Abraham Lincoln: From Homely to Heroic

"I have stepped out upon this platform that I may see you and that you may see me," President-elect Abraham Lincoln announced when his inaugural train steamed into tiny Painesville, Ohio, on a chill February morning in 1861. "And in the arrangement," he quipped to the curious crowd lining the tracks, "I have the best of the bargain."

No one on hand would have disagreed. Then how did a face that one critic of the day described as "sooty and scoundrely" become a beloved national icon? The answer may lie with the unlikeliest image-maker imaginable: modest Abraham Lincoln himself.

Growing up on the prairie, coming of age in New Salem and Springfield, Ill., campaigning for public office, or presenting his weather-beaten, newly bearded face to a curious public en route to Washington, Lincoln never harbored any illusions about his looks—or lack of them.

An old Indiana acquaintance labeled him as a "drowl looking boy" even at age 10. Growing "battered and bronzed" as a young man, Lincoln's leathery skin grew littered with unsightly moles and pitted as if "scarred by vitriol." His huge nose made him look like he was sniffing at some suspicious odor, while pitcher-handle ears flapped akimbo from his smallish, coconut-shaped head. Framing this startling face was a thatch of unruly hair that, he joked, "had a way of getting up in the world." (He once refused the loan of a colonel's comb, saying: "Now, if you have anything you comb your horse's mane with, that might do.")

It is entirely likely Lincoln developed his famous sense of humor in self-defense—mocking himself before he could be mocked by others. Not that he lacked assailants. Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan once dismissed him as a "gorilla." (Lincoln had the last laugh visually, wearing his high stovepipe hat when he posed with McClellan on the Antietam battlefield, making the diminutive general look like a midget.) Elegant New England author Nathaniel Hawthorne sneered, after an 1862 White House visit, that Lincoln was, quite simply, "the homeliest man I ever saw." When Hawthorne submitted this description to the Atlantic Monthly, his editors were so shocked they censored the disobliging line from his published report.

"It is allowed to be ugly in this world," Lincoln once sighed to a portrait painter, "but not as ugly as I am." Within that anecdote lurks the vital clue to the robust, counterintuitive endurance of the Lincoln image. After all, he said it while posing for an artist. Homely or not, he proved willing, even eager, to have his uncomely "phiz" recorded by photographers, painters, and sculptors, all the while making a political virtue out of self-deprecation. No leader ever fussed over his appearance less, or cultivated its reproduction more.

At the dawn of the era of photography, Abraham Lincoln could hardly be bothered with the cumbersome sittings the primitive technology required. Only occasionally coaxed into galleries by friends and colleagues, he sat for no more than a handful of rustic camera studies before journeying to New York to deliver his Cooper Union speech in 1860.

There, Lincoln discovered the power of his own image. At Mathew Brady's plush Broadway gallery, he posed for a brilliantly arranged portrait that softened the harsh lines in his face and emphasized his powerful frame against the evocative backdrop of a classical pillar and a pile of thick books. Brady transformed the prairie politician into a statesman. Widely copied and distributed during a presidential campaign in which, true to the tradition of the time, Lincoln did no campaigning of his own, the picture became his surrogate before image-starved voters. Months later, the victor acknowledged: "Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me president." He had come to understand that images, no less important than words, could make or break political reputations.

During the campaign, Lincoln had become a remarkably willing subject for artists in all media. Examining his first portrait in oils, he told painter Thomas Hicks: "I think the picture has a somewhat pleasanter expression than I usually have, but that, perhaps, is not an objection." That was because he hoped the "pleasant" profile would influence voters when lithographed for distribution in crucial New York.

Busy as the nominee became, juggling an avalanche of correspondence and throngs of demanding visitors, Lincoln patiently sat for a succession of painters who followed Hicks to Springfield. Along the way, Lincoln modestly convinced each artist that he was posing under protest, was too ugly to be captured on canvas, and could barely comprehend why all the fuss was being made. While playing at being self-effacing, he slyly encouraged works that spread his likeness throughout the nation and made a virtue of his rough-hewn looks.

"I cannot see why all you artists want a likeness of me," he once joked, "unless it is because I am the homeliest man in the state of Illinois." There was much truth in the outburst. Lincoln sensed he needed what today's political handlers call "image mediation." In his willingness to cooperate he became increasingly aware of how such likenesses could ease concerns about his appearance (a Southern newspaper had branded him "a horrid looking wretch"), benefit him politically, and ultimately illustrate, even influence, his place in history.

Posing was no simple matter; it required considerable effort. Long before the Kodak revolution, much less the age of the cellphone snapshot, photos routinely took many minutes to arrange and at least 20 seconds of frozen immobility to record. Painters needed days, even weeks, to prepare. Lincoln typically insisted, "Don't fasten me into a chair"—but unfailingly proved cooperative.

Sculpture was the most demanding of all artistic media. But Lincoln let Leonard Wells Volk slather his face with wet plaster, straws in his nostrils to facilitate breathing, and held still for an hour while the goop hardened into a life mask. Lincoln found the process "anything but agreeable," but he later returned to Volk's studio to sit for a bust, even agreeing to shed some clothes so Volk could capture "his breast and brawny shoulders." Lincoln must have been embarrassed. He fled the gallery so quickly he forgot to pull up his undershirt and had to creep sheepishly back to Volk's rooms when passersby on the street laughingly pointed to the sleeves he was trailing below his coattails.

Then why did he submit to the process? More than a decade earlier, Lincoln had gone to Washington as a congressman. Outside the U. S. Capitol he saw Horatio Greenough's controversial but imposing statue of a bare-chested George Washington as a Roman god. Although mocked as a "Venus in the bath," the colossal marble obviously impressed the freshman representative. Why else would he later pose half-naked for Volk? Only because he harbored the dream that he might someday inspire heroic sculpture himself.

Eventually he did. Even once the Civil War sapped his time and energy, President Lincoln made time for image-makers. Sculptors William Marshall Swayne, Sarah Fisher Ames, Clark Mills, and Vinnie Ream poked and prodded him to make what Lincoln deprecated as "mud heads," yet for which he cheerfully sat. He visited local photography galleries to provide his public a succession of increasingly sympathetic portraits for their family albums. And once he signed the Emancipation Proclamation—tellingly confiding, "If my name ever goes into history it will be because of this act"—Lincoln encouraged still more artists to immortalize him, now with an eye not just on election but on reputation. One of them, Francis B. Carpenter, enjoyed the run of the White House for six full months to create the monumental painting of Lincoln reading the first draft of his Emancipation Proclamation to his fractious cabinet—a canvas adapted into one of the best-selling engravings of the 19th century and recently revived for the cover of Doris Kearns Goodwin's best-selling book, Team of Rivals.

Even Lincoln would have been amazed by the avalanche of iconic images he ultimately inspired—few of which, from the ubiquitous copper penny (the model photo was posed by Carpenter) to the singular statue in the Lincoln Memorial (whose hands were modeled after a cast by Volk), would exist absent his carefully cloaked enthusiasm.

Unveiling a statue of Lincoln lifting a liberated slave from his knees—a work that seems politically incorrect today but attracted thousands of admirers to Washington for its 1876 dedication—ex-slave Frederick Douglass urged Americans to "multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls." Lincoln, in his savvy, disarming, diversionary, occasionally even disingenuous way, made sure they could.