The Drawback With Abe Lincoln’s Face

Taking a look at an image of Abraham Lincoln in October 1860, the 11-year-old Grace Bedell claimed to have solved the issue of Lincoln’s face and wrote him a letter to inform him about it. The presidential candidate was effectively conscious of the issue. As he got here into public view in 1860, jokes about Lincoln’s look abounded. A preferred anti-Lincoln music imagined his supporters begging to not have his image proven. Bedell, of Westfield, New York, supplied an answer: Lincoln ought to develop a beard. “If you’ll let your whiskers develop,” she wrote, “you’d look an ideal deal higher on your face is so skinny.”

Bedell’s commentary was formed by a medium that wasn’t all that a lot older than she was. Images had come to America scarcely twenty years earlier, and in that quick span of time, it had reworked folks’s sense of themselves, their relation to society, and their follow of politics. What Frederick Douglass referred to as “the age of images” started in 1839, when the Frenchman Louis Daguerre’s photographic course of, the daguerreotype, got here to america. Individuals have been fascinated by the brand new expertise above all as a medium for portraiture. It was the dawning “age of the primary individual singular,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as it, and folks wished footage of themselves. The market answered. As studios opened in cities and cities throughout the nation and the expertise developed, folks sat for portraits in droves. “What an unlimited department of commerce this enterprise of sun-picturing has grown,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote in The Atlantic.

Not everybody loved the sun-picturing straight away. These having their likeness taken for the primary time did so with some mixture of marvel and trepidation. Posing earlier than the digicam, early sitters mentioned they felt drafts of air on their face or tingling of their cheeks. The method was orchestrated by a digicam operator below a blanket—whom Holmes described in one other article as a chemical-wielding “skeleton form, of a few man’s peak, its head coated with a black veil.” The expertise appeared to partake of the occult. And the outcomes, typically ghostly due to the lengthy publicity occasions required, solely strengthened such emotions.

These early sitters weren’t fully incorrect. There was no sorcery concerned, however one thing was taking place to them in entrance of the digicam. Turning into a picture, reckoning with a wholly new type of self-presentation, launched an intense consciousness not simply of the self, however of the face. “Right here,” Holmes wrote of the photographed face, “is the nest of that feeble fowl, self-consciousness, whose brood strays at giant over all of the options.”

The flip aspect of self-awareness was scrutiny. Folks weren’t simply taking a look at themselves; they have been additionally taking a look at others, particularly as technological developments elevated the circulation of images. Whereas the daguerreotype produced a one-off picture, printing images on paper from negatives prolonged the attain of photographs infinitely past the unique, and improved printing strategies helped put ever extra inked engravings of images in standard publications. Images and photographic photographs have been all over the place, and by 1860, even an 11-year-old knew instinctively find out how to look.

Confronting this new actuality, you simply would possibly really feel your cheeks tingle—and also you simply would possibly develop a beard. Because it occurs, the return of facial hair to Western societies correlates with the appearance of pictures. Beards will be extremely photogenic, defining and framing the traces of the face for the digicam. If it was true, as one of many earliest reflections on pictures mentioned, that on this new age everybody should turn into their “personal caricaturist,” the beard was not a foul prop.

In Lincoln’s case, the iconic bearded visage is so indelibly stamped in our minds that it appears to befit the chief who endured the breakup of the Union, the demise of his third son, and all of the horrors of the Civil Warfare—the determine who fought to finish slavery and who, within the stirring Outdated Testomony strains of his second inaugural tackle, uttered essentially the most haunting phrases ever mentioned by an American president. However Lincoln’s venerable, bearded face was at the start a product of the anxious new realities of the photographic age.

The entire personal imperatives to look good have been solely magnified for public figures—extra so for a public determine not recognized to be terribly handsome. One picture helped combat the concept Lincoln was irredeemably unattractive. When he visited New York in February 1860 to ship on the Cooper Union an important speech of his life to this point, Lincoln additionally went to Mathew Brady’s studio for a portrait. The ensuing {photograph}—by Brady’s personal account procured with a lot issue and intensive stagecraft—helped create a good public picture of Lincoln. Standing at three-quarter size, hand resting on two books, Lincoln appeared not awkward and gangly however commanding and dignified. Within the coming months, the picture circulated in several codecs and engraved variations.

Grace Bedell was possible taking a look at a print model of the Cooper Union portrait when she wrote to Lincoln. Taking a look at it now, you may see her level. In that picture, as in others from 1860, Lincoln’s distinguished cheekbones make the cheeks seem hole to the purpose of gauntness, precisely as Bedell mentioned. Others got here to the identical conclusion. Three days earlier than Bedell wrote her letter, a bunch of “True Republicans” writing from New York Metropolis tendered the identical suggestion to Lincoln. After cautious consideration of the images of Lincoln on the buttons they have been sporting, they concluded that he would look a lot better with a beard to bolster his face, in addition to a standing collar to shorten his neck. “‘Our candidate,’” they mentioned, “ought to be the most effective wanting in addition to the most effective of the rival candidates.”

Though Lincoln requested Bedell in his reply if a beard won’t be “foolish,” he started rising one quickly after the alternate. The first patchy shoots have been seen after he gained the election in November 1860; it was totally grown as he ready to journey to Washington in February 1861, throughout which he would cease to greet and embrace Bedell at a whistle-stop in western New York. Lincoln had come into his face—the one that might be recurrently and repeatedly seen in footage via the Civil Warfare and past.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne gained an viewers with Lincoln on task for The Atlantic in 1862, he was entranced by the actual face. Within the preliminary draft of his essay “Mainly About Warfare Issues,” he described Lincoln as “in regards to the homeliest man I ever noticed, but not at all repulsive or unpleasant.” Atlantic editor James T. Fields requested Hawthorne to chop the outline. “Thought-about as a portrait of a dwelling man,” Fields mentioned years later within the journal, “it will not be sensible or tasteful to print.” Hawthorne complied, however he didn’t prefer it. “What a horrible factor,” he complained sardonically, “to attempt to let off slightly little bit of fact into this depressing humbug of a world.”

The reality that Hawthorne wished to specific—that Lincoln’s appears to be like have been redeemed by his kindness and sagacity—is seen in one of many president’s final portraits. Taken by Alexander Gardner in February 1865, it’s a close-up. Lincoln appears to be like off to the aspect. You’ll be able to see the pressure of his presidency in each line in his face, however out of the shadows rises a slight smile. A lot of the beard is gone. There’s little left however a graying goatee. The identical hollowness Grace Bedell noticed is there in his cheeks, deeper and extra profound. After almost 4 years of battle, he’d given these depths which means.