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Reviews
| The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print. By Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely Jr. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. xxi, 234. 8 × 10 1/2, 106 photographs, notes, index. Paper, $19.95.)The Lincoln Family Album. By Mark E. Neely Jr. and Harold Holzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Pp. xxvii, 161. 8 1/2 × 11 1/2, 150 photographs, notes, index. Paper, $24.95.)
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These excellent books have much in common, beginning with two of their author-editors, known for many years to all Lincoln students and museum aficionados. Both are reissues. The Scribner Press published the first edition of The Lincoln Image in 1984; Doubleday published the first edition of The Lincoln Family Album in 1990. Both are full of interesting pictures, but these are books for reading as well as looking. Or perhaps one should say that the printed texts help one to see much more in the pictures than one could just by looking at them. |
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The Lincoln Image, Part I, presents and discusses the mass-produced images of Lincoln as presidential candidate. Because he began growing his beard after winning the presidential election, the Lincoln in thousands of posters, cartoons, and campaign buttons was clean-shaven. A major problem for photographers, painters, and engravers—Republicans or at least employees of Republicans - was to make Lincoln appealing, the general early impression having been that he was hopelessly ugly. Opponents, of course, did their best to make him as unattractive as possible. Part II covers the years of war, and Lincoln, bearded, now looks familiar, yet there are pictures much admired when new that do not much resemble the Lincoln of the five-dollar bill or the penny. A few disasters occurred when printers tried adding a beard to one of the older images. Overall, there were relatively few new pictures of Lincoln in 1861 and 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation caused a new outpouring in 1863. At this point, we can fairly say that the study of popular prints must alter our views of the Civil War. Since the famous, iconoclastic essay by Richard Hofstadter, and a number of hostile studies of Lincoln following the Second Reconstruction, scholars who praise the Proclamation have done so from a defensive position. The prints presented in this book tell a different story; the Proclamation was understood then as fundamental, revolutionary, and glorious. Thousands of prints and engravings now began the idolization of President Lincoln. |
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Part III, "Apotheosis and Apocrypha," presents a wide assortment of religiously and patriotically motivated images. The most dated of these carry over the religious art of the Renaissance to show the assumption of Lincoln into heaven, attended by angels and greeted by George Washington. There were also more earthbound representations, to remind Americans how their martyred president looked when alive. The most ridiculous of these is a full portrait of Francis P. Blair, Jr. seated at his desk, in which Lincoln's head has been substituted for Blair's. The head is indeed recognizably Lincoln; the slightly plump, moderate-sized body is recognizably not. |
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The Lincoln Family Album, not known to scholars or the public until the 1980s, is exactly what the name implies. Mary Todd Lincoln was probably the one who selected and mounted the pictures, and, perhaps because she disliked being photographed, is the family member most poorly represented. Naturally enough, the Lincoln boys are prominent in the collection. There are also plentiful pictures of Todds, but no Lincolns or Hanks, apart from Abraham and his immediate family. Several eminent politicians, military figures, interesting guests, and notable landmarks—for example, the Smithsonian Institute - fill out the book. The editors have added photographs from the collections of later generations, so that the book serves as a family history, concluding when the direct line from Abraham and Mary ended with the death of Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith in 1985. All the pictures, including some added since the first edition, are relevant, and the prose is as valuable as that in The Lincoln Image. Some pictures were not retrieved from old family albums. There is, for instance, a fine photograph of Emilie Todd Helm, Mary Lincoln's youngest half-sister, and the widow of a Confederate officer, whose visit to the White House caused the Lincolns some grief. Hers is perhaps the most attractive picture of a woman in either of these pictorial histories. Robert Todd Lincoln displayed this picture of his Aunt Emilie in the fine mansion in Vermont he eventually called home. |
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