The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 1: The Opening Battles.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

‘Tis fifty years since. The words recall the opening sentence of Scott's famous romance, “Waverley,” and Scott's reference, like my own, had to do with the strenuous years of Civil War.

To one examining the unique series of photographs which were secured, during the campaigns of our great war, by the pluck and persistence of Brady and Gardner, and the negatives of which have, almost miraculously, been preserved through the vicissitudes of half a century, comes, however, the feeling that these battles and marchings were the events not of fifty years back, but of yesterday, if not, indeed, things of to-day. These vivid pictures bring past history into the present tense; the observer sees our citizen soldiers as they camped, as they marched, and as they fought, and comes to know how they lived and how they died. There are revealed to the eye through these lifelike photographs, as if through a vitascope, the successive scenes of the great life-and-death drama of the nation's struggle for existence, a struggle which was fought out through four eventful years, and in which were sacrificed of the best of manhood of the country, North and South, eight hundred thousand lives.

In September, 1862, I landed in New York from the Bremen steamer Hansa, which was then making its first transatlantic trip. I had left my German university for the purpose of enlisting in the Union army, and, with the belief that the