The photograph was not supposed to survive. On April 24, 1865, while Abraham Lincoln’s embalmed body lay in state inside New York City Hall, photographer Jeremiah Gurney Jr. was permitted to photograph the murdered president in his open coffin, creating an image that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton soon ordered suppressed and destroyed.
One copy escaped destruction. It passed quietly into private papers, disappeared from public knowledge for generations, and was finally recognized in 1952 by a fourteen-year-old researcher named Ronald Rietveld. The result is one of the strangest surviving objects from Lincoln’s assassination: a photograph that the federal government tried to erase, preserved long enough to outlive nearly everyone involved in suppressing it.
The surviving Jeremiah Gurney image of Lincoln lying in state at New York City Hall, followed by a closer view derived from the surviving photograph. The wide image is important because it shows the photograph as Gurney made it: Lincoln’s body positioned inside an entire ceremonial and military environment rather than isolated as a medical or forensic close-up.
The image does not initially look as explosive as its history suggests. Lincoln lies in the open coffin beneath heavy mourning decorations, with uniformed men positioned nearby and the ceremonial space of City Hall surrounding him. There are no dramatic wounds visible and no attempt to create the intimate visual shock associated with later crime-scene photography, but that apparent restraint is precisely what makes Stanton’s reaction so interesting.
The government was already allowing enormous numbers of Americans to see Lincoln’s body with their own eyes. The issue was not simply whether the public could look at the dead president; the more revealing question was whether the public could possess a permanent image of him after the official procession had moved on.
New York Was Supposed to See Lincoln
Lincoln’s funeral journey had been designed as a massive public act of mourning. His coffin traveled from Washington through major Northern cities on its way to Springfield, retracing much of the route he had taken toward the presidency four years earlier, and the Library of Congress estimates that more than seven million people saw the coffin while more than 1.5 million viewed Lincoln’s remains during the journey.
New York was one of the largest stops. Lincoln’s funeral train reached the Jersey City depot on April 24, after which the coffin crossed the Hudson and was carried to City Hall, where the Library of Congress records that approximately 500,000 mourners came to view the remains. Contemporary reporting described Broadway packed with spectators, windows and rooftops crowded with people, and City Hall covered in elaborate mourning decorations.
New York City Hall dressed for Lincoln’s funeral. The public ceremony surrounding Lincoln’s corpse was immense, carefully staged, and openly visible; the controversy was therefore not about concealing the fact that Lincoln was dead.
Before the doors were opened to the public, the coffin remained under the control of the funeral escort. A contemporary report preserved by the Library of Congress states that after the embalmers prepared Lincoln for viewing and while the full coffin lid was still open, a full-length photograph was made, requiring roughly twenty-five minutes because of the subdued light inside the room.
That was Jeremiah Gurney’s moment. The camera captured what hundreds of thousands of mourners would soon see temporarily, but it converted that temporary viewing into something capable of surviving the ceremony itself.
A Photograph Could Leave the Room
That difference is central to the way The Lincoln Log handles the image. The manuscript points out that citizens could pass the coffin, soldiers could guard the room, newspapers could describe the ceremony, and artists could produce memorial engravings, while photography introduced a different problem because it could detach the corpse from the procession and preserve the body independently of the people controlling the funeral.
A mourner inside City Hall encountered Lincoln according to someone else’s rules. Officials controlled the building, the guards, the direction of the line, the hours of viewing, the position of the coffin, and eventually the moment when the lid closed and the funeral moved to its next destination.
A photograph did not obey that timetable. Once a print existed, it could be stored, copied, sold, hidden, mailed, studied, reproduced in a book, passed between private collectors, or rediscovered generations later by people who had never participated in the funeral at all.
That is why the manuscript calls the photograph a form of portable custody. A procession can supervise access to a corpse while it moves through a city, but a photograph allows the corpse’s image to travel without the coffin, guards, family, clergy, military escort, or government schedule.
The distinction may sound subtle until Stanton enters the story.
Stanton Orders the Photograph Destroyed
Edwin M. Stanton was Secretary of War during one of the most chaotic weeks in American political history. Lincoln had been assassinated, John Wilkes Booth remained at large, the government was tracking suspected conspirators, the country was emerging from civil war, and Lincoln’s funeral itself required enormous coordination across states and cities.
When Stanton learned that Lincoln had been photographed in his coffin, he ordered the photographic plates and negatives confiscated and destroyed. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum notes that one print had already been sent to Stanton in the hope that he would reconsider and permit reproductions, but Stanton instead prohibited additional photographs of Lincoln’s remains.
Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War. His order largely succeeded: the Gurney image did not become part of the vast commercial flood of Lincoln mourning pictures that followed the assