Abe Lincoln photo made during his 1858 ascendancy donated to his museum in Illinois
SPRINGFIELD, Sep 29: During his momentous U.S. Senate campaign against Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln sat for a photograph after politicking in western Illinois and presented one of the copies to a man severely injured while testing a cannon for Lincoln’s campaign rally.
As a small measure of compassion, Lincoln presented one version of the image to the injured man, Charles Lame, who overcame a deadly infection in an arm torn up by the blast with the help of flesh-eating maggots.
The tale provides an unlikely, ghastly background to the original 1858 ambrotype created during the future nation-saving Civil War president’s ascendancy, an image which the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum has added to its collection, officials said Tuesday.
The ambrotype given to Lame remained in the family and was inherited by Mary Davidson of Hendersonville, Tennessee.
When she died in August 2022, her children decided the image should go to Springfield.
Lincoln’s celebrity was on the upswing when he arrived on Sept. 30, 1858, in Pittsfield, about 110 miles (177 kilometers) northwest of St. Louis.
He had completed four of his seven headline-grabbing debates with Douglas, whose view that the introduction of slavery into new territories should be up to local voters had drawn Lincoln, a former one-term congressman, back into politics.
Centering largely on slavery, the campaign ended in defeat for Lincoln. But he had forced Douglas into statements that alienated him from slave-holding Southern states to the point that they rejected him for president in 1860, paving Lincoln’s way to the White House.
Following his two-hour Pittsfield speech on Oct. 1, local lawyer Daniel Gilmer, who had opened his home to Lincoln for lunch that day, persuaded the candidate to sit for the ambrotype at the gallery of Calvin Jackson. (AP)
