Warfare in those days was up close and personal. I suspect that he had seen a good bit by 26.
He looks like Andrew Johnson in that picture.
The receding hairline might have something to do with the effect.
It's the hair, and the epaullettes. I was going to say he looks a bit like Jake Gyllenhaal crica Donnie Darko.
That looks old? I think he looks surprisingly baby-faced.
Yeah, he looks mid-20s to me, just with a receding hairline.
10 -- my understanding is that US Grant fucked the shit out of bears.
Yeah, I think he just looks serious. You get military guys with the same expression today, only they're more like 19-20, so they don't look adult so much as like children trying to be grownup.
It's also the troubled brow, isn't it?
I knew a guy in HS who looked about 30 at 15, mostly because he had a boxy jaw and wiry hair. It was impressive.
But isn't it also the case that people just tended to put on serious looks in pictures back then? It seems like you don't often see pictures of people doing anything close to smiling, even long after the processes that required long exposure times had been replaced.
1822 + 26 = 1848. The Mexican War is over, he's distinguished himself, he's been promoted to Captain (epaulets on both shoulders), he's married his Colonel's daughter. He doesn't know it, but he's reached the apogee of his career in the regular army. The years of drinking are just ahead. Many reasons have been given for that, boredom and the separation from Julia are probably very important, but PTS occurs to me as an additional possibility. He'd seen terrible things, particularly at Chapultepec. He says in the memoirs he regretted participating the Mexican War the rest of his life.
While I agree with many of the comments above, I think 15 gets it most right. When I was a young soldier, my first two section chiefs both looked much older and more worn out than Grant looks in that picture. They were both Vietnam veterans (of course, almost all the NCOs were in 1974). And they were both around 25 years old.
15/16 sounds pretty plausible to me, fwiw
12: you get 13-14 year olds with the same look, in the right (i.e. wrong) neighborhoods
Come to think of it, I met a guy last fall at a friend's house who was recently back from Iraq and had been involved in some horrific stuff, who had a similar look about him. Very good looking kid, maybe 24-25, and in repose it looked as if it would break his face to smile.
18 is true. And mostly we think those kids are a good reason for stiffer juvenile sentencing laws, rather than heroes.
15 is dead wrong. Psychological explanations don't really carry any weight until after the invention of psychology, which was in the 1960's, by Joan Baez.
The reason he looks old is because exposures were much longer in those days. By the time the picture was finished being taken, Grant was 35 years old.
He says in the memoirs he regretted participating the Mexican War the rest of his life.
How are his memoirs? Are they good?
Yes. They're very readable, an excellent potted history of the Civil War, and make him an incredibly appealing character. You should read them.
21-- If it was a daguerreotype, the exposure probably wasn't more than a few seconds. There were also similar exposure times for other processes by then.
It's called the 1000 yard stare. And life was alot harder then, even if war was no less brutal.
No makeup or favorable portrait lighting. In black and white.
But I think he looks about his age, with a receding hairline.
In Europe, is it the thousand meter stare? Does this mean war is objectively harder for American troops? Figures.
27: In my experience you usually don't need to see so far in Europe. Things are just closer and more convenient. So a 500 metre stare would probably suffice.
14: In Indonesia (and probably elsewhere in Asia) people still tend to look ultra-serious in photos (otherwise they are not taking it seriously, and also, see a bunch of stuff about cross-cultural meanings of the smile). Anyway, they just end up looking unhappy. So all over anyone's walls there are lots of photos of miserable couples at their miserable weddings, miserable students miserably graduating, etc.
If you play your cards right, you can view those photos while being plied with hot tea and cakes flavoured with dust on an expiringly hot day, while people talk a lot and look at you significantly, explaining (you later discover) that you are a genius who can speak all the local languages. 'I don't understand', you say.
Killed thread with unnecessary anecdote. Hey, how about them fat dykes?
29: Don't second guess yourself. It's okay to take pride in a thread you've killed, even if you would rather it did not have to die.
At least, that's what I keep telling myself.
ditto to 23: the Memoirs are terrific. Grant could really write about war (although I think Mark Twain helped edit). Next to nothing on his presidency, which was a wise publishing move.
I think he died before he got there -- the Memoirs were written in his last couple of months dying of throat cancer, purely as a moneymaker for his family. Other than the Memoirs, he died pretty close to bankrupt. And Twain did publish them and possibly edited them, but they don't read like Twain did any of the writing.
Yeah, toward the end you can just see him transcribing his descriptions of the late battles directly from his old field reports, as if he's trying desperately to get to Appomatox before he dies. He makes it, but just barely.
I keep on meaning to read Sherman's memoirs and not getting around to it -- the picture of Sherman in Grant's memoirs is wonderful, and I'd like to see the reverse angle.
YOUSH ARE ALLS A BUNSH OF [hic] LOUSHY COPPERHEAD REBELSH [hic]! AND YER JUSHT LUCKY I'M SHTILL DEAD OR I WOULD COME DOWN TH' TUBESH AND KICK YER SHORRY [hic] ASSES HALFWAY TO ATLANTA!
34: Different, not so direct a narrative, with many scenes and observations. I love it, but it's appeal is probably not so universal as Grant's.
36 might want to use presidential pseudonymity. Make drunken undead threats now, but in the morning you'll wish you'd done it as Benjamin Harrison.
I feel like I should read Grant's memoirs.
I've looked at a moderate amount of 19th century photography as part of my day job and it's noticeably how everyone, particularly the men, looks i) mad, ii) dirty, and iii) slightly misshapen.*
I suppose ii) is probably often a function of the emulsions being used, which weren't panchromatic so make the skin colours look slightly darker.
Grant looks pretty good for that period.
* I've mentioned this before in another thread.
"I've looked at a moderate amount of 19th century pornography as part of my day job[...]*"
"* I've mentioned this before in another thread."
Did the same joke get made?
re: 42
Actually, ignoring the joke and taking it totally literally, we did have a collection of historical pornography coming through the studio a few years back --18th century etchings and the like. I didn't get to see it though.
Old pornography is pretty neat. There's lots of it on the internet. Which might not be a surprise.
But . . . but . . . those chicks are fat!
If I recall correctly, they (the mysterious they who curate the pornography) brought the stuff up and then stood over it while it was being photographed. Just in case anything happened to it.
No such care is taken with unique illuminated manuscripts or the like!
The B/d/l///n has mysterious pornography curators? I can see this being one of those hereditary things, like Keeper of the Queen's Cormorants or whatnot.
re: 50
I suspect, more seriously, it (the pr0n) lives in the locked cages with some of the other stuff likely to walk if left unsupervised.
But I do like the idea of 'Keeper of that Which Shall Not Be Named', i.e., some half-blind guy living in the stacks.
46. Wasn't the consenus of the previous thread that masturbating to picures of people known to be dead was verbotten? Vintage pron be damned.
"How are his memoirs? Are they good?"
The consensus remains that Grant's Memoirs are the best presidential memoirs so far.
As mentioned here in the past, you can read them here, here, and elsewhere.
some half-blind guy with hairy palms living in the stacks.
