1835 - 1915
The grandson of John Quincy Adams and the son of Lincoln's ambassador to Britain, Charles Francis Adams joined the First Massachusetts Cavalry in 1861. At the end of the war he commanded the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry, an African American regiment, and left the army in 1865 as a brigadier general. Adams fought at Antietam and Gettysburg, where he came to respect the skills of the Confederate army. He subsequently became a historian, writing about the Civil War from a position of unusual generosity and insight, which strongly influenced the country's subsequent view of the conflict. In 1907 Adams, the exemplary Yankee, was invited to speak at the centennial of Robert E. Lee's birth. On that occasion he remembered Lee's dignity and valor, and called Lee and Stonewall Jackson glorious adversaries, "worthy of the best of steel. I am proud now to say I was their countryman." Brady photographed Adams and his men in August 1864, before the Battle of Petersburg.
Mathew Brady Studio
Albumen silver print, 1864
16.5 x 23.8 cm (6 1/2 x 9 3/8 inches); on board 20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.), 22 x 28 inches matted
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.