Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Portrait

Mathew Brady photographed Abraham Lincoln at his temporary New York gallery on the morning of 27 February 1860, hours before Lincoln delivered the Cooper Union address that made him a serious presidential contender. Brady drew Lincoln's collar up to shorten the appearance of his long neck and his studio smoothed the lines of his face, producing the beardless image that Republican printers turned into campaign woodcuts, lithographs and cartes de visite through the 1860 election.

Lincoln is widely quoted as later crediting Brady and the speech together with making him president. That line traces to a single source: an 1891 newspaper interview Brady gave in old age, thirty-one years after the fact, recalling his own introduction to the president through Ward Hill Lamon. No contemporary record of Lincoln saying it has been found, and historians who work with Brady's biography treat the interview itself as unreliable, valuable mainly because so little else about Brady survives in his own words.

This is one of at least seven documented photographic sittings between Brady's studio and Lincoln between 1860 and 1864 (Ostendorf numbers including O-17, O-57, O-59, O-60 and O-84), and it is the earliest: a clean-shaven, pre-nomination Lincoln photographed as a candidate rather than as the bearded wartime president of the later Washington sittings, several of which were actually operated by Brady's studio employee Anthony Berger rather than Brady himself.

What the photograph shows

A three-quarter-length standing portrait of Abraham Lincoln, clean-shaven, in a dark suit with the coat left open, his left hand resting on a stack of books set on a small table, a section of a classical column visible behind his right shoulder. The pose is upright rather than seated, which was itself a choice: Lincoln was unusually tall and gaunt, and a standing pose let Brady use his height rather than disguise it.

The image exists today only through prints, chiefly cartes de visite of the standard mid-nineteenth-century format, image roughly 5.7 by 8.9 centimetres on a card mount about 6.4 by 10.2 centimetres, and through later, larger reprints and engraved derivatives made from the same negative or from copy negatives of it. No source consulted for this record locates or describes the original glass plate itself as a surviving, identified object distinct from its prints.

The sitting

Brady made the photograph at his gallery, then operating from temporary rooms at 643 Broadway at the corner of Bleecker Street in New York, on the morning of 27 February 1860, the same day Lincoln was to speak that evening at the Cooper Union. Lincoln had arrived in New York the day before to deliver what his sponsors, the Young Men's Central Republican Union, had billed as a major address, and a visit to the city's most famous photographic gallery was arranged as part of the trip, apparently at the suggestion of his New York hosts rather than as Lincoln's own idea.

Brady later recalled the session as difficult. Lincoln's clothes did not fit well by the standards of an Eastern seaboard studio, his neck was unusually long relative to his collar, and the standard head-clamp used to keep sitters still during the long exposure had to be raised because it was built for shorter men. Brady is recorded as saying of the session, 'I had great trouble in making a natural picture.'

Building the pose

The result was not a simple record of how Lincoln looked that morning; it was a constructed image. Brady left Lincoln's coat unbuttoned to broaden the appearance of his narrow chest and shoulders. He set a small table with books at Lincoln's side, a standard studio device for suggesting learning and gravity in a portrait subject. He positioned a classical column behind Lincoln's shoulder, another stock studio prop associated at the time with dignity and permanence in public-man portraiture.

None of this was unusual for a commercial gallery portrait of a public figure in 1860. What made this sitting different was the subject's subsequent history: within months the studio props built for an out-of-town lawyer's portrait were being reproduced by the tens of thousands as the image of a presidential nominee.

The retouching

Brady's own account, corroborated by the National Portrait Gallery's curatorial material on the sitting, describes two distinct interventions. First, during the sitting itself, Brady adjusted Lincoln's collar upward by hand. Lincoln is reported to have recognized what Brady was doing and remarked, 'I see you want to shorten my neck,' to which Brady is said to have answered, 'That's just it.' This was a physical adjustment made to the sitter before exposure, not retouching of the negative afterward.

