Abraham Lincoln As You’ve Never Seen Him

Follow the 16th President of the United States from his meteoric rise to his untimely demise in stunning stereoscope!

In 1839, when photography shouldered its way onto the world stage with a visual splendor unlike anything preceding it, Abraham Lincoln, at thirty, was nurturing a young political career as a third-term legislator in the Illinois House of Representatives while building his new law practice in Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln undoubtedly read newspaper reports about the invention of photography, replete with awe-inspiring descriptions penned by writers who struggled to find words to describe how a photograph looked to a people who had never seen such a thing. “They are the most remarkable objects of curiosity and admiration, in the arts, that we ever beheld,” wrote the editor of The Knickerbocker in December 1839 after seeing some of the first photographs (known as “daguerreotypes” for their inventor, Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre) on display in New York City. “Their exquisite perfection almost transcends the bounds of sober belief,” inventor and painter Samuel F. B. Morse wrote.

The new invention was yet another shining achievement of civilisation’s progress – and another reason for antebellum Americans to marvel at how modern was the time in which they lived. The steam engine was revolutionising transportation, and the locomotive, also known as the iron horse, was coursing through the countryside, chugging from one city to the next with remarkable speed and ease. In the 1830s, Morse himself had perfected his telegraph, which fired Morse code messages across vast distances like flashes of lightning. And a newfangled machine called a reaper harvested crops faster than an entire crew of workers, be they free men or slaves.

It was an age of philosophical enlightenment, too, and religious reaffirmation. Across the country, Americans rededicated themselves to the moral values of their Christian heritage, and so began to look at the inconvenient truth of slavery as a blemish on democracy’s lofty ideals. By the 1830s, the issue of involuntary servitude had been a matter of debate in North America for at least 80 years. The tone of the discussion sharpened, however, when a Massachusetts social reformer, William Lloyd Garrison, began to frame slavery in a religious context, insisting that owning slaves was a sin against God. In 1831, Garrison established a weekly newspaper, The Liberator, devoted to the eradication of slavery, and, through it, helped launch the abolitionist movement. The South, whose agricultural economy was dependent on slave labour, held up Garrison as a criminal, and such rancor grew as years and then decades passed.

More information and images at: Gizmodo