Three Images of the Crowd at Lincoln’s Second Inauguration Discovered at Library of Congress

Details of Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration come into clearer focus with the recent discovery at the Library of Congress of three glass negatives that show the large crowd gathered at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., for the president’s address on March 4, 1865.

These negatives had been labeled long ago as being either the Grand Review of the Armies or the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant. Carol Johnson, a curator of photography at the Library of Congress, spotted the misidentification on Friday, Jan. 4, while checking old logbooks and finding the annotation “Lincoln?” in the margin. Only two other photos of Lincoln’s second inauguration were previously known, but a careful visual comparison confirmed that these three negatives portray the same event.

Images are found in the news release.

Source: LC

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 and is filed under Archives and Special Collections, Libraries and Librarianship, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.