“All my sitters are interesting,” said Theodore carefully. But he’d better give the fellow a story. “I’ll tell you whose picture’s missing,” he offered. “Abraham Lincoln—at the Gettysburg address.”

At the end of that summer of the Draft Riots, when he’d decided to leave New York for a while and follow the war out in the field, there’d been only one sensible way to do it. And that was to work for Mathew Brady. Brady had the government concession. He’d send you out, even provide you with a special carriage, converted into a movable darkroom. And so, in November 1863, along with several other photographers, Theodore had found himself down in Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, where a new cemetery had just been prepared to receive the fallen heroes of the great battle that had taken place nearby only months before.

There had been little doubt, by then, about the significance of the Battle of Gettysburg. Before July 1863, after all, both sides might have been getting sick of the war, but the Confederacy was still on the offensive. Down on the Mississippi, General Grant had so far failed to take the Confederates’ mighty fortification at Vicksburg. Bold General Lee and Stonewall Jackson had taken on a Union army twice their size on the Potomac River, and though Jackson had died, Lee and his Confederate army had swept through Maryland and into Pennsylvania, threatening both Baltimore and the capital.

But then, on the Fourth of July, had come the double victory for the Union. Vicksburg had fallen, at last, to Grant, and Lee’s army, after a display of matchless courage, had been smashed and turned back at Gettysburg.

The North had the initiative. The South was open to massive attack.

Not that the war was won. By no means. The riots in New York, after all, had been only the most extreme expression of a widespread Union dislike of the war, by then. The will of the North might crack. The South might yet outlast them. The government in Washington knew it very well.

The dedication of the new cemetery at Gettysburg had been important, therefore. A ceremony was called for. A big story for the newspapers. A fine speech.

The speech had been entrusted to the president of Harvard, the greatest orator of the day. Only later, as a courtesy perhaps, did anyone think of asking Lincoln himself to attend. Indeed, Theodore remembered, he and the other photographers hadn’t been too sure that Lincoln was coming at all.

“But come he did,” he remarked to the journalist now. “There was a big crowd, you know, governors and local people and all the rest. Maybe fifteen thousand altogether. Lincoln rode up with the Secretary of State, I think, and Chase, the Treasury Secretary. Then he took his place with the others, just sat there quietly with his tall hat off, of course, so that we could hardly see him. I’d caught a glimpse of him when he came to make his address at the Cooper Institute, when he was still clean-shaven, but I hadn’t seen him with his beard before. Anyway, there was some music, and a prayer, so far as I remember. And then the president of Harvard rose to speak.