"Photograph by Brady"
Four images of "Hon. Thomas E. Bramlette, Ky", who served as a colonel (1861-62) and major general and brigadier general (1863) in the U.S. Army and as Union Governor of Kentucky (1863-67) during the Civil War, captured circa 1863-65 by renowned photographer Mathew B. Brady (1823-1896). Since Gov. Bramlette is identified in the original photo caption as "Honorable" instead of as "General" and since he is not wearing in a soldier's uniform in the portraits, he probably posed for the photographs after he became governor of Kentucky in 1863. The photos probably were taken by Brady or an associate at Mathew Brady Studio in Washington, D.C. (Brady, who had acquired a reputation as one of America's greatest photographers by creating portraits of famous people in New York City during the mid-to late-1840s and early 1850s, opened the Washington, D.C., studio in 1856 to photograph American political leaders and foreign dignitaries. He later organized a corps of traveling photographers to chronicle part of American history by photographically documenting the Civil War.) Congress bought the negatives and original prints of Brady's entire photographic collection, including Gov. Bramlette's portraits, in 1875. (That, by the way, is the year Governor Bramlette died in Louisville, Ky. He was born in 1817, the son of Sarah Elliott and Ambrose Shrewsbury Bramlett.) The Brady collection now is preserved by National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington, D.C. The digital copy of the Bramlette portraits shown here was acquired online from NARA in the NAIL search engine at http://www.nara.gov/.
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