During this long period of my uncle's illness all the care of both families devolved on my father. Never a "business man," saddened by his brother's condition, and utterly unable to manage, at the same time, a fairly large estate, the publication of two illustrated works, every plate of which he felt he must personally examine, the securing of subscribers and the financial condition of everything—what wonder that he rapidly aged, what wonder that the burden was overwhelming! After my uncle's death matters became still more difficult to handle, owing to the unsettled condition of the southern states where most of the subscribers to Audubon's books resided, and when the open rupture came between north and south, the condition of affairs can hardly be imagined, except by those who lived through similar bitter and painful experiences. In 1858 or 1859 John W. Audubon entered upon an ambitious project, which the outbreak of the Civil War, aided, it is believed, by the unscrupulous dealings of business partners, rendered disastrous. In association with Messrs. Roe Lockwood, & Son, New York, and the lithographers, Messrs. J. Bien & Company, Number 180 Broadway, with whom considerable money had been invested, a second and American edition of his father's great folio on _The Birds of America_ was attempted. An atlas of 106 double elephant plates, reproduced in colors on stone with slight but numerous changes from the original copper plates, was completed as Volume I in 1860;[235] the war, which broke immediately afterwards, completely ruined the enterprise, so that but few copies of the work were dispersed and an immense stock of plates was rendered useless; the burden of debt was undoubtedly increased by the issue of seven octavo volumes of text.[236] Many years later, hundreds of persons who knew of Audubon's work only through its great reputation, and who had never learned to discriminate between a hand-colored copper-plate engraving and a lithograph, were deceived by an adroit, but essentially spurious advertisement of these inferior reproductions when they were being exploited by a firm of Boston book dealers. The original bulk of these large lithographs must have been vast indeed, if the following story, which was attributed to a member of the firm in question, be true: "We bought the entire stock of those plates, many years ago," so this man is reported to have said, "and, though the sales of every succeeding year since have been sufficient to cover the original cost, the number of plates has not appreciably diminished."