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Jack Smith Lincoln Graphics Collection
(P 0406)

The Jack Smith Lincoln Graphics Collection consists of over 750 original photographs, lithographs, engravings, and busts of Lincoln. These items were collected for over forty years by South Bend, Indiana, Lincoln collector Jack Smith. The collection includes contemporary and later images of Lincoln with his family, generals and cabinet members. Also included are political cartoons, illustrated sheet music, and book and newspaper illustrations of the period. Taken together, they comprise one of the most significant collections of historical Lincoln images. Lincoln was the first President to be extensively photographed and, due in large part to his assassination at the close of the Civil War, the subject of extensive graphic illustration and artwork.

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Daniel R. Weinberg Lincoln Conspirators Collection
(P 0409)

The Daniel R. Weinberg Lincoln Conspirators Collection consists of ninety photographs, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, and newspapers relating to the trial and execution or imprisonment of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. Included are such items as the handwritten execution order read at the execution by General John Hartranft; original sequential photographs of the execution taken by Alexander Gardner, and original carte-de-visite photographs of conspirators John Wilkes Booth, David Herold, and John Surratt.

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Alexander Gardner Lincoln Glass Plate Negative (P 0420)

The Alexander Gardner Lincoln Glass Plate Negative, the striking centerpiece of the IHS Lincoln Collections, is the original collodion wet-plate negative of the portrait of Abraham Lincoln made by Alexander Gardner. Lincoln sat for this photograph on 8 November 1863, just eleven days before delivering the Gettysburg Address. It is one of the best-known photographs of Lincoln and was used by sculptor Daniel Chester French as the model for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The collection includes a modern positive print of the image and the period envelope in which the glass plate negative was originally stored.

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Other Lincoln-Related Manuscripts in the Collections

Other Lincoln-related Manuscripts and Visuals in the IHS Collections were joined by the above three new collections. Among these items is a leaf from the sum book used by Lincoln as a boy in southern Indiana to record his arithmetic exercises; several of Lincoln's endorsements of miltary and political appointments during the Civil War; letters from Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton regarding Indiana troops in the war; letters regarding the visits of both Lincoln's inaugural train stop and his funeral train in Indianapolis; written reminiscences of Lincoln by those who knew him as a boy in Indiana; and drawings by Hoosier General Lew Wallace of the conspirators, created as Wallace sat on the military commission trying the conspirators.