The earliest known daguerreotype image of Abraham Lincoln

October 2, 2010 by  
Filed under Patrick's Blog

This is fascinating.


The basic story is this: In 1977, Albert Kaplan, an antiquarian collector of 19th-century artifacts, shelled out $27 to buy an old daguerreotype called “Portrait of a Young Man” from a New York art gallery. As he scrutinized the face in the picture, he became convinced that he was looking at a young Abraham Lincoln.


The following video elaborates how he became certain that the youth in the picture grew up to become the revered President of the United States who presided over the Civil War, freed the slaves, and was cut down by an assassin’s bullet at age 56.


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5 Responses to “The earliest known daguerreotype image of Abraham Lincoln”
  1. Patrick Madrid says:

    No, not exactly. Lincoln's 1863 "Emancipation Proclamation" officially declared the freedom of approximately 3/4 of the slaves on U.S. soil (i.e., those living under the Confederacy). Their actual, physical emancipation happened gradually, as the war wound down. The slaves in the North were also freed pursuant to Lincoln's order when the war ended. And just to clarify, the 13 Amendment, abolishing slavery, was enacted in 1865, not 1866. See http://tinyurl.com/13th-amendment.

    • louisianais says:

      I stand corrected. But was slavery completely abolished? Last year I had an amendment to the Louisiana state constitution on my ballot. I voted for it but it failed. Prisoners convicted of crimes will continue to perform unpaid or underpaid labor. Even more ironic is that some of this labor will be performed in prisons operated by private companies. And on the other criminal human trafficking is epidemic in the United States. So what did the war actually end? Could it have ended the interruption of the flow of tariffs and duties collected in Southern ports and transferred to the US Treasury?

  2. louisianais says:

    The slaves were freed by the passage of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1866.

  3. Sheila Deeth says:

    Neat. Thanks.

  4. MemoriaDei says:

    hmmm, very very interesting, I do believe. But, I don't believe it's the same person. Thanks for the video, though…I've never seen anything like that before. Cool beans!

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