Lincoln’s 1860 Presidential Campaign Had to Battle Rumors That He Was Grotesquely Ugly
Many consider Abraham Lincoln to be America’s greatest president, or at least in the top three. However, before he got the gig, Lincoln had to pass the job interview and audition: the 1860 presidential election. In that election, Lincoln’s campaign had a problem: the candidate’s looks. Photography had been invented by then, but had not yet widely spread in the media, so many Americans did not know what Lincoln looked like. In that vacuum, rumors – spread and amplified by his opponents – abounded that Lincoln was ugly as sin. As the Houston Telegraph put it, Lincoln was: “the leanest, lankiest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms and hatchet face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly“.
Another newspaper described him as: “coarse, vulgar, and uneducated“. A woman claimed Lincoln was “grotesque in appearance“. His opponents concocted a rallying cry that ended with: “We beg and pray you – Don’t, for God’s sake, show his picture“. It was petty, but contra what we were told as kids, looks do matter. At least sometimes, and an election in which enough voters might be turned off by a candidate’s mug to impact the result is one of those times. So Lincoln turned to famous photographer Matthew Brady. As seen below, Brady came through.
