The Lincoln Portrait

For several days I have been haunted by an old picture, which a dealer named Albert Kaplan says portrays Abraham Lincoln around age 33.

Unlike every other picture I’ve ever seen of Lincoln, this looks least like him. This man’s cheeks are full, his face round rather than a rectangle, and he’s dressed like a dandy.

This would make sense because at the time Lincoln was a young, aspiring Whig politician, a follower of Henry Clay. As a politician he always understood he power of photography, and it’s natural this should be true at the start of his career as it was at the end.

What’s most extraordinary is that he doesn’t look extraordinary. History has placed Lincoln on a pedestal, the "go-to" guy for transformative leadership, our greatest political writer, a hero. This young man is none of those things.

Yet an analysis of several Lincoln pictures, alongside this one, concludes it’s the same man. An analysis of the case and the plate indicates it comes from the right era, 1840-1845, so that the "young man" pictured could indeed be Lincoln.

I’ve read just one 20th century book that portrayed Lincoln as anything but a demi-God.

It was an alternate history called How Few Remain,
by Harry Turtledove. The novel, the first in what is currently a
10-book exercise, starts with Lee’s plans for Antietam getting through
to his generals, succeeding, and the Union being dissolved. His 72-year
old Lincoln (he wasn’t President in 1865 and could thus not be
assassinated at Ford’s Theater) is an exile in his own land, moved
finally to take a rump of the Republican Party into union with the
Socialists. Yet his dignity and idealism remain intact. The cause is
lost, his name reviled, yet he still holds his head high, confident in
the right as God gives him power to see it.

This is the Lincoln we should consider today, this 1843 dandy, this sad old man. This is a human Lincoln, an ordinary Lincoln, a Lincoln we could all aspire to be, when touched as we must be by the better angels of our nature.

One more point, about the picture itself, which shows how stupid we’ve become as a society.

Kaplan obtained a copyright on this picture, in 1983. A copyright on an 1842 Daguerreotype. That will expire 75 years after Kaplan’s death, unless Disney extends the copyright even further. Until then this piece of the public domain is one man’s to exploit, and his children’s and his children’s children to exploit. Kaplan’s control of this portrait will extend far beyond the "four score and seven" years Lincoln talked about at Gettysburg. I find that, frankly, abominable.  The first image of Abraham Lincoln has become slave to one man’s greed.