Faces of the Civil War: Unknown IV

This unidentified soldier was from New Hampshire, probably the Manchester area.

Nearly 34,000 soldiers from New Hampshire served in the Union army. About 5,000 of them died. Was this private one of them?

Unfortunately, like so many images of Civil War soldiers, this one does not include a name. It's a long shot, but maybe an Internet surfer will ID this photo in my collection. Here's what I do know:


A card on the back of the photograph shows that
the image was taken in a studio on Elm Street in
Manchester, N.H.

Based on the card on the reverse of this 1/6-plate ambrotype, this man was from New Hampshire, likely  from Manchester or the surrounding area. He plunked down about a buck and a half to have a keepsake image taken at M.S. Lamprey's Daugerrian Saloon on Elm Street in Manchester, across the street from a hotel.  After processing the image, the photographer tinted the soldier's cheeks a light shade of red, a common practice. Perhaps this man had this photo taken shortly after he quit his job at a local mill -- Manchester once was home to the world's largest cotton mill -- and enlisted in the army.

Did this soldier see action at Antietam or Gettysburg or somewhere in the Deep South? Soldiers from New Hampshire fought and died in all the major battles in the East, in addition to serving as far away as the swamps of Louisiana. I have no indication of the regiment in which he served, so there's no telling what experience this soldier had during the war.

Ambrotypes, a photograph created on a sheet of glass, were popular in the late 1850s and early 1860s, so it's safe bet that this image was taken in 1861 or 1862. Ambrotypes were a fragile format, and someone who handled this one probably dropped it, causing it to break into three pieces.