Springfield, IL (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – This is the story about a picture of Lincoln’s killer with the devil.
That product of what you might call a 19th Century version of Photoshop is one of the latest images uploaded to Picturing Lincoln, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum’s page of digitized images. It’s the second upload since Picturing Lincoln was created.
The Booth / devil artwork is on a carte de visite, or “visiting card,” which people of the day passed around as an early form of social media.
“They took an image of John Wilkes Booth, and they double-exposed it,” explained Kelsey Wise, an audio / visual librarian at the facility. “After the assassination of Lincoln, these became very popular as a way to villainize and demonize John Wilkes Booth.”
Picturing Lincoln, Wise says, is the museum’s way of sharing Lincoln with the world.
