Dignity in Defeat: Mathew Brady’s Photos of Robert E. Lee
THE PHOTOGRAPHER MATHEW BRADY had been in Richmond for several days, making nearly 60 photographs of the ruined city. He got wind of Lee’s return and asked an old acquaintance, Confederate colonel Robert Ould, to appeal to the general to have his photograph taken. Ould, who had been a district attorney in Washington before the war and become the chief Confederate officer in charge of prisoner exchange, had been given something like diplomatic immunity by Grant. Brady said in a newspaper interview late in life that both Ould and Mrs. Lee had helped him persuade the general to submit to the camera, although as Brady put it, “It was supposed that after his defeat it would be preposterous to ask him to sit.” But, Brady continued, “I thought that to be the time for the historical picture.”
Apparently Lee, or perhaps Mrs. Lee, agreed, because it was arranged that Brady could come to the house and make his pictures. The next day, Easter Sunday, Brady took six photographs in all: four of Lee alone and two of him with his aide, Colonel Walter Taylor, and his oldest son, Major General Custis Lee, who had been captured only three days before the surrender. Brady posed the officers beneath the overhang of the back porch, on the basement level, because the light was best there.
LEE’S YOUNGEST SON, ROB, would write years later of his father: “I believe there were none of the little things in life so irksome to him as having his picture taken in any way.” But Lee had a fine sense of history, for instance wearing for his surrender his best uniform and a dark red silk sash—Grant says in his memoirs that “General Lee was dressed in a full uniform which was entirely new, and was wearing a sword of considerable value.” However much Lee disliked posing, on this Sunday morning he once again put on a clean uniform and wore well-shined black shoes, but he left aside the sash and the sword and the boots. Charles Bracelen Flood in his book
Lee: The Last Years points out that this uniform also had “no braid on the sleeves.” Lee was acutely aware of his power to set an example for the South and had urged his former troops to swallow their anger and return home to rebuild their lives. Grant wrote in his memoirs that at Appomattox he had “suggested to General Lee that there was not a man in the Confederacy whose influence with the soldiery and the whole people was as great as his.” In the wake of Lincoln’s death the day before, and the charges that the South was responsible, Lee might also have chosen to pose in the domestic setting of his home—a leader still in his uniform, but sans sash, braid, sword, and boots, visibly morphing into a civilian—as a symbol of stability and responsibility in very dangerous and uncertain hours.
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