Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose (review)

BOOK REVIEWS211 fused sentences mar the smooth now of action. The scholar will find Nine Men in Gray acceptable; die general reader will find it delightful. F. N. Boney University of Georgia Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose. By Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. Pp. x, 409. $19.50.) Abraham Lincoln was always willing to be photographed and after he reached national stature photographers were more than willing to take pictures of him. Collectors have listed more than a hundred of his poses. Now the authors of this book outdo their predecessors by presenting 119. The numbering of all known Lincoln pictures presents problems. Lincoln lived in the age of the stereoscope, and the two pictures on a stereoscopic card were taken at the same time by two cameras placed side by side like human eyes. Each print differs slighdy, so technically each may be Usted as a different picture. However, to do so adds materially to die number of Lincoln photographs and some collectors may object to such hair-splitting. The complex problem of numbering Lincoln pictures does not end here. Civil War photographers supplied the sudden demand for pictures of the President by photographing him with batteries of cameras—sometimes as many as nine lenses clustering together for a single shot. Each lens captured a slightly different picture although it takes a refined instrument to measure the difference. So again the question may be asked, "Do they differ enough to receive distinct numbers?" These perplexities are adequately described in this book. The autiiors also reveal many of the tricks played by cameramen during Lincoln's time. A skillful artist might paint out facial wrinkles, thereby making what appears to be a different picture. It was also easy to change a subject's hair and in more than one instance a beard was added to the negative of Lincoln's smooth-shaven face. The first book of numbered Lincoln pictures was published in 1915 by Frederick HiU Meserve. That handsome volume contained 108 actual photographs, each pasted by hand on its pages. In the decades which followed , research disclosed that the author had made some mistakes and was fooled by at least one counterfeit, but Meserve's work will always remain the great classic in the field. In 1952, Stefan Lorant produced Lincoln: A Pictorial Story of His Life, in which he reduced the Meserve list to an even hundred that included some newly discovered photographs. Now Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf, having spent years collecting and studying Lincoln pictures, revise questionable statements made by both Meserve and Lorant. Their work is so thorough and comprehensive that it seems safe to say this book deserves the much abused word "definitive." Certainly every Lincoln student will want this volume. In addition to a complete catalog of all known pictures of the Great Emancipator, it con- 212CI VIL WAR HIS TOR Y tains many of his family, his friends, his forebears, and his descendants. The reproduction of faked Lincoln pictures is unusually good and includes some which have been palmed off on popular magazines, including one that made quite a stir when published in 1941 by the Saturday Evening Post. No other book has such a wealth of Lincoln photographs reinforced with so much information concerning them. Jay Monaghan Santa Barbara, California Lincoln and the First Shot. By Richard N. Current. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1963. Pp. 223. $3.95. ) Readebs of this journal are well aware of Richard Current's abiding interest in how the Civil War commenced. He now sums up his considerable work on that subject for the "Critical Periods in History" series. This volume describes the first six weeks of Lincoln's administration and concludes by analyzing the Charles W. Ramsdell-James G. Randall controversy over whether or not Lincoln, as Ramsdell argued, "induced" the South to fire the first shot. Professor Current rejects both the Ramsdell thesis and the Randall (and David M. Potter) contention that Lincoln failed, since he intended and expected to provision the fort peacefully. Current's position is similar to Kenneth Stampp's "calculated risk" thesis. Preservation of the Union was Lincoln...