Scholar Says He’s Found New Photo of Lincoln at Gettysburg

Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division/Courtesy of Christopher Oakley The highlighted figure in the crowd is Lincoln, according to Christopher Oakley, a professor of new media at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Abraham Lincoln’s appearance at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, has been remembered in the roughly 270 ringing words he spoke that day and exactly one undisputed photograph.

But now, a scholar is claiming he has identified another image of Lincoln from that occasion: a tiny, dark-suited speck in a wide shot of the crowd, his head slightly bowed.

Christopher Oakley, a professor of new media at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, made the discovery, which was reported in the October issue of Smithsonian magazine, while working with a group of students on the Virtual Lincoln Project. That project, which includes a detailed digital reconstruction of the Gettysburg ceremony, involved looking at the nine known photographs from that day, as well as the roughly 130 known photographs of Lincoln from other occasions.

It was while looking at a much-scrutinized photograph taken by Alexander Gardner that a familiar face, belonging to a figure standing near a man Mr. Oakley had newly identified as Secretary of State William Seward, leaped out.

“It sank in very quickly,” Mr. Oakley, a former Disney animator, said in a telephone interview. “I jumped back from my desk and did a little historian’s happy dance.”

Mr. Oakley is not the first person to spot Lincoln among the throngs in Gardner’s photograph. In 2007, an amateur historian named John Richter drew headlines, and some vigorous rebuttals, when he announced that a different figure on the left-hand side of the photograph â€" a stovepipe-hatted man on a horse, with his back turned to the camera â€" was Lincoln.

But the image examined by Mr. Richter was actually one of two very similar stereoscopic images taken by Gardner that day, which were made simultaneously with two different lenses set about three inches apart, and would result in a kind of 3-D image when combined through a viewfinder. It was while looking at a highly magnified detail from the less damaged left-hand image, only recently scanned by the Library of Congress (and which Mr. Richter had not examined), that Mr. Oakley found further evidence supporting his own claim.

The man on the horse, Mr. Oakley argues, cannot be Lincoln, since the new scan reveals that he is wearing epaulets, which Lincoln would not have worn. And his own positive identification of Lincoln has drawn tentative support from some prominent scholars, including some, like Harold Holzer, the chair of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, who had previously supported Mr. Richter’s claims.

“It’s like ‘Law and Order,’” Mr. Holzer told Smithsonian. “You keep enhancing an image until you see the suspect.”

Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division/Courtesy of Christopher Oakley One of two very similar stereoscopic images taken by Alexander Gardner.