Fabricating a Civil War Identity

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I recently acquired an album which contained an interesting carte de visite image of a Civil War ordnance sergeant, and so identified by the sergeant stripes with a star above. Ordnance sergeants, in rank, are just below a sergeant major and above a first sergeant. The reason for this is that each regiment had one ordnance sergeant while every company in a regiment had a first sergeant. And the sergeant major was also on a regiment level and was always the highest ranking enlisted man.
This particular image, while taken by Addis in Washington D. C. the album was otherwise entirely from Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania. Now if you are not familiar with Mauch Chunk, that is not surprising as in 1953 the city fathers, in hopes of creating tourism, renamed the town Jim Thorpe after the famous Native American athlete.
This particular soldier was not identified so as is my wont, I launched a search on google hoping to find his identity. I eventually found the names of several ordnance sergeants with Pennsylvania units and continued researching these names.
One such person was name John Joseph Henderson. The son of a Methodist minister, Henderson was born in 1843 and was educated in the Meadville, Pennsylvania, public schools until 1858 (when he was 15) when he entered Allegheny College, and graduated with the class of 1862 (now he was 19).
Here the government records take over. On 20 August 1862 he enlisted in Company K of the 150th Pennsylvania Infantry a a private. Almost immediately, Company K was detached from the regiment and under one Captain Donald Derreckson assigned to guard President Abraham Lincoln at his summer home, "The Soldier's Home" as it was called. Lincoln spent from June to November in residence here, along with his family. Henderson served his entire military career at this post and was discharged as a private on 115 June 1865.
The reason Henderson showed up as an "ordnance sergeant" is that in his fraternity (Phi Gamma Delta) yearly newsletter Henderson, who was later in life a Republican office holder, wrote a couple of articles detailing his military career and made himself an ordnance sergeant and also testified that he had witnessed the assassination of the President. As for the latter, there is no way of knowing the truth of this. But he clearly never was an ordnance sergeant or any thing other than a private. In addition to which, apparently his fraternity brothers being poorly inform in military matters, the detached Company K had no ordnance and as a company no place on the roster for an ordnance sergeant. So apparently fabricating one's military record is not just a twenty-first century practice.
Oh yes, I have still to identify my ordnance sergeant.

I have created this blog primarily to relate my present world which is buying and selling on eBay. Since this occupies the better part of my day, at least six days a week, this seems most relevant to "My World".

I began primarily buying on eBay in 1999, shortly after I got my first personal computer (my principal bookstore was already computerized but I did not bother to learn from that), I bought the original iMac as it was a simple to use as advertised, and at then 63 years of age simple was the motivating reason. I gradually expanded to selling occasionally but it was not until my business went under in 2004 that I turned to eBay full time to survive.

Over the previous 31 years I and my late partner had owned a series of gay and lesbian bookstores in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New York. But I had begun as a bookman with antiquarian books and autographs. So in 2004 I gradually sold off what remained of those interests. It was not until a year later that I discovered and developed an interest in vintage photographs which I have fairly much refined to images prior to 1870 -daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes and carte de visites. And also images from about 1888 to 1920, the advent of the personal camera and thus vernacular photography.

Now with that out of the way, I'll view this particular market as it relates to eBay today. Just in recent months there has developed a trend among many sellers to switch, in part or totally, from the auction format to "Buy It Now" or BIN. On one hand, this offers the buyer a means to immediately acquire a desired item, but on the other, this trend has been accompanied by what I consider a dangerous development - overpriced items dominating photography listings (this may well be true in other categories as well but I am not here concerned with such).

This seems to be occurring in all areas of vintage photography but the clearest and most dangerous is the effect in the highly popular area of Civil War images. I recently canvassed the listings in this field and the overwhelming majority of listings were BIN and almost all of these were overpriced. It is, in effect, creating an inflationary view of such images which are, on the other hand, not warranted by the results of auction listings in the same category.

Also, by checking some of the principal BIN sellers and their recent results (anyone can check this by going to the listing page and in the left column click on "completed listings".

What this shows is the these same sellers are, in fact, not finding buyers for most of their inflated listings. But too often buyers look at the listings only and assume this reflects the market.

To a lesser extent this is also true with CDVs and tintypes, and to a lesser degree daguerreotypes and ambrotypes). Without naming names, I had one buyer who had been purchasing auction items from me for years but it was not until I connected this buyer to another user name under which she sold CDVs. I there discovered that she drastically marked up items she purchased to high BIN prices. She also uses as her seller name one which implies but does not so state that her sales financially assist in animal adoptions. Her person page goes on at length about animal adoptions and rightly lambasts puppy mills. But nowhere states any of her proceeds go directly to benefit any charity.

However, most of these BIN sellers make no attempt to justify their high prices. On some days if one searches through the listings on CDVs, entire pages of results will be BINs. I very rarely have found a BIN that was a fair market price for the item listed. I found a routine and common image from the Civil War of Lincoln and his family - thousands were sold during the war. At the same time that I had two images of this CDV, both starting at $4.95 I found a BIN seller with one listed for $100. Stupid me, I emailed this other seller and asked if he was aware that it was a common image, and he responded by charging that I ONLY sold poor computer generated copies of images (in fact, of course I sell only original images). He must have been a military man at one time where the best countermove is to attack.

Unfortunately, this trend may well continue. Another seller, and a friend, recently told me that she might have to join them rather than fight. Hopefully, I shan't be the last holdout, but I really favor the auction format, even to the extent that on all my auction listings (I use BIN only for books and for photos that did not sell) have lead with the slogan: 'Where the marketplace determines value, not the seller!". I must admit, however, that not one of my buyers has commented on this commitment.

Enough for now, and more later.