By Kurt Luther
Ann Shumard, Senior Curator of Photographs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, reached out to me with a question about a possible misidentification. A glass plate negative in the National Portrait Gallery (NPG)’s Frederick Hill Meserve Collection, attributed to Mathew Brady’s studio, showed a standing view of a Union officer identified as the notable Irish Brigade leader and Montana territorial governor Thomas Francis Meagher. However, there were two other portraits of Meagher, also Brady negatives, in the same Meserve Collection. Shumard noticed differences that led her to question the Meagher ID for the first portrait. If it wasn’t Meagher, she wondered, could the correct identity be determined?
I was eager to take a look. First, I examined the photo with the questionable ID. The Union officer stood in a photographer’s studio with his hands folded behind his back. He wore the frock coat of a junior officer with a single column of buttons. Notably, the coat bore epaulettes rather than shoulder boards, their insignia hinting at the rank of captain. He also wore a belt, sash, and sword with the scabbard slung for riding. Dark trousers with a single light-colored welt and boots and completed the uniform.
The officer’s face bore a determined expression. His light-colored eyes coolly met the viewer’s gaze. His hair was neatly parted, and he wore a long mustache over pursed lips and a cleft chin. Was this the visage of Thomas Meagher? I had recently read Timothy Egan’s excellent biography of Meagher, The Immortal Irishman, and my memory of Meagher’s appearance was fairly fresh.
My first impression was that the NPG officer was someone else. But I recalled from the book that Meagher had briefly served as a captain in the 69th New York Infantry before replacing Michael Corcoran as colonel after the latter’s capture at the First Battle of Bull Run. Thus, at least the uniform was a potential match. Fortunately, Shumard had provided a couple of reference images of Meagher to refresh my memory, and I opened the links for a closer look.
The direct comparison confirmed my hunch. While the two men’s faces bore broad similarities—both had light eyes, strong jawlines, and drooping mustaches—there were also clear differences. Meagher’s hooded eyelids set him apart, and his arched eyebrows and pointed nose contrasted with the NPG officer’s straight eyebrows and rounded nose. I now felt confident ruling out Meagher as the mystery officer’s identity. But if not Meagher, then who was he?
My next step was to explore possibilities using Civil War Photo Sleuth (CWPS, civilwarphotosleuth.com), a website that my team and I created that combines human expertise with AI-based facial recognition to help identify unknown Civil War-era portraits. CWPS has a database of over 60,000 Civil War portrait photos, a majority contributed by individual users, and I expected there would be numerous close matches for a mustachioed Union lieutenant or captain. My hope was that the mystery officer’s light eyes and cleft chin would narrow down the candidates to a shortlist that I could inspect more carefully.
Sure enough, there were over 400 potential matches with CWPS’s old facial recognition model, and a much smaller set of 10 potential matches using the newer, more precise model. But none appeared to be a strong contender for the mystery officer’s ID. As I would later discover, this was because the CWPS database didn’t yet contain a reference image of the officer in question.
Fame fixation afflicts researchers who set out to prove that an unidentified photo is a newly discovered image of a famous person, rather than following the evidence wherever it leads.
By now, I had spent a considerable amount of time pondering the mystery officer’s face. I found that an impression of a different well-known Union general was starting to form in my mind: the Gettysburg cavalry commander Brig. Gen. John Buford. I recalled that Buford, like the mystery officer, also had neatly parted hair, a drooping mustache, and light-colored eyes.
A moment after this appealing theory formed in my mind, I checked myself. For one thing, I knew CWPS had John Buford images in its reference database, and he did not show up anywhere near the top of the list in my previous search results. For another, I was wary of falling victim to what I call “fame fixation.” A form of confirmation bias, fame fixation afflicts researchers who set out to prove that an unidentified photo is a newly discovered image of a famous person, rather than following the evidence wherever it leads.
Reminding myself to stay disciplined, I began a Google image search for reference photos of John Buford. The majority of results showed one of two well-known Brady portraits of Buford, one seated and the other standing with a hand-in-waistcoat pose, sprinkled with the occasional still image of Sam Elliott in the film Gettysburg. Tucked in past the 10th row of results, I stopped dead in my tracks. The search result showed an image with two faces side-by-side: John Buford and my mystery officer. Beneath it, a text caption announced, as if it was written just for me: “John Buford—Not!”
The image, I quickly realized, was a screenshot from Life on the Civil War Research Trail, MI Editor and Publisher Ron Coddington’s video series on YouTube. In the episode, filmed in November 2022, Ron recounts a story from MI Senior Editor Perry Frohne’s “Fakes, Forgeries, and Frauds” column published in the Winter 2023 edition of the magazine.
Frohne wrote that an experienced collector approached him at a Chicago Civil War show with a Brady carte de visite purported to be John Buford. However, the period ink inscription on the reverse clearly identified the subject as “Capt. A.W. Putnam” of the 7th U.S. Infantry. Frohne declared the mystery solved. The collector, experiencing a temporary bout of fame fixation, argued that the photo actually showed Buford, and the more obscure Capt. Putnam had simply owned the carte at some point. Frohne was finally able to convince the collector otherwise by finding photos of Buford and Putnam online and directly comparing them. Frohne’s reference image of Putnam was identical to the mystery officer in the NPG photo.
Inexplicably, I had missed both the video and the column for over two years. But I was grateful to have finally found them and the new leads they offered. Armed with Capt. Putnam’s name and military unit, I researched his biography and military service on Find-a-Grave and the American Civil War Research Database (HDS).
I learned that Atlee White Putnam was born in 1826 in Rutland, Mass. He may have been a career soldier, because his residence is listed as Fort Leavenworth on his 1859 marriage certificate to Priscilla Mendell. In April 1861, days after the outbreak of war, Putnam was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 7th U.S. Infantry and promoted to first lieutenant a month later. In August 1861, he was promoted to captain and transferred to the Quartermaster Corps. Stationed in New Orleans, he contracted malaria during the sweltering summer of 1862, according to pension records. Putnam succumbed to the disease on May 2, 1863, and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in his widow Priscilla’s native New York.
My last step was to present the newfound ID and evidence to Ann Shumard at the National Portrait Gallery. I felt confident in my conclusions. With the addition of the period-inscribed carte of Putnam shown in Frohne’s column, plus another view of Putnam in the Medford Civil War Society’s Civil War Collection I found linked on his Find-a-Grave profile, the ID was now airtight.
On a whim, I also searched the National Portrait Gallery’s online collections for Putnam’s name. The search returned a glass plate negative in the same collection, visually identical to the mystery photo except for being horizontally mirrored. But this one was correctly identified as Putnam and attributed to Brady. Shumard was delighted, writing, “I love the fact that the answer to the mystery man’s identity was actually lurking elsewhere in our Meserve Collection.”
Reading through the metadata for this Putnam reference image, I noticed an NPG staff annotation that made me smile: “Formerly identified as John Buford.” Clearly, I was far from the first photo sleuth to let fame fixation hinder an investigation of Captain Putnam’s portrait. But hopefully, I’ll be the last.
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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