Our Collection

At the Institute’s core is the Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the great archives in American history. More than 85,000 items cover five hundred years of American history, from Columbus’s 1493 letter describing the New World through the end of the twentieth century.

Lincoln or related images, mostly cartes re: Lincoln, funeral, family, Booth [decimalized]

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Gilder Lehrman Collection #: GLC05136 Author/Creator: Place Written: [various places] Type: Photograph Date: 1861-1865 ca. Pagination: 54 items Order a Copy

Carte de visites, stereographs, etc. from E. & H. T. Anthony and others. Several are later reprints. Includes 2 Lincoln portrait stereographs from Anthony's "Prominent Persons," 13 stereos of Lincoln's funeral; 31 CDVs of Lincoln, his family and John Wilkes (7) and Edwin Booth. The collection contains a souvenir booklet of 12 CDVs, an early half-tone portrait enclosed in a brass medal and others. The cartes include Ostendorf 17, 51, 53, 55, 60A, 73A, 86, 91, 92-variant, 93-variant and 112. Detailed inventory available.

The collection consists of 54 items, including carte de visite, cabinet card, and stereocard images, a photograph album, and two keepsake objects from the Civil War period.
The images in this collection chiefly depict Abraham Lincoln and members of the Lincoln family, including several variations of the bust portrait found on the five-dollar bill (#12 and 13), a photo engraving of Lincoln with his wife and sons Robert and Tad, with an added portrait of his deceased son Willie (#14), a view of Mary Lincoln with sons Willie and Tad (#19), and an image of Lincoln's Springfield home in the summer of 1860 (#21). The collection also includes a number of images of John Wilkes Booth (#23-30), as well as scenes of Ford's Theatre (#36) and Lincoln's funeral processions in Philadelphia (#37-38), New York (#39-43), and Springfield, Ill. (#44-46). One particularly interesting photo in this collection depicts what is probably a Savannah, Ga., street scene sometime after Lincoln's assassination. This photograph shows several African American men gathered beneath a sign reading "Republicans. Lincoln Lives" (#22).
Additional items in the collection include a miniature photograph album (#52) containing eleven cartes de visite and one engraving, a miniature colored lithograph of Lincoln housed in a small metal frame (#53), and several small dried fern fronds from staff on which the flag was raised at Ft. Sumter.
The collection is arranged by format and subject in the following series:
I. Cartes de visite of Abraham Lincoln.
II. Cartes de visite of the Lincoln family and other Lincoln-related images
III. John Wilkes Booth cartes de visite
IV. Cabinet card and stereocards
V. Album and objects
The descriptions below include the caption in quotations when available, followed by the name, place, and date of publication for the item at hand, since most of the images in this collection are published cartes de visite and stereo cards. The photographer's name, as well as the place and date of the original photograph are also included when known. Elements describing the original photograph appear after the abbreviation "Ph." This information is succeeded by the type of image (carte de visite, cabinet card, etc.), the item's dimensions (in centimeters), mount type, markings, and a brief description of the image. For reference purposes, many of the images described below also include the number assigned to them by Lloyd Ostendorf in his exhaustive work Lincoln's Photographs: A Complete Album (Dayton, Ohio: Rockywood Press, 1998).

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