Lincoln Captured!
By TED WIDMER
Despite recent rumors to the contrary, Lincoln displayed no vampiric powers in his early presidency. But it is true that he could appear many places at the same time, thanks to a chemical process that seemed to borrow as much from the dark arts as from science.
Photography was a fluid technique in 1861, in every sense. It had made rapid strides since the first inchoate smudges of a backyard in France were captured in 1826, the year that Jefferson and Adams died. (That first photo, locked in a vault in Texas, can be seen here.)
Improvements followed fast and furious; the daguerreotype in 1839; the ambrotype in 1851; the tintype in 1856. The United States had no shortage of tinkerers, and like characters in Hawthorne short story, these wizards drew from science, experimenting with bits of silver, iodine and even egg whites to cheat nature out of her secrets. Hawthorne placed a daguerreotypist in “The House of the Seven Gables,” and like many other writers, believed that there was something supernatural about creating perfect portraits — “ghosts,” in his words — that would live on long after death. Who needs vampires?
The process of creating ghosts was messy and slow. Photographers were artists as well as scientists, and many of the earliest pioneers, like Samuel F. B. Morse, were painters, deeply enamored with the human form. An early student of Morse’s, a failed painter with terrible vision named Mathew Brady, borrowed from both science and art as he established a thriving photography business in New York and Washington.
For Lincoln, this dark technology was a godsend. Despite his penchant for making fun of his appearance, Lincoln knew that his “phiz” was instantly recognizable, all the more so after hair began to appear on it. And recognizability was an asset when all known facts relating to the government of the United States were up for grabs. Presidents have to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time; highly visible to the public on certain stage-managed occasions, and then quite invisible when there is work to be done. (It is still the same in 2011, when there is always an effervescent “Photo of the Day” on the White House Web site.) In the early months of his presidency, Lincoln more than tolerated his photographers; he intuitively understood that they were helping him a great deal as he tried to give the Union a face — his own.
Over the spring of 1861, as the new government came into focus, so did Lincoln. It was natural that he would be drawn to Mathew Brady, the self-made man whose studio was just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Lincoln said, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president.” For on the same day that he gave the great Cooper Union address, in February 1860, he did something just as significant when he stopped at Brady’s New York studio for a likeness.
Brady, the former painter, was not averse to certain forms of retouching (he made Lincoln’s neck less scrawny by artificially enlarging his collar), and the result was a surprisingly normal-looking candidate. Not a savage from the wilds of Illinois, or a baboon, as he was often called, but a reasonable facsimile of a human being. That image was widely disseminated during the tumultuous campaign, as Americans by the thousands bought small buttons with his tintyped image affixed to them.
But that was then, in the distant antebellum. Now that war had broken out, Americans needed to see their president as he actually looked that spring. In an age that was tiring of romantic clichés and simply wanted facts, the photograph was emerging as the portrait of choice. So Lincoln came to Brady. Repeatedly. He did so as soon as he arrived in Washington in late February, taking a photograph just after the wild train journey that brought him to the White House. That image was widely disseminated in Harper’s Weekly on April 27. And he did so again in May, most likely on May 16, thanks to recent research. In 2003, Thomas F. Schwartz discovered that an artist named Arthur Lumley had drawn Lincoln in the act of being photographed (one form of art capturing another), and had written the date “May 16/61” at the bottom of the page.
The images that resulted from that session, his first serious sitting as president, are striking. This is not a teller of jokes, or an escapee from the back woods. What the English journalist William Howard Russell called his “wild republican hair” has been subdued and rests in place. He sits regally in an elegant chair – a chair, in fact, that Lincoln had given to Brady, after having rescued it from the House of Representatives. It was likely his former chair when he was a representative. The mood is somber, serious, and intense at times. He is no longer a mere politician — this is the president of the United States.
These six images, presented above courtesy of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation, show a variety of moods and shadings. They show him standing and sitting, in profile and staring straight at the camera and the nation behind it. One striking image shows him deep in thought, seated like the Rodin sculpture “The Thinker,” which would not be cast until 1902. He was perhaps reflecting on the great message to the American people that he was in the act of writing, which would be released on July 4. It is impossible to know, precisely, which problem he was thinking about — he had more than his share.
But in all of these photographs, there is one trait that dominates. There is no equivocation. The Lincoln that emerges from the shadows is a force of nature, who looks like he could break an assailant in half. John Hay wrote of his ability to overwhelm a visitor: “He looked through the man to the buttons on the back of his coat.” We feel that force in these images, particularly in the photograph that is broken, almost as if by the strain of trying to capture him. In so many other portraits, Lincoln displays the passive body language of a man of peace, responding to events rather than initiating them. Here he leans forward, taut, belligerent. This is no spectator.
Of course, he was never captured entirely. Many contemporaries wrote of the inadequacy of his portraits. John Nicolay said it perfectly:
Graphic art was powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip, in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay, and back again from the rollicking jollity of laughter to that serious, far-away look that with prophetic intuitions beheld the awful panorama of war, and heard the cry of oppression and suffering. There are many pictures of Lincoln; there is no portrait of him.
Walt Whitman wrote something similar:
Probably the reader has seen physiognomies (often old farmers, sea captains, and such) that, behind their homeliness, or even ugliness, held superior points so subtle, yet so palpable, making the real life of their faces almost as impossible to depict as a wild perfume or fruit taste, or a passionate tone of the living voice — and such was Lincoln’s face, the peculiar color, the lines of it, the eyes, mouth expression. Of technical beauty it had nothing — but to the eye of a great artist it furnished a rare study, a feast and fascination. The current portraits are all failures — most of them caricatures.
But on this May day in 1861, he came closer than usual. Between the White House and the Capitol, Lincoln and Brady advanced the idea of representative democracy in their own way, by representing the leader of the government to the American people. In so doing, they created six indelible images of a nation girding itself for the struggle to come.
Sources: James Mellon, “The Face of Lincoln”; Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., “Lincoln, Life-Size”; Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., “Looking for Lincoln”; Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., “Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography”; Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf, “Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose”; Mary Panzer, “Mathew Brady and the Image of History”; Mary Panzer, “Mathew Brady”; Roy Meredith, “Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man: Mathew B. Brady”; Stefan Lorant, “Lincoln: His Life in Photographs”; Merry A. Foresta and John Wood, “Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype”; Thomas F. Schwartz, “A Mystery Solved: Arthur Lumley’s Sketch of Abraham Lincoln” (Journal of Illinois History, Autumn 2003); Walt Whitman, “Specimen Days.”
Ted Widmer is director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and the editor of the Library of America’s two-volume “American Speeches.”
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