Three Brady photographs taken in Grant's last campaign.
Shells were flying above the entrenchments before Petersburg at the time the photograph above was taken—June 21, 1864—but so inured to this war-music have the veterans become that only one or two of them to the right are squatting or lying down. The calmness is shared even by Brady, the indomitable little photographer. He stands (at the left of the right-hand section above) quietly gazing from beneath the brim of his straw hat—conspicuous among the dark forage caps and felts of the soldiers—in the same direction in which the officer is peering so eagerly through his field-glass. Brady appears twice again in the two lower photographs of the same locality and time. ‘I knew Mr. Brady during that time,’ writes William A. Pinkerton, the son of Allan Pinkerton, who was in charge of the secret-service department throughout the war, ‘but had no intimate acquaintanceship with him, he being a man and I being a boy, but I recollect his face and build as vividly to-day as I did then: a slim build, a man, I should judge, about five feet seven inches tall, dark complexion, dark moustache, and dark hair inclined to curl; wore glasses, was quick and nervous. You can verify by me that I saw a number of these negatives made myself.’
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