The Civil War
During the first two years of the Civil War, Russell painted a diorama used to recruit soldiers for the Union Army. On 22 August 1862, he volunteered at Elmira, New York, mustering in the following month as a captain in Company F, 141st New York Volunteer Regiment. In February 1863, Russell, who had become interested in the new art of photography, paid civilian photographer Egbert Guy Fowx $300 to teach him the collodion process of wet-plate photography. Fowx was a free-lance photographer who sold many of his negatives to Mathew B. Brady, who subsequently copyrighted and published many of them under his own name.
Russell's first photographs, taken with a camera borrowed from Fowx, were used by Brigadier General Herman Haupt to illustrate his reports. Impressed with his work, on 1 March 1863, Haupt arranged to have Russell detached from his regiment and assigned to the United States Military Railroad Construction Corps, making Russell the only non-civilian Civil War photographer. In that role he photographed primarily transportation subjects for the Union, but was responsible for a few photographs of more historical and graphical interest sold to and distributed by the Mathew Brady Studios. One such was "Confederate dead Behind the Stone Wall" after the battle of Chancellorsville, May 1863.
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