Circa 1865 Carte de Visite of Abner Doubleday from a Mathew Brady Negative.
Lot 53. Circa 1865 Carte de Visite of Abner Doubleday from a Mathew Brady Negative. For many years, conventional baseball history, relying on the early 1900s Mills Commission, credited Doubleday with inventing the sport. His place in history as a Civil War figure is much more secure. Doubleday is credited with firing the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter. He saw action at Fredericksburg and performed admirably at Gettysburg after achieving the rank of brigadier general. Nevertheless, he ran afoul of Maj. Gen. George Meade, who was eventually replaced by Lincoln for his ineffectiveness. Doubleday then spent most of the remainder of the Civil War carrying out administrative duties in Washington, D.C. Later in his career, he commanded an African-American unit in Texas, and he patented a cable car railway that still runs in San Francisco. In the photo, Doubleday is posed in his military uniform. A single star on his shoulder reveals his rank and dates the photo as Civil War vintage. After the war, Doubleday reverted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. More common is a full-length portrait by Brady taken after Fort Sumter. Here, Doubleday sits, and a few jacket buttons are undone. The studio stamp on the back recognizes E. & H. T. Anthony of New York and notes that the photo is from a “negative in Brady’s National Portrait Gallery.” During the Civil War, Brady provided thousands of negatives to the Anthony studio. The CDV measures the traditional 2 3/8” x 4” with clipped corners; it is untrimmed. The sepia photo shows light foxing. There is a minute spot of paper loss and a very tiny inute brown stain on the background, both away from Doubleday’s image. The card has ghost Doubleday signatures on the front and back. The signature on the front is over an area where another signature appears to have been removed. This is an excellent and scarce photo of one of the 19th century’s more interesting historical, and mythical, figures. Current Bid $321.