Second, and separately, the National Portrait Gallery's account of the negative states that Brady's studio retouched the image itself: smoothing the lines of Lincoln's face and correcting the appearance of his left eye, which had a natural upward drift that struck many sitters and viewers as a slight cast or 'roving' quality. This is retouching in the stricter sense, work done on the negative or a working print rather than on the sitter, and it is the element of the record's brief that most needed a citable source rather than repeated retelling: it rests here on the Smithsonian's own curatorial description of the plate, not on a popular retelling of the anecdote.

A further layer of alteration happened after Brady's negative left his hands. When engravers and lithographers adapted the photograph for magazines, campaign prints and the covers of published versions of the Cooper Union speech, several of them went further still, smoothing Lincoln's notoriously unruly hair and softening his features beyond what Brady's own retouching had done. That later, editorial layer of idealization belongs to the printmakers who reproduced the image, not to Brady's studio, and the two should not be collapsed into a single act of retouching.

The Cooper Union address

The speech Lincoln gave that evening, before a large and skeptical audience organized by the Young Men's Central Republican Union of New York, was a closely argued, heavily researched refutation of Senator Stephen Douglas's claim that the Constitution's framers had not intended for the federal government to restrict slavery in the territories. Historian Harold Holzer, whose Lincoln at Cooper Union is the standard modern study of the speech, has argued that it did more than any single earlier appearance to convince Eastern Republicans, who knew Lincoln mainly as a Western debater against Douglas, that he was a serious national candidate rather than a regional figure.

The speech and the photograph arrived on the same day for a reason that mattered practically as well as symbolically: an Eastern audience unfamiliar with Lincoln's appearance needed an image to go with the newly persuasive text, and Brady's studio, a short walk from the Cooper Union building, supplied one before the ink on the newspaper accounts of the speech was dry.

From studio print to campaign material

The photograph's political life began after Lincoln's nomination in May 1860, not immediately after the sitting. Once Lincoln was the Republican candidate, the image was adapted for reproduction well beyond the limits of a single photographic print. Harper's Weekly converted it into a full-page wood engraving illustrating its coverage of Lincoln's nomination, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper used the same image for its own election coverage later in 1860. Harper's Weekly's version reversed the image left to right in the engraving process and added decorative elements, including buffalo imagery, that had no relation to the photograph itself.

Print firms including Currier and Ives, J. C. Buttre, and Ensign, Bridgman and Fanning issued their own lithographed and engraved versions, in both black and white and hand-colored formats, for sale as standalone campaign prints, broadsides, and covers for pamphlet editions of the Cooper Union speech text. Cartes de visite of the photograph itself were also sold, though the format's mass popularity in the United States is generally dated to slightly after 1860, meaning the carte de visite as a mass-collected keepsake object reached its widest circulation only after the campaign had concluded, even though Brady's gallery had begun selling cartes de visite of the sitting during 1860.

The cumulative effect, as both Holzer and Smithsonian curators have argued, was to give a candidate largely unknown east of the Appalachians a settled, dignified visual identity months before most Eastern voters ever heard him speak.

The quotation, examined

The line most often attached to this photograph, that Lincoln himself said 'Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me President,' or in a slightly different wording 'Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President,' is repeated across popular accounts of the sitting as settled fact. It is not.

The only source for the quotation identified in the research for this record is Brady's own recollection, given in an interview with the journalist George Alfred Townsend, published in The World (New York) on 12 April 1891, under the title 'Still Taking Pictures: Brady, the Grand Old Man of American Photography.' In that interview, at the age of roughly sixty-nine and three decades after Lincoln's death, Brady recalled that when Lincoln's aide and marshal Ward Hill Lamon introduced him to the newly inaugurated president, Lincoln replied, 'Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President.'

