The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (review)

book reviews279 only one or two. The editors continue their practice of briefing some correspondence to allow room for printing more significant letters in full, and as expected in this series, the letters to Polk far outnumber the extant ones he wrote. Volume VI contains the added feature of a calendar of all letters from 1816 through 1843. Over the years since the Polk project began, it has been in skillful and sensitive editorial hands. As the effort approaches the vital presidential years, scholars need have no fear of a deterioration in quality of work. We can all look forward to the remaining volumes. James E. Sefton California State University, Northridge The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print. By Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984. Pp. xi, 234. $35.00.) Long before the advent of television, motion pictures, photojournalism, and slickly illustrated magazines, Americans became familiar with the images of their political leaders and other celebrities in large part through the medium of the popular print. Along with woodcut illustrations in Harper's and Leslie's, carte-de-visite photographs, and such ubiquitous campaign devices as ferrotype lapel pins and silk ribbons, popular prints played an important role in mid-nineteenth-century American politics, creating visual images of Lincoln and his contemporaries in the minds of millions of their countrymen who would never see them face to face. In Lincoln's case in particular, prints engraved or lithographed for mass distribution were of enormous importance, first in transforming an obscure prairie politico into an appealing presidential candidate, then into the national statesman credited with preserving the Union and setting free the slaves, and finally into the ultimate American folk icon. Lincoln presented a real challenge for the political printmakers, for he was uniquely homely. Photographs, in many instances, captured an unruly likeness that hinted of madness, a face better suited to frightening children than forging a national consensus. To enterprising printmakers in 1860 fell the challenge of softening Lincoln's features, taming his wild shock of hair, bringing a semblance of order to his unkempt dress, and otherwise transforming his visual image into one that would make voters respond, if not maidens-swoon. When their best efforts were rendered obsolete by Lincoln's post-election decision to grow a beard, printmakers ' plates and stones were suitably modified (in some cases making Lincoln look more like Ambrose Bumside or Father Time than himself) to satisfy public curiosity. During the war, such landmark events as the Emancipation Proclamation were commemorated by the creation of many popular prints. In the months of national grief that followed Lin- 280civil war history coin's assassination, prints depicting the deed itself and the subsequent apotheosis of the martyred president into the most compelling and enduring of American icons did much to establish Lincoln's lasting place in our pantheon of political deities. These prints, the men who made and marketed them, and the image they conveyed to the public is thus a subject of signal importance to Lincoln scholarship. That this topic has languished so long without due consideration by historians constitutes an indictment of no small proportions against a profession so enamored of statistics and the written word, that it has all but neglected such equally rich scholarly resources as graphic arts, material culture, and other manifestations of political popular culture. This deficiency has been remedied in a major way by the publication of The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print. An outgrowth of a similarly titled exhibit at Gettysburg College to commemorate the 175th anniversary of Lincoln's birth, one might have expected a typical coffee-table volume, long on lavish illustrations and cloying banalities and short on meaningful historical scholarship. What Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr. have given us instead is a superbly researched and splendidly written treatise that marks a milestone in Lincoln scholarship in its own right, and serves as a model for further study of Lincoln as an artifact of American popular culture. The prime focus of this volume is, as it should be, the story of the prints themselves...