Abraham Lincoln: Portrayed in the Collections of the Indiana Historical Society

By Harold Holzer
Illustrated, maps, bibliography endnotes, index, 216 pp., 2007. University of Oklahoma Press, 2800 Venture Dr., Norman, OK 73069-8216, $24.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Ted Alexander
James A. Percoco teaches U.S. and Applied History at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Va. He is author of A Passion for the Past: Creative Teaching of U.S. History and Divided We Stand: Teaching About Conflict in U.S. History. Percoco is a USA TODAY All-USA teacher and is an adjunct professor in the School of Education at American University where he serves as History Educator-in-Residence.

Review:
Today people get their visual information primarily through cyberspace. We live in a world of YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. For those alive during the Civil War and the subsequent decades that followed, visual literacy was often measured by the number and variety of prints and drawings that hung on the walls of one's parlor or living room.

Images mattered then as much as they do today. An image of Abraham Lincoln was almost always ubiquitous. Eight hundred of these prints, drawings, photographs and Lincoln-related illustrations were purchased in 2003 by the Indiana Historical Society from noted Lincoln collector Jack Smith.

At the same time the Historical Society purchased the entire Daniel R. Weinberg Lincoln Conspirators Collection and the one-of-a-kind original collodion wet-plate negative of Alexander Gardner's famous photograph of Lincoln captured only a few days before he delivered his Gettysburg Address.

One hundred fifty of these images can now be seen in catalog fashion thanks to the efforts of the Indiana Historical Society and noted Lincoln iconographer Harold Holzer, who edited and provides the Introduction to this stunning plate book.

Using images as a kind of rubric, Holzer's text provides readers with a solid historiographical context to the illustrations that are carefully arranged and presented by Emily Castle and Barbara Quigley of the Indiana Historical Society. The full range of the illustrated Lincoln is here, from rugged rail-splitter, to prairie candidate, to family man, to cartoon buffoon, to Great Emancipator and martyred saint.

As with his previous works, Holzer's narrative is lively and detailed, chock full of anecdotes about singular images combined with a crafty analysis measuring each work on its artistic and pecuniary value of the times.

Like a fine dinner served up with great presentation the illustrations in this book serve as a kind of mirror to how Americans viewed Lincoln visually. This is not so much a book about how Lincoln saw himself, though Holzer provides us a glimpse in places of Lincoln's thinking; rather it is how Victorian Era artists chose to portray the legacy of the 16th President and how the "Lincoln image" business flourished during and after the Civil War.

Well-organized and reader-friendly this book will make a fine addition to anyone's Lincoln library.