Several things follow from that. First, this is a self-reported anecdote, related by the one person whose reputation it flattered, about a private remark supposedly made three decades before the interview was recorded no independent witness, contemporary letter, diary, or newspaper account from 1861 corroborates it. Second, the interview itself is treated cautiously by historians who work with Brady's biography precisely because so little other material survives in Brady's own words; a research summary of Brady's life notes that the 1891 Townsend interview 'is exploited in many accounts of his life' because of 'the dearth of material directly relating to the man,' language that describes reliance born of necessity rather than of confidence in the interview's accuracy. Third, Brady in 1891 was an elderly man in declining financial and physical circumstances giving one of the only extended interviews of his life, a context that gives him an obvious, human incentive to recall his own historical importance in the most flattering possible light.

None of this proves Lincoln never said anything like it. It does mean the sentence should not be presented as a documented statement of Lincoln's. It is Brady's memory of Lincoln's words, recorded for the first and only time three decades after the fact, in an interview whose reliability specialists in Brady's life already treat with caution for unrelated reasons. This record states that plainly rather than repeating the line as settled history.

Distinguishing this sitting from Brady's other photographs of Lincoln

Brady or his studio photographed Lincoln on at least seven occasions between 1860 and 1865, and the resulting images are frequently confused with one another in popular reproduction because most show a similar three-quarter or seated pose against a plain studio background. The standard reference numbering for Lincoln photographs, established by Lloyd Ostendorf and used alongside the earlier numbering of Frederick Hill Meserve, identifies this 27 February 1860 sitting as Ostendorf no. 17 and Meserve no. 20, and states specifically that it was Brady's first photograph of Lincoln.

It is not to be confused with, among others: the sitting of 6 April 1861 in Washington (Ostendorf no. 57), made shortly after Lincoln's first inauguration; a pair of sittings on 16 May 1861 in Washington (Ostendorf nos. 59 and 60); a Washington sitting of 8 January 1864, which produced the pose sometimes called 'The Solitary Pine' (Ostendorf no. 84, Meserve no. 75); and the extensively reproduced Washington sitting of 9 February 1864, at which Brady's studio operator Anthony Berger, not Brady personally, photographed a bearded, wartime Lincoln in several poses (including Ostendorf nos. 91 and 92), one of which became the basis for the engraved Lincoln portrait used on the United States five-dollar bill from 1914 until a 2000 redesign. The 1864 Berger sittings show a physically changed man: four years older, bearded since late 1860, and photographed as a wartime president rather than a candidate. Any image purporting to show 'the Cooper Union photograph' that in fact shows a bearded Lincoln belongs to one of these later sittings, not to this one.

Survival and custody of the negatives

Brady's business records and negative stock did not pass down as a single, intact archive. Brady himself lost effective control of much of his negative stock through the bankruptcy that followed the Panic of 1873; the government's wartime negatives eventually went to the War Department and then the National Archives, while a large body of studio portrait negatives, including presumably much of his pre-war political portraiture, passed through several later owners. Some negatives went to Levin C. Handy, a nephew of Brady's wife who had apprenticed under him and continued operating a photographic studio in Washington; Handy's family holdings, found in deteriorating condition, were purchased by the Library of Congress in 1954 and now form the Brady-Handy collection. A separate body of Brady studio material was assembled across the early twentieth century by the collector Frederick Hill Meserve, whose holdings were later inherited by his daughter Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and eventually acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and by Yale University's Beinecke Library and Art Gallery.

No source consulted for this record specifies which institution, if any, holds the original glass negative exposed at the 27 February 1860 sitting, as distinct from period prints made from it. The Library of Congress's own catalog records describe its holdings of this image as prints, not as the original negative. This is recorded here as an open question rather than resolved by assumption.

What is unresolved

The location and survival of the original glass plate, as opposed to prints made from it, is not established in any source consulted. The full print run and original retail price of the 1860 cartes de visite of this sitting are not documented in the sources consulted. And the anecdote at the center of the image's fame, that Lincoln personally credited Brady with making him president, rests on a single, decades-later, self-interested recollection rather than on any contemporary record, a distinction this record has tried to state plainly rather than smooth over.