Glenn W. LaFantasie: Why the Presidency Aged Lincoln So Dramatically

Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University. He is working on a book about Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant

No face in American history is more recognizable than Abraham Lincoln's.

His lean, craggy, hollow appearance -- with tousled hair and scraggly beard (without a mustache) and melancholic eyes -- is known around the world. His profile appears on the penny, and an engraved portrait appears on the $5 bill. His image was included among the four presidents carved out of the cliff face of Mount Rushmore (although sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his work crew never finished all the intended features -- namely, a portion of a hand holding a lapel -- below Lincoln's face; Borglum died in 1941 and the onslaught of World War II diverted project funding elsewhere). The bicentennial in 2009 of Lincoln's birth occasioned the proliferation of Lincoln's face almost everywhere you looked (at least his home states of Kentucky and Illinois), even beyond the expected annual appearance of Lincoln to sell cars and mattresses during Presidents' Day sales every February. And we'll continue seeing a lot of Lincoln over the next four years as the commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial rolls along.

Historians have been fascinated by how dramatically Lincoln's face changed during his presidency. Photographs reveal how increasingly careworn he became over the four years during which he waged war against the Confederate States of America and struggled to restore the Union. One of his secretaries, John Hay, remarked that "under this frightful ordeal his demeanor and disposition changed -- so gradually that it would be impossible to say when the change began; but he was in mind, body, and nerves a very different man at the second inauguration [March 1865] from the one who had taken the oath in 1861. He continued always the same kindly, genial, and cordial spirit he had been at first; but the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the eye grew veiled by constant mediation on momentous subjects; the air of reserve and detachment from his surroundings increased. He aged with great rapidity."...