NEW YORK — Abraham Lincoln visited New York City five times in his life, and only once as president, yet the growing 19th-century metropolis played a central role in burnishing his enduring public image.
That’s the point of an exhibition, “Lincoln and New York,” that opened Friday at the New-York Historical Society on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. The exhibition runs through March 25.
It begins with Lincoln’s historic speech at Cooper Union in 1860 and the iconic Mathew Brady photograph taken the same day, more than two months before he won the Republican presidential nomination.
The events led Lincoln later to state: “Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me president.” It concludes with his 1865 funeral procession down Broadway, an event attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners. Along the way, it traces New Yorkers’ reactions to Lincoln, from veneration to vilification.
There are many other Lincoln bicentennial exhibitions across the nation, but the one thing they all miss, said Harold Holzer, the exhibition’s chief historian, “is how Lincoln achieved the status he achieved, and how did it morph into something approaching secular sainthood over a period of only four years.”
Filling six galleries, the exhibition shows how New York City’s place as the center of media, commerce and finance enabled it to transform Lincoln’s image “from the debater and jokester to a serious, learned, dignified politician fully capable of taking the country through what became the secession crisis,” Holzer said.
A video re-enactment of the Cooper Union speech with actor Sam Waterston as Lincoln; a copy of the original speech in which Lincoln discusses his views on slavery; and funeral photographs and memorabilia are among the featured artifacts.
