General Melancthon S. Wade

A celebrated photographer, entrepreneur, and abolitionist, James Presley Ball established a photographic business in Cincinnati in 1849 that became one of the largest and most popular portrait studios in mid-nineteenth-century America. Ball first learned the daguerreotype process in Virginia from another Black artist, John B. Bailey, before settling in Cincinnati, where he joined a community of like-minded abolitionists. Working with a group of artists, including the prominent landscape painter Robert S. Duncanson, Ball oversaw the creation of a 600-foot painted panorama intended to educate people about African-American history and the misery of human bondage: "Ball's Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States, Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade; of Northern and Southern Cities; of Cotton and Sugar Plantations; of the Mississippi, Ohio and Susquehanna Rivers, Niagara Falls, & C." (1855).

Along with other Black artists, Ball and Duncanson helped to maintain Cincinnati as an artistic center in the 1850s, and notable Cincinnatians flocked to Ball's studio so that he could make their portraits. In the early 1860s, his sitters included local soldiers and officers of the Union Army, including General Melancthon S. Wade, the purveyor of a successful dry goods company who, in 1860 at the age of fifty-eight, came out of retirement to volunteer for the Union Army. He was placed in command of Camp Dennison near Cincinnati until poor health led to his resignation on March 18, 1862.