A National Archives Archivist Enlarged a Mislabeled Glass Plate in 1952 and Found Lincoln at Gettysburg

The National Archives still lists the negative as "Crowd of citizens, soldiers, and etc. with Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg." Everything before the president's name is the label the plate wore in federal storage for most of a century. The rest is there because Josephine Cobb enlarged a broken piece of glass about 20 times in 1952 and found him in it.

The Label the Plate Wore

The War Department bought Mathew Brady's collection in two transactions, in 1874 and 1875, for $27,840. The Army held the plates for decades, and the National Archives accessioned the collection in 1940, where it became series 111-B, "Mathew Brady Photographs of Civil War-Era Personalities and Scenes." One item in that series carried the flattest description in the building: a crowd of citizens and soldiers, photographer unspecified, place unspecified. Its catalog record still gives a date range of about 1860 to 1865, a five-year window for an exposure that can be pinned to a single documented day.

The object itself is damaged. Roughly a quarter of the upper left corner of the plate is gone, leaving a rough trapezoid instead of a rectangle. In the surviving frame, a few boys loaf in the foreground and stare at the camera. Behind them, the ground rises into a gray mass of hats and shoulders, thousands of people deep, with no individual face large enough to read. That is the entire picture. Nothing in it announces itself.

How She Knew Where to Look

Cobb had been at the Archives since 1936, hired into the Photographic Archives and Research Division as an assistant archivist, and by 1952 she ran the Still Photo section. Civil War photography was her specialty, and Brady was her long research project. She knew Lincoln had sat on a platform at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery on November 19, 1863. She also knew that a plate described as an anonymous crowd might be that crowd.

Her method was geometric before it was optical. The tallest flag in the frame, she reasoned, probably marked the speakers' stand, and the dignitaries would be gathered around it. That gave her a small patch of emulsion worth pushing. She enlarged toward it repeatedly, something like 20 times over by Mark Pohlad's account in Lincoln Lore, until a bare-headed, bearded, downcast face came up out of the grain. She placed Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln's bodyguard and the day's chief marshal, immediately to his right, and Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin, the event's host, at the far right of the group.

Later observers have kept adding names to the platform, and they do not entirely agree with each other. Major General Robert C. Schenck has been placed on Lincoln's left, Everett standing at the upper right with his hands on his hips, and the president's secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, somewhere in the group. A later 3D reconstruction of the stand puts Secretary of State William Seward at Lincoln's left instead. The two identifications Cobb made herself, Lamon and Curtin, are the two that have gone unquestioned.

She dated the exposure to around noon, when the presidential party reached the stand, roughly three hours ahead of the address itself. The Archives still repeats her reading that Everett had not yet arrived, which sits awkwardly with the later observers who put him in the frame, so that detail is not settled. The position of Lincoln's head and shoulders suggests he is in the act of sitting down. The standing figure at the right of the platform, whoever he is, has no face at all, which is what you would expect: wet collodion negatives of that era needed 5 to 20 seconds of exposure, and a person who moves for one of those seconds does not have a face.

Tentatively Identified

The find was announced on Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1953, on the front page of the Gettysburg Times, under a headline about discovering a Gettysburg Lincoln picture in the National Archives after 90 years. Life ran it a week later and hedged hard, telling readers that the bearded man who may be Lincoln was slightly blurred, and that positive identification was almost impossible. Cobb herself supplied the hedging. In every early account, her identification is described as tentative, and the caution appears to have been hers rather than an editor's.

The number of enlargements grew in the retelling. A 1957 review of Stefan Lorant's picture book "Lincoln: A Picture Story of His Life" credited Cobb with enlarging the negative 100 times and Lorant with 250 to get it onto the page. Pohlad's reconstruction puts Cobb's own work at roughly 20. The detail of Lincoln's face became one of the best-known images of Lincoln, and Cobb never wrote an article about finding it. She treated it as a fact about an object in her care rather than a career event.

The Luck Story and the Record

The version that survives is a lucky-glance story, and it is not a stupid one. Nineteen fifty-two was an absurd year for photographic discoveries. A teenager named Ron Rietveld came across the only known photograph of Lincoln lying in his coffin while going through drawers in the Illinois state historical collections at Springfield. Helmut Gernsheim tracked down Nicéphore Niépce's "View from the Window at Le Gras," the oldest surviving photograph from nature. Life's own coverage opened with the observation that long-lost photographs of Lincoln have a way of turning up just in time for Lincoln's birthday. Read that way, Cobb was the person standing nearest the cabinet when the odds paid out.

The record is duller than that. Two years earlier, Cobb had worked a different mislabeled plate, one marked "Hanover Junction, Va." The soldiers in it wore Union uniforms, and the Virginia town of that name sat about 20 miles north of Richmond, well inside Confederate lines. She concluded the label was wrong and the place had to be Hanover Junction, Pennsylvania. A tall figure in a top hat appeared in the frame, the Lincoln community got excited, and after her own long look, Cobb decided it was not the president. She had already run the exercise and already talked herself out of the answer she wanted.

She was also, at that moment, deep in the research for her study of Brady's Washington gallery, and she had spent 16 years watching the Archives' own enlargement capability improve. The luck story requires her to be a bystander. She was closer to a woman who knew the tools, the map, and the discipline, and then went looking. In 1951, she told a reporter she would rather have spent her life on Brady. "As it is, I have to chisel to get extra time to work on him," Cobb said, "for as head of a section here I am constantly called upon to fill out forms and beat people over the head for statistics."

Cobb stayed 36 years. After 1962, her title changed to specialist in iconography, apparently the first time an American archivist held that job description, and she retired in 1972 to Maine and started cataloging her own daguerreotypes. The Gettysburg plate is the only thing most people know about her, and it was a small piece of a very long career spent making other researchers' books possible.

What Counts as an Identification

In the seven decades since, nobody has seriously argued that the man in Cobb's enlargement is somebody else. Every later attempt to add a photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg has gone differently. In 2007, John Richter of the Center for Civil War Photography announced that Lincoln appears on horseback, returning a salute, in one of Alexander Gardner's stereo views of the same ceremony. William Frassanito, whose photographic analysis of Gettysburg is the standard reference, was blunt about the face in Smithsonian: the rider's beard was longer and fuller than the trimmed one Lincoln wore in a studio sitting 11 days before, and Lincoln had a distinct gap between goatee and sideburns.

In 2013, Christopher Oakley, a former Disney animator teaching new media at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, said he had found Lincoln in a different place, a small top-hatted profile at the speakers' stand in Gardner's second stereo plate, spotted while his students were building a 3D reconstruction of the ceremony. Frassanito gave that one a qualified nod, saying the resemblance ran 80 percent in favor. Richter did not buy it. "It's like looking at an ink blot," he told Smithsonian. "If you want to see a butterfly, you can see a butterfly. Personally, I don't see Lincoln." PBS North Carolina described the figure as still debated by Civil War scholars and history buffs in a 2024 write-up of his platform research.

The difference is not resolution. Cobb's figure sits where the written record puts the president, at a moment the record accounts for, surrounded by people who can be named independently and who are looking at him. The rival candidates rest more heavily on likeness, and even Oakley's geometric case comes down in the end to whether a blur a few grains across is the right face. An identification holds when the picture agrees with everything outside the picture, and the archive can be sure who is in a frame while remaining unsure who made it. The Library of Congress record for this very image notes that attributions run from unidentified, per Frassanito, to Mathew Brady, per the National Archives, to David Bachrach, per the Center for Civil War Photography.

Keep the File That Holds More Than You Need

The reason any of this was possible is that the plate recorded far more than the job required. Whoever set up that camera was making a crowd view from about 168 feet in front of the stand, by Oakley's reconstruction of the camera position. Nobody was making a portrait. The lens resolved the president's face anyway, because a wet collodion negative does not know which part of the scene you care about, and the emulsion sat there holding an answer for 89 years until somebody asked the right question of it.

Your files work the same way and get treated worse. The National Archives serves this negative online through four derivatives, and the largest is a 397 MB unadjusted scan, made in 2008 from a 1980s copy negative. That is two generations away from the glass, and it is still detailed enough that researchers keep mining it. Meanwhile, the normal working habit is to deliver 2,048-pixel JPEGs, keep the raws until the drive fills, and then decide that the client already got what they paid for. The delivery file answers this year's question. It cannot answer a question nobody has thought of yet, and the useful content of an archive is precisely the detail nobody has looked at.

Pohlad raises one more possibility about the plate: the corner was already broken, and the cameraman may have fired this frame simply to use up a defective piece of glass. If that is what happened, the only photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg that nobody disputes is a throwaway exposure on damaged stock, and it exists because for 89 years nobody with a shelf full of unlabeled crowd scenes decided he had enough of them.

Lead image by Alexander Gardner, public domain. Source.