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156 10 Seldom Twice Alike: The Changing Faces of Lincoln Harold Holzer Between the last month of 1862 and the first hours of 1863, Abraham Lincoln did nothing less than come to terms with his own immortality . In his annual message to Congress back on December 1, 1862, with the deadline for execution of the final Emancipation Proclamation looming, he had modestly predicted only that: “[W]e cannot escape history. We . . . of this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves.” But on January 1, 1863, he offered a far bolder prediction to the handful of witnesses gathered in his White House office as he picked up his pen to sign the actual document: “If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act.” Significantly, the latter comment was repeated by a prominent journalist of the day and then quoted by an artist working at the White House the following year to paint a tribute to the first reading of the preliminary Proclamation to the cabinet.1 In other words, Lincoln had first recounted his statement to a journalist —one of the men responsible for writing what has come to be called “the first draft of history.” And then the words served to inspire an artist working to “draft” the same history in pictorial terms. Nothing could have been more fitting and proper, to paraphrase the famous words Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg later that year. To Lincoln, making history had increasingly come to embrace not only the printed word but also the mass-produced image. In an age in which images could be quickly made and widely distributed at affordable prices, American audiences came to 157 Seldom Twice Alike embrace a similar interest in pictorial tributes. They were more than illustrations . They were visualizations of history.2 Ever since winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, Lincoln had become accustomed to making himself available to pictorial as well as documentary reporters. He had proven a cooperative subject for artists and photographers who descended on his Springfield hometown that spring and summer to request sittings. Although he had little time to pose stiffly and formally in the tradition of, say, George Washington, who devoted hours of his retirement to standing immovably before Gilbert Stuart and others, Lincoln did permit painters to sketch him while he read his mail or met with visitors. On one memorable occasion, he had left his temporary office in the State Capitol, walked across the hall, and sat for photographer Alexander Hesler beneath its large, sun-drenched windows. As Lincoln had come to understand, such pictures could be quickly reproduced and circulated to admirers, usefully answering lingering concerns among potential voters that he was simply too homely to aspire to the White House. Demand for his images had risen once again when he grew a beard after Election Day, changing his appearance as no other president-elect had done before his inauguration. But between 1861 and 1863, while Lincoln occasionally did visit photography studios in Washington to sit for updated poses that painfully document his rapid aging in office, painters and print publishers generally turned to other, more current subjects—particularly the new generation of military heroes making their reputations on the battlefields of the Civil War. The production of Lincoln images declined. The Emancipation Proclamation, however, should have propelled Lincoln back into the forefront of the American picture industry. His new status as a “great emancipator” seemed to cry out for revised graphic tributes. For a time, however, the president did little to encourage image-makers, providing few fresh photographs essential for adaptation into engravings and lithographs. In the first seven months of 1863, he is known to have ventured into a photography studio only once, an April 17 visit to Mathew B. Brady’s gallery, where he posed for a rather nondescript full-figure pose. The president was so tall that the camera operator, Thomas Le Mere, proved unable to capture his entire frame on the plate. “Can it be taken with a single negative?”Lincoln was said to have jested as the photographer arranged the pose. Lincoln recalled once seeing landscape photographs stitched together to form a single,extra-wide image.“I thought perhaps this method might be necessary for my full-length landscape.”No,Le Mere assured him,he would make three identical images using a multi-lens camera.3 But standing next to a chair, his fist on a prop pedestal at his right, Lincoln is seen only from...

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