Lincoln

This board holds the pictures gathered for Lincoln, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. Abraham Lincoln was the first president whose public life was fully covered by the camera, and he understood its power better than most politicians of his time.

He was born in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1809 and grew up on the frontier in Indiana and Illinois, with very little formal schooling. He taught himself law, served in the Illinois legislature and one term in Congress, and became known nationally through his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858.

Photography helped make him president. In February 1860 he gave a major speech at the Cooper Institute in New York, and the same day he sat for Mathew Brady, who made a portrait of a dignified, clean-shaven statesman. That image was copied widely during the campaign and helped answer the charge that Lincoln was a rough backwoods figure. Later that year an 11-year-old girl named Grace Bedell wrote suggesting he grow a beard, and he did. More than 100 photographs of Lincoln survive, and you can follow his face aging through the war years in them.

Lincoln led the country through the Civil War, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and delivered the Gettysburg Address that November. He was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, 5 days after Lee's surrender, and died the next morning. His funeral train took about 2 weeks to carry his body back to Springfield, Illinois, stopping in cities along the way for huge public mourning.

The pictures here include portraits, campaign prints, Civil War scenes, the assassination and its aftermath, and the many memorials that followed, including the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, dedicated in 1922. Look closely at the photographs from 1865. The strain of 4 years of war is plain on his face.