Lieutenant General Scott, General-in-Chief, U.S. Army and Staff

An entrepreneur as much as a photographer, Mathew Brady was celebrated as a great portraitist of national figures from Daniel Webster to Abraham Lincoln. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he oversaw a group of photographers documenting the camps, officers, and aftermath (battles themselves were impossible to capture with existing camera technology); he published these as a series titled Brady’s Incidents of the War. Here Brady depicted officers surrounding Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, one of the Union Army’s most acclaimed and decorated officers, with dignity and resolve, as if posing in the studio rather than ready to meet the battlefield. Hugh Edwards, a native Kentuckian whose grandfather had fought in the battle of Shiloh, held a lifelong interest in the Civil War and helped build the museum’s collection of 19th-century photography.