By Kurt Luther
When MI Senior Editor Rick Carlile approached me to help identify a carte de visite of a seemingly unremarkable Union officer, I did not expect that this image would lead me on a fascinating journey through history. By consulting period letters and books, Civil War history blogs, and modern technologies like facial recognition and reverse image search, I rediscovered the lost identity of the mystery officer and stories of two pioneering Civil War women.
Carlile’s carte shows a Union officer standing at attention, with his head turned slightly to the camera. He had dark hair, a mustache and goatee, and distinctive straight eyebrows. The face seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. His frock coat with two columns of evenly spaced buttons indicated a field-grade rank, but I couldn’t determine if his shoulder straps bore the insignia of a major, lieutenant colonel, or colonel. He wore no hat, sash, or weapons, offering no clues about his unit assignment or branch of service.
The photo’s background was similarly spare. The officer stood in front of a plain wall in a studio without props. The only unique element was a patterned floor. The mount had two border lines of equal thickness, common for mid- to late-war photos, but the back lacked a tax stamp, indicating a date of 1864 or earlier. There was no inscription on either side, but a photographer’s backmark gave the name E. Balch of 123 Bowery, New York City.
The photographer, Eliza Balch, born Eliza Vaughan in England in 1798, married Aaron Leland Balch on Christmas Day, 1826, according to a period genealogy book. Leland Balch, as he was known, was a Vermont native, Norwich University graduate, and Universalist clergyman. The couple had four children, of whom two survived to adulthood, and later moved to Massachusetts. Leland suddenly died in 1839, and the widowed Eliza returned to New York. By the early 1850s, census records and city directories indicated she was running a photography studio in The Bowery. Her studio operated through the Civil War years and into the late 1860s.
Eliza Balch died in 1871 in Baltimore. She appears not to have remarried, raising her two sons as a single mother and business owner. According to the Women in Photography International Archive, she is recognized today as a pioneer woman photographer, and her work is held in prominent collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the George Eastman Museum.
The top-ranked result showed a photo of Charles Tyler Trowbridge. While it was a different photo than that of my mystery officer, I noted the strong facial similarity, including the distinctive eyebrows.
While I found Balch’s story fascinating, I still knew little about the subject of her photo. I uploaded it to Civil War Photo Sleuth (CWPS, civilwarphotosleuth.com), a website that uses facial recognition to compare unknown photos to over 50,000 Civil War-era reference images, many of them identified. Noting the field-grade coat, I filtered the search results to include only Union officers who held the rank of major (or full surgeon), lieutenant colonel, or colonel at some point throughout the war.
The top-ranked result showed a photo of Charles Tyler Trowbridge. While it was a different photo than that of my mystery officer, I noted the strong facial similarity, including the distinctive eyebrows. Trowbridge also wore a mustache and goatee, but his goatee was longer than the one in my mystery photo, and his hairstyle or hairline also looked different. According to the biographical profile on CWPS, Trowbridge served in the 1st New York Engineers, which lined up with the mystery photo’s New York City backmark.
I was intrigued, but the inconsistencies of the hair and facial hair concerned me. The reference photo on CWPS was low-resolution; I wondered if I could find a higher-quality version that would allow for a closer inspection. CWPS noted the reference photo came from the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center’s MOLLUS-Mass collection, which is partly digitized and searchable on their website. I found the high-quality version I sought, but the greater detail did not resolve my uncertainty about the facial match. Instead, the reference photo offered a different clue. Trowbridge was not pictured among the 1st New York Engineers, as I expected. Instead, his portrait was included among officers of the 33rd U.S. Colored Infantry (USCT), also known as the 1st South Carolina (Colored) Infantry.
Now I knew why the mystery officer’s face seemed familiar: I had written about the 33rd, including this same grouping of officer portraits, for the Winter 2024 issue of MI, though that column did not mention Trowbridge. I missed the connection because, for some reason, CWPS only mentioned his initial enlistment in the New York Engineers, but omitted his later service in the USCT. I still couldn’t confirm the unknown soldier was Trowbridge, but I had a new lead.
I knew I needed more reference photos of Trowbridge to solidify the tentative ID. I ran a Google Images search for “charles trowbridge,” adding the keywords “civil war.” As I scanned the results, my eyes widened as I spotted an engraving of a Union soldier that looked remarkably similar to my mystery officer. The link brought me to an October 2015 post on Spared & Shared, a renowned blog operated by William “Griff” Griffing featuring transcripts of Civil War letters and diaries. This post was about Trowbridge’s brother, Frank, of the 139th New York Infantry. Griff couldn’t find a photo of Frank, so he included the engraving of his brother Charles with an explanatory caption.
Rick Carlile’s officer was Charles Trowbridge. But where did this engraving come from?
This engraving of Charles Trowbridge appeared to be directly inspired by my mystery photo. The facial expression, hairstyle, and goatee were identical, and the man wore the same Union field-grade coat with indistinct rank. The pose was slightly different: Trowbridge’s right arm was positioned slightly forward, rather than at his side. Perhaps the engraving was based on a variant photo from the same sitting, or the artist took some creative license (see “The Art of Photo Sleuthing,” MI, Autumn 2020). I had no doubt it was the same man: Rick Carlile’s officer was Charles Trowbridge. But where did this engraving come from?
The post didn’t provide a source for the engraving, which was captioned “C. T. Trowbridge / Lieut. Col. 33d U. S. C. T.” in period type. I contacted Griff, but he understandably couldn’t recall where he found it nearly a decade earlier. I reasoned that an engraving with a typewritten caption almost certainly came from a period book or newspaper, but which one? Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the original commander of the 1st S.C., had penned a famous memoir of his time in the regiment, but it contained no engraving of Trowbridge.
Again turning to technology, I used Google’s Reverse Image Search to identify similar images based on visual features. It returned three search results. The second came from “Documenting the South,” a website hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Instantly, I could tell this was the exact image that Griff posted. Better yet, this version was fully cited. The original source was, as expected, a book: Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers (1902) by Susie King Taylor. The Library of Congress has a digitized copy of the entire book available for reading online. As I read it, I began piecing together the history of how Trowbridge’s portrait ended up there.
In May 1862, Maj. Gen. David Hunter, without President Lincoln’s approval, recruited formerly enslaved men in South Carolina to join “Hunter’s Regiment.” One of his recruiters was Charles Trowbridge, then a sergeant, detailed from the 1st New York Engineers, which were serving in South Carolina. Trowbridge recruited, trained, and armed between 50 and 100 former slaves from the Sea Islands, according to the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in Beaufort, S.C.. That summer, Lincoln authorized limited black recruiting as an experiment prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 1st South Carolina (Colored) Infantry formed. Trowbridge became captain of Company E, and in August, he marched his men to St. Simons Island to recruit more members. Here, he met Susie King Taylor.
Susie King Taylor was born a slave on a Georgia plantation. As a girl, she moved to Savannah with her grandmother, who secretly taught her to read and write. At the outbreak of the war, Taylor fled to St. Simons Island, where Union Commodore John Goldsborough learned of her literacy and tasked her with setting up the first free school for Black children. She taught there when Trowbridge arrived in 1862.
Trowbridge hired Taylor as a laundress for the regiment, but after a smallpox outbreak, she administer medical care to his soldiers. This service led to her recognition as the first Black U.S. Army nurse, but unfortunately not the corresponding Army pension, according to an “Emerging Civil War” article by Meg Groeling. Trowbridge lamented the situation in a letter published in Taylor’s book, where his engraving also appears: “Among all the number of heroic women whom the government is now rewarding, I know of no one more deserving than yourself.” After the war, Taylor opened more free schools, served as a civil rights activist, and organized a chapter of the Woman’s Relief Corps, where she held various roles, including president. She died in 1912.
Trowbridge continued serving with the 1st South Carolina, later redesignated the 33rd USCT. According to an 1876 New York Times profile, he was promoted to major in 1863 and lieutenant colonel in 1864. When Col. Higginson resigned due to effects of a wound received the previous year, Trowbridge took command, leading his men through the siege of Morris Island and the capture of Charleston. He mustered out in 1866 and held various minor offices in New York politics and veterans organizations. He died Christmas Eve, 1907, in the Minnesota State Capitol, where he was the live-in custodian.
Kurt Luther is an associate professor of computer science and, by courtesy, history at Virginia Tech and an adjunct professor at Virginia Military Institute. He is the creator of Civil War Photo Sleuth, a free website that combines face recognition technology and community to identify Civil War portraits. He is a MI Senior Editor.
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