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By Dan Guillory Imagine walking into the stylish dining room of a suburban home in the late 1970s and gazing upon the images of Richard Nixon, Jerry Ford, and Jimmy Carter as dinner was being served. Even though this scenario is highly unlikely, exactly one century earlier a comparable event was quite common as middle-class Americans festooned their halls and parlors with steel-plate engravings of generals, politicians, and naval heroes. And chief among these icons was the visage of Abraham Lincoln. Of course, most Americans had never seen Abraham Lincoln in person, but his likeness was familiar to everyone by the time he delivered the Gettysburg Address in November 1863. Since the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Lincoln's face had appeared in woodcuts on newspaper pages—and, later, in carte de visite photographs and in print portraits sold at print shops, bookstores, and mail-order outlets. During the Civil War period, the technology still did not exist for making newspaper reproductions of the few photographs that were available. Images of politicians were relatively rare, and they occupied places of honor in the family home, as do the posters of rock stars and sports heroes adorning the walls of teenagers' rooms today In a world of CNN, DVD's, web site graphics, and ubiquitous photojournalism, we might comfortably suppose that our era invented the political icon, beginning perhaps with the televised Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960. But this book clearly shows otherwise. For the roots of image-making run deep into the nineteenth century and its highly political culture of buttons, sashes, parades, and epic-length speeches. By the 1840s nearly 80 percent of the population turned out for national elections. So Americans thrived on political imagery and even pasted photographs of politicians in their treasured family photo albums. In Lincoln's era, the price of such pictures ranged from fifty cents to ten dollars, and consumers were happy to snap them up at any price because politics and politicians became the national obsession, occupying a societal niche filled today by NFL football stars and Hollywood celebrities. It could safely be said that politics was, if not the national pastime, certainly the chief source of amusement. And the political print was at the center of this lively and colorful arena. At his nomination on the third ballot of the national Republican convention in Chicago (May 1860), Lincoln's delegates showered the specially built Wigwam with thousands of copies of a print by E. H. Brown, Abraham Lincoln, From a Photograph by Hosler, in which Lincoln appears somber and pale. His hair is tousled, and dark circles surround his eye sockets. The face seems sickly, even ghoulish, to the modern eye. But contemporaries loved the print. One writer even suggested that Lincoln's portrait featured "a spiritual expression such as his countenance assumes when he is engaged in debate." Yet Lincoln's undeniable and self-confessed homeliness remained a vexing problem. Southern papers called him "horrid looking," "sooty and scoundrely in aspect." And even the proLincoln Chicago Tribune allowed that their candidate was "careless," "dark," and "weatherbeaten" in appearance. Printmakers, engravers, and lithographers rushed to the rescue by providing "flattering" images of Abe. The famous Currier and Ives company in New York City and the competing Kellogg company in Hartford produced "doctored" images based on the famous Mathew [sic] Brady photograph of 1860, the so-called "Cooper Union" photograph. Cosmetic treatments of Lincoln's image also involved adding—or removing—the famous beard. Another common practice was to insert Lincoln's face or body in a previously published print. In Union (1861), engraved by Henry Sadd, John C. Calhoun is "burnished out" and replaced by a likeness of Lincoln, notably without his beard. In contrast to these favorable images, printmakers also produced another typical Lincoln graphic—the partisan political cartoon, such as the blatantly racist Currier and Ives lithographs of 1860, "The Nigger" in the Woodpile and An Heir to the Throne, the latter featuring a grotesquely distorted image of an African slave posed next to Abe, who is leaning on his trademark rail. The last kind of print produced in Lincoln's lifetime was the allegorical or mythological print in which Lincoln's image is placed in a highly stylized and deliberately symbolic context. Examples would include The Outbreak of Rebellion in the United States, 1861 (published by Kimmel and Foster in 1865), in which Lincoln stands next to bare-breasted Columbia while Jefferson Davis leans against a palmetto entwined by a hissing serpent. Another example is the famous lithograph published by the Dupuy company in Pittsburgh (1864), President Lincoln, Writing the Proclamation of Freedom, January 1st. 1863 (itself a copy of a painting by David Gilmour Blythe also executed in 1863). The Lincoln Image was originally written as a textual accompaniment to an exhibition that occurred at Gettysburg College in 1984, later running at the Fort Wayne Art Museum, the Lincoln Boyhood Home in Indiana, and the John Hay Library at Brown University, among other venues. Then famous scholar Jacques Barzun recommended the text for publication by Scribner's, a firm that was subsequently taken over by Macmillan. In the process, the original plates were lost, and the book went out of print. Because of computer-aided printing technology, however, the University of Illinois Press was able to retrieve the original images and produce this new edition of The Lincoln Image. The book covers prints produced during Lincoln's lifetime—not all but a "representative" sampling of "what there once was." The Lincoln Image is a handsome, hefty book: its creamy pages are silken to the touch, and its carefully chosen graphics have a way of engraving themselves on the memory of even the most casual page-turner. Harold Holzer, Gabor Boritt, and Mark Neely are all well-regarded Lincoln scholars. Although their text is unusually clear and remarkably candid, their true genius expresses itself in the careful selection and insightful arrangement of these crucial historical images. The Lincoln Image is an important addition to Lincoln scholarship, a text that can be perused with real pleasure by specialist and non-specialist alike. Dan Guillory, author of Living With Lincoln: Life and Art in the Heartland, is Chair of the English Department at Millikin University. 16 ILLINOIS HERITAGE |
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