1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [36]
They were men of distinction, these Old Gentlemen—of nobility, even. One could see it immediately in their faces. Just down the avenue from Shadd’s restaurant, a glass-topped case outside Mathew Brady’s National Photographic Art Gallery displayed them in splendid array: “grave and reverent seignors,” an admiring reporter for the Daily National Intelligencer called them.13 Everyone came to sit for Mr. Brady in the prewar years. It was a political rite of passage no more optional than a new congressman’s taking the oath to support and defend the Constitution. No more partisan, either: men of every party and principle climbed the three flights of wooden stairs—some more nimbly than others—to arrive in a skylighted room where a flock of assistants, and sometimes even the famous proprietor himself, welcomed them. Brady, foppish and ingratiating, made the whole experience so pleasant. There was a little dressing room with a marble washstand where the client could mop his brow and arrange his hair—generally brushing the locks, scanty though they might be, forward in picturesque Caesarean fashion. When he emerged, a carved oak chair awaited, with a pedestal next to it ready to hold an appropriate prop: a thick gold-stamped volume of the Annals of Congress, for example. Occasionally the gentleman wrapped himself in a toga-like cloak, the better to hide a metal clamp that would keep his head from moving during the long exposure. (If he wished instead to rise and strike an oratorical pose—perhaps his recent speech on the tariff question had drawn favorable notice in the newspapers—a convenient metal armrest was also provided.) Then he drew his head back, knit his brows together, formed his mouth into a tight-lipped frown—and within thirty seconds, the Alabama cotton planter or Connecticut attorney was transformed into a veritable Cato the Elder, his visage suitable to be lithographed in a monthly magazine. Perhaps one day it might even be rendered in marble to adorn the state capitol back home.14
But anyone stopping by Brady’s gallery on the eve of the Civil War would have noticed that the noblest visages, though still ensconced honorably in their glass case, were no longer to be seen in the halls of the Capitol. The statesmen of restraint and moderation, the tongues that spoke in careful euphemisms or cried out eloquently for Union, Union, above all else, were becoming scarce. Webster and Clay, twin titans among the compromisers, were dead; so was Thomas Hart Benton, the lion of Missouri. John Bell had gone back to Tennessee, Sam Houston to Texas. Even the ranks of lesser men whose cautious ways had kept the Union safe—men like old Judge Bibb—were dwindling fast.
Brady’s studio now received a different sort of senator, in outlook and aspect: Ben Wade of Ohio, flinty-eyed and obdurate, a Republican whose radicalism went beyond antislavery to embrace women’s suffrage and trade unionism, and who was said to have carried a pair of horse pistols onto the Senate floor. Clement Clay of Alabama, lean and ascetic as an early Christian saint, who railed against Northern abolitionists for “seducing” gullible slaves away from their happy existence in the South, the better to satisfy a perverted appetite for interracial sex.15 Zachariah Chandler, Republican of Michigan, on whose saturnine head a Democratic colleague broke a milk pitcher one afternoon in the dining room of the National Hotel, this by way of correcting the legislator on a point of political doctrine.16 And Senator Davis of Mississippi, whom Brady shot standing in three-quarter profile: a figure unbending as ice, eyes distant and pale, like an astronomer gazing toward some far-off star.