The Downside 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 properly conscious of the issue. As he got here into public view in 1860, jokes about Lincoln’s look abounded. A well-liked anti-Lincoln music imagined his supporters begging to not have his image proven. Bedell, of Westfield, New York, provided an answer: Lincoln ought to develop a beard. “If you’ll let your whiskers develop,” she wrote, “you’ll look an ideal deal higher in your face is so skinny.”

Bedell’s remark 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 known as “the age of images” started in 1839, when the Frenchman Louis Daguerre’s photographic course of, the daguerreotype, got here to the US. Individuals have been fascinated by the brand new expertise above all as a medium for portraiture. It was the dawning “age of the primary particular person singular,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson known as it, and other people wished photos 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 immediately. These having their likeness taken for the primary time did so with some mixture of surprise and trepidation. Posing earlier than the digital camera, early sitters stated they felt drafts of air on their face or tingling of their cheeks. The method was orchestrated by a digital camera operator beneath a blanket—whom Holmes described in one other article as a chemical-wielding “skeleton form, of a few man’s peak, its head lined 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 solely improper. There was no sorcery concerned, however one thing was occurring to them in entrance of the digital camera. Changing 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 massive over all of the options.”

The flip aspect of self-awareness was scrutiny. Individuals 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 pictures infinitely past the unique, and improved printing methods helped put ever extra inked engravings of images in widespread publications. Images and photographic pictures have been all over the place, and by 1860, even an 11-year-old knew instinctively easy methods to look.

Confronting this new actuality, you simply may really feel your cheeks tingle—and also you simply may develop a beard. Because it occurs, the return of facial hair to Western societies correlates with the appearance of images. Beards might be extremely photogenic, defining and framing the traces of the face for the digital camera. If it was true, as one of many earliest reflections on images stated, that on this new age everybody should turn out to be their “personal caricaturist,” the beard was not a nasty 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 Battle—the determine who fought to finish slavery and who, within the stirring Previous Testomony strains of his second inaugural deal with, uttered essentially the most haunting phrases ever stated by an American president. However Lincoln’s venerable, bearded face was initially a product of the anxious new realities of the photographic age.

All the non-public imperatives to look good have been solely magnified for public figures—extra so for a public determine not identified 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 a very powerful 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 in depth 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 possibly can see her level. In that picture, as in others from 1860, Lincoln’s outstanding cheekbones make the cheeks seem hole to the purpose of gauntness, precisely as Bedell stated. 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 significantly better with a beard to bolster his face, in addition to a standing collar to shorten his neck. “‘Our candidate,’” they stated, “must be the perfect trying in addition to the perfect 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 change. The first patchy shoots have been seen after he gained the election in November 1860; it was absolutely 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 repeatedly and repeatedly seen in photos via the Civil Battle and past.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne gained an viewers with Lincoln on task for The Atlantic in 1862, he was entranced by the true face. Within the preliminary draft of his essay “Mainly About Battle Issues,” he described Lincoln as “concerning the homeliest man I ever noticed, but on no account repulsive or unpleasant.” Atlantic editor James T. Fields requested Hawthorne to chop the outline. “Thought-about as a portrait of a residing man,” Fields stated years later within the journal, “it might 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 a bit little bit of fact into this depressing humbug of a world.”

The reality that Hawthorne wished to precise—that Lincoln’s appears 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 off to the aspect. You possibly can 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 practically 4 years of warfare, he’d given these depths that means.