Document of the Week
This week’s document isn’t really a document–it’s a picture. It’s a print of Lincoln based on the famous Cooper Union portrait by Matthew Brady. If you go to the document section and click on the image to open the document viewer you can see a copy of the original Brady photo.
The Cooper Union image is one of the few full-length portarits of the lean and lanky Lincoln and was widely used as a campaign image in his 1860 campaign. The original photo was taken while Lincoln was in New York to give a speech at the Cooper Union. For more on the speech, check out Harold Holzer’s book Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President. This engraving was made in England in early 1861, after Lincoln had already won the election and foreign nations were becoming interested in him.
