Samuel Abbot Cooley

Like George S. Cook and George N. Barnard, Cooley was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a photographer there before the war.

He did not enlist — possibly for reasons of health. He attached himself instead to the 6th Connecticut Infantry as a sutler, the licensed civilian merchant who followed a regiment selling what the army did not issue, and in that capacity he came down to the South Carolina coast. He was not merely a shopkeeper in uniformed company: after a small action near Pocotaligo on 22 October 1863, Brigadier General John M. Brannan commended “Mr. Cooley, sutler of the Sixth Connecticut Volunteers” for helping to bring wounded men off the field.

Then he did what Alexander Gardner had done with the Army of the Potomac: he gave himself a title. Cooley advertised as U.S. Photographer, Department of the South — the Union-held coastal territory run from Hilton Head — and sometimes as Photographer Tenth Army Corps. In that semi-official position he photographed army installations along with a great many scenes of Beaufort and the people living there.

It was a business as well as a calling. He brought three assistants down from New York and worked for customers out of a studio at Beaufort; the back of one of his cartes de visite lists studios at Hilton Head, Folly Island and Jacksonville, Florida. Harvey Teal estimates that Cooley and his assistants produced more than two thousand images of Beaufort, Hilton Head and the sea islands.

After the war he returned to Hartford, where he died on 15 May 1900.

Cooley came to Charleston with the occupation. The Library of Congress credits him as photographer of a Fort Sumter parapet negative of 1865 and attributes to him a stereograph of the ordnance yard on Morris Island, taken in April of that year, on the evidence of the corresponding negative number.

He is also, uniquely among the men in this section, visible at work: a negative of April 1865 shows him standing beside his camera on the parapet of Fort Sumter, his wagon behind him.

Civilian sutler to the 6th Connecticut Infantry. Commended by Brigadier General John M. Brannan for recovering wounded after the action near Pocotaligo, 22 October 1863. No enlistment, no commission, and no formal appointment as army photographer.

The wagon in his Fort Sumter portrait is the reason any of it was possible. Wet collodion had to be coated, exposed and developed before the plate dried, so a photographer working in the field carried his darkroom with him or made no pictures at all.

Working with three assistants and four locations, Cooley ran a production operation rather than a one-man practice, which is worth remembering when a picture is credited to him: the credit is to the business as often as to the hand.

Cooley’s name is attached to more pictures than Cooley took. The three assistants and four studios mean that “Cooley” on a mount identifies the business; and the Library of Congress, attributing his Morris Island ordnance-yard stereograph, says so in the record: attributed to Samuel A. Cooley, based on the negative number.