The outbreak of the Civil War launched a new phase in life of Greenwich Village's foremost photographer. Mathew Brady expressed his loyalty to the Union, and served his country by documenting America’s great schism though the new art of photography. He enlisted fellow photographers, including Alexander Gardner, and from their collected efforts, published The Photographic History of the Civil War. Brady's Civil War photography changed the face of historical documentation and popularized the notion of photojournalism – the public could now see more readily the realistic hardship and carnage of war.
After the War, Mathew Brady exhibited his war photographs and portraits at his Tenth Street Studio in Greenwich Village. For the first time, the American people viewed truthful images of prominent events of war, including portraits the notable military and civil characters on both sides of the contest. The Evening Post of New York asserted, “The future historian will find in such a collection one of his most welcome helps toward the foundation of a true estimate of the leading men of our time whose characteristics are more truthfully embodied by the photographer’s art than by the best and most faithfully written contemporary descriptions” (February 23, 1866, p.2).
During the war, Mathew Brady gathered over 30,000 negatives depicting battlefields, earthworks, military camps, siege trains, fortifications, dead and wounded soldiers, captured prisoners, and portraits of famous officers - thousands of scenes conveying the atmosphere of the great rebellion. In making this collection of photos, Mathew Brady drained the fortunes he accumulated in his portrait galleries on Broadway, and in Washington D. C., having faith that Congress would appreciate his work’s historical value and eventually purchase it. After the war, artists, publishers and historians used Brady’s photographs liberally, yet Congress would only purchase a portion of Brady’s work a half-a-century after the photographer’s death. Mathew Brady thus spent the last years of his life failing in health and in business, and nearly blind.
Nevertheless, America remembers Brady for revolutionizing the way people viewed the world around them. His photographs provided a new form of representation that allowed access to subjects that were impossible to contemplate before Daguerre's invention. If Mathew Brady’s Civil War documentation ensured his place in the canon of American photographic history, the creative Greenwich Village atmosphere certainly cultivated such an artist.