American Historical Ephemera & Photography

Approx. 7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in. tintype portrait. (Plate with significant cracks and likely separation with what appears to be liquid adhesive repair in some areas, surface scratches and other abrasions/imperfections to emulsion occur throughout portrait.) Housed in a wooden wall frame (not examined out of frame).  Paper label on frame verso identifies the subject as Lieutenant Albert Wymer Henley of Company K, 13th Mississippi Infantry and Company H, 36th Mississippi Infantry, though this cannot be confirmed.  

The seated subject wears a rectangular belt plate, which, though only the top portion is visible, appears to be a Mississppi belt plate bearing the state seal, being an upright American eagle within an oval brass cast rectangular plate (Gavin, Figure 121, p 160). This plate is said to have been used in the Mississippi militia prior to the war.

Otherwise, the subject wears and carries the varied trappings of a protoypical antebellum militia or erstwhile state officers, including a standard nine-button frock coat patterned after US regulations, dress shoulder epaulettes having thin bullion coils, Mexican War-style wheel cap, and classic embellished  American militia eagle head with curved blade, gilded, with an ivory grip (likely imported). Therefore, we cannot confirm the identity nor the southern allegiance of the pictured subject. 

At age 27, Albert Henley enlisted in Co. E (Hazelhurst Fencibles), 36th Mississippi Infantry at Meridian, Mississippi on 2/27/62 for 12 months.  He was appointed 2nd lieutenant 4/1/62, and 1st lieutenant 5/11/62 and thereafter spent most of his service "absent from his command the greater portion of the time since May 1862 and for several months under treatment at a hospital at Hazelhurst, Mississippi."  Documents show that 1st Lieut. Henley was paroled as a prisoner with the surrender of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863 and signed his parole on July 8.  He formally resigned from the Confederate Army on 12/21/63 and was discharged in February 1864 "by reason of disability." No record of Albert W. Henley with service in the 13th Mississippi could be located.