The Problem With Abe Lincoln's Face

The Atlantic

10-04-2025

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Looking at a picture of Abraham Lincoln in October 1860, the 11-year-old Grace Bedell claimed to have solved the problem of Lincoln's face and wrote him a letter to tell him about it. The presidential candidate was well aware of the problem. As he came into public view in 1860, jokes about Lincoln's appearance abounded. A popular anti-Lincoln song imagined his supporters begging not to have his picture shown. Bedell, of Westfield, New York, offered a solution: Lincoln should grow a beard. 'If you will let your whiskers grow,' she wrote, 'you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.'
Bedell's observation was shaped by a medium that wasn't all that much older than she was. Photography had come to America scarcely two decades earlier, and in that short span of time, it had transformed people's sense of themselves, their relation to society, and their practice of politics. What Frederick Douglass called 'the age of pictures' began in 1839, when the Frenchman Louis Daguerre's photographic process, the daguerreotype, came to the United States. Americans were fascinated by the new technology above all as a medium for portraiture. It was the dawning 'age of the first person singular,' as Ralph Waldo Emerson called it, and people wanted pictures of themselves. The market answered. As studios opened in towns and cities across the country and the technology evolved, people sat for portraits in droves. 'What a vast branch of commerce this business of sun-picturing has grown,' Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote in The Atlantic.
Not everyone enjoyed the sun-picturing right away. Those having their likeness taken for the first time did so with some combination of wonder and trepidation. Posing before the camera, early sitters said they felt drafts of air on their face or tingling in their cheeks. The process was orchestrated by a camera operator under a blanket—whom Holmes described in another article as a chemical-wielding 'skeleton shape, of about a man's height, its head covered with a black veil.' The experience seemed to partake of the occult. And the results, often ghostly because of the long exposure times required, only strengthened such feelings.
These early sitters weren't entirely wrong. There was no sorcery involved, but something was happening to them in front of the camera. Becoming an image, reckoning with an entirely new form of self-presentation, introduced an intense awareness not just of the self, but of the face. 'Here,' Holmes wrote of the photographed face, 'is the nest of that feeble fowl, self-consciousness, whose brood strays at large over all the features.'
The flip side of self-awareness was scrutiny. People weren't just looking at themselves; they were also looking at others, especially as technological advancements increased the circulation of photographs. Whereas the daguerreotype produced a one-off image, printing photographs on paper from negatives extended the reach of images infinitely beyond the original, and improved printing techniques helped put ever more inked engravings of photographs in popular publications. Photographs and photographic images were everywhere, and by 1860, even an 11-year-old knew instinctively how to look.
Confronting this new reality, you just might feel your cheeks tingle—and you just might grow a beard. As it happens, the return of facial hair to Western societies correlates with the advent of photography. Beards can be highly photogenic, defining and framing the lines of the face for the camera. If it was true, as one of the earliest reflections on photography said, that in this new age everyone must become their 'own caricaturist,' the beard was not a bad prop.
In Lincoln's case, the iconic bearded visage is so indelibly stamped in our minds that it seems to befit the leader who endured the breakup of the Union, the death of his third son, and all the horrors of the Civil War—the figure who fought to end slavery and who, in the stirring Old Testament strains of his second inaugural address, uttered the most haunting words ever said by an American president. But Lincoln's venerable, bearded face was first and foremost a product of the anxious new realities of the photographic age.
All of the private imperatives to look good were only magnified for public figures—more so for a public figure not known to be terribly good-looking. One image helped fight the idea that Lincoln was irredeemably unattractive. When he visited New York in February 1860 to deliver at the Cooper Union the most important speech of his life to date, Lincoln also went to Mathew Brady's studio for a portrait. The resulting photograph —by Brady's own account procured with much difficulty and extensive stagecraft—helped create a favorable public image of Lincoln. Standing at three-quarter length, hand resting on two books, Lincoln appeared not awkward and gangly but commanding and dignified. In the coming months, the image circulated in different formats and engraved variations.
Grace Bedell was likely looking at a print version of the Cooper Union portrait when she wrote to Lincoln. Looking at it now, you can see her point. In that image, as in others from 1860, Lincoln's prominent cheekbones make the cheeks appear hollow to the point of gauntness, exactly as Bedell said. Others came to the same conclusion. Three days before Bedell wrote her letter, a group of 'True Republicans' writing from New York City tendered the same suggestion to Lincoln. After careful consideration of the pictures of Lincoln on the buttons they were wearing, they concluded that he would look much better with a beard to bolster his face, as well as a standing collar to shorten his neck. ''Our candidate,'' they said, 'should be the best looking as well as the best of the rival candidates.'
Although Lincoln asked Bedell in his reply if a beard might not be 'silly,' he began growing one soon after the exchange. The first patchy shoots were visible after he won the election in November 1860; it was fully grown as he prepared to journey to Washington in February 1861, during which he would stop to greet and embrace Bedell at a whistle-stop in western New York. Lincoln had come into his face—the one that would be regularly and repeatedly seen in pictures through the Civil War and beyond.
When Nathaniel Hawthorne gained an audience with Lincoln on assignment for The Atlantic in 1862, he was entranced by the real face. In the initial draft of his essay ' Chiefly About War Matters,' he described Lincoln as 'about the homeliest man I ever saw, yet by no means repulsive or disagreeable.' Atlantic editor James T. Fields asked Hawthorne to cut the description. 'Considered as a portrait of a living man,' Fields said years later in the magazine, 'it would not be wise or tasteful to print.' Hawthorne complied, but he didn't like it. 'What a terrible thing,' he complained sardonically, 'to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world.'
The truth that Hawthorne wanted to express—that Lincoln's looks were redeemed by his kindness and sagacity—is visible in one of the president's last portraits. Taken by Alexander Gardner in February 1865, it is a close-up. Lincoln looks off to the side. You can see the strain of his presidency in every line in his face, but out of the shadows rises a slight smile. Much of the beard is gone. There is little left but a graying goatee. The same hollowness Grace Bedell saw is there in his cheeks, deeper and more profound. After nearly four years of war, he'd given those depths meaning.