Lincoln (125 page)

Lincoln visits McClellan’s headquarters after Antietam. Baffled by McClellan’s inexplicable reluctance to advance after defeating Lee’s army at Antietam, Lincoln visited the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac.

Library of Congress

THREE REPUBLICAN RADICALS WHO PUSHED LINCOLN TOWARD EMANCIPATION

Charles Sumner

The National Archives

Horace Greeley

The National Archives

“A PRACTICAL REMINDER” Colonel David H. Strother’s cartoon captured the impatience felt by Lincoln and many other Northerners at McClellan’s slowness in advancing on the Confederate capital of Richmond.

Chicago Historical Society

Frederick Douglass

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

“FIRST READING OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN” This engraving, made from Francis B. Carpenter’s huge oil painting completed in 1864, shows the President reading the draft of his Emancipation Proclamation to members of the cabinet. On the left are Edward M. Stanton (seated) and Salmon P. Chase; William H. Seward is seated in front of the table, and Gideon Welles, Caleb B. Smith, Montgomery Blair, and Edward Bates are behind it. A parchment copy of the Constitution lies on the cabinet table, and a painting of Andrew Jackson is faintly visible through the chandelier.

Library of Congress

“ABRAHAM LINCOLN WRITING THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION” This chromolithograph, made from an oil painting by David Gilmour Blythe in 1863, depicts a homespun Lincoln (his rail-splitter’s maul is in the foreground) who has pushed aside the state-rights theories of John C. Calhoun and John Randolph and has carelessly allowed a bust of James Buchanan to hang from the bookcase, while he rests his hand on the Holy Bible and heeds the injunction of Andrew Jackson: “The Union Must & Shall be Preserved.”

The Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana (#2051)

TWO VIEWS OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

“WRITING THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION” Adalbert Johann Volck’s 1864 etching gives the Copperhead version of the same event, showing Lincoln, with his foot on the Constitution, writing with a pen dipped in the devil’s inkstand. On the wall one painting depicts John Brown as a saint and another shows the atrocities that followed a slave insurrection in Santo Domingo.

The Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana (#3252)

Because he was so tall, Lincoln did not like standing for a portrait, but this full-length photograph, made by one of Mathew Brady’s assistants in April 1863, shows a poised and surprisingly youthful President.

Meserve-Kunhardt Collection

THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1864