cadet uniforms greatly resembled Confederate uniforms. They did so for many years. I am further told that the student body marched under the twin banners of the Stars and Stripes and the Confederate Battle Flag for a long time, but that occurred generations before I was born.

I have never been able to find much of anything on Johnston's "confederate experience" other than a mention or two of his "CW experience"

"While he was still a boy the civil war broke out, in which he engaged for a short time near the close, on the side of the south". (Source: History of Howard and Cooper Counties- 1883- biography of T.A. Johnston-pg., 893).

The other source stating that he took up at age 16 with Price and Marmaduke during the 1864 raid through Missouri which included the last taking of Boonville by the confederates. He would have answered the last ditch call for recruits during this most unfortunate dilemma and I'm sure had a miserable 6 months or so until war's end.

Below, Johnston as a young man probably at the time of his MU graduation and administrative start at the Kemper Family School later to organized by him utilizing Kemper's values along with a military theme.

T.A. Johnston.jpg
 
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Here are some cabinet photos I used to own - they are from the 1869 Kearsarge, NH baseball team. They basically looked like giant CDVs. I don't know how much earlier than 1869 that cabinets were being produced, but my guess is that there were plenty of early-mid 1860's mounted albumens that were larger than CDVs - why not? I don't know what the earliest cabinet is, but you could probably google it and find some confirmed-date examples...

Matthew Brady's studio produced prints that were called Imperials but I don't know what their dimensions were; I think I've seen them suggested as the first cabinet cards or at least prototypes though. Other than obvious reprints like Newton's, I've never seen any cabinet card purported to date from the Civil War.
 
Matthew Brady's studio produced prints that were called Imperials but I don't know what their dimensions were; I think I've seen them suggested as the first cabinet cards or at least prototypes though. Other than obvious reprints like Newton's, I've never seen any cabinet card purported to date from the Civil War.

Mathew Brady's Imperial prints were extra large format style and were known as salted paper prints.
Generally the size was 20 7/8" x 17 11/16". Between 1856 and 1861, imperial prints were the most prestigious products of the Mathew Brady studio. The painting-sized photographs printed directly from glass plate negatives demonstrated the studio's mastery of the newly introduced wet-collodion process and the large-format camera.

Here are a few examples:

Col. Elmer Ellsworth

Imperial Print-Brady.jpg


*************

Harriet Hosmer

Imperial Print-Brady #2.jpg


******************

Mary B. Mathews Moffat

Imperial Print-Brady #3.jpg
 
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