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January 2011
The pioneer American photographer Mathew Brady took an enormous number of portraits but sat for relatively few. The best known of those that have survived appears below to the right. So far no portraits of the young Brady have come to light. Recently, however, the owners of America Hurrah, a New York City antiques shop that specializes in photographica, showed us the daguerreotype at the lower left. We—and the Library of Congress—suspect that the agreeable-looking young subject is Mathew Brady, peering out from his earliest known portrait.
Thinking of the energy crisis, the poor, decrepit Penn Central Railroad, and the thin trickle of trains on Amtrak, we turn in this issue to a contrasting scene when railroading had all its future before it, the moment of departure for the first steam passenger train on the Mohawk & Hudson Railroad on August 9, 1831. Though it was not the very first scheduled train to be pulled by a locomotive (that was the Best Friend of Charleston on Christmas Day the year before), it was the second in America, and it was the best remembered, thanks to that fine genre painter Edward Lamson Henry, who created the huge canvas below, 42¾ X 110 inches in size. (Our cover is a detail.) The job was done in 1892-3, in time to be exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Americans have always loved steam. We cannot claim the steam engine as our invention, but we did adopt it at once and brought it to the peak of its development. The device took on peculiarly American forms in this country; compare, for instance, the tidy British locomotives with their rangy American counterparts. So too with our steamboats. While they lacked the sharp beauty of the clippers, they made up for it with their powerful, chunky, intricate American grace. They plied our rivers and coastal waters for most of the last century, the lines vying with each other to produce ever grander, more luxuriously appointed ships. And they were grand, for they were a source of pride as well as income to their owners. As early as 1847 owner George Law, churning up the Hudson on his Oregon , ordered chairs, bunks, doors, and even wainscoting fed into the furnaces to avoid the terrible humiliation of losing a race to one of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ships.
A good place to start the story is the Republican convention in Chicago in May, 1860. By long odds the leading candidate, and on form and experience the best qualified, was of course Senator William H. Seward of New York. He was eminent in the legal profession. He had served with distinction as governor of his state before going to the Senate. He had been a leader of the antislavery Whigs and had brought them into the recently created Republican Party. He came to Chicago in the full expectation of being its nominee for President, and his supporters were ebulliently confident. But Seward carried the handicap of having been too long and too conspicuously the frontrunner, so that he was the principal target of all the other candidates, and of this fact Judge David Davis, campaign manager for Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, took shrewd advantage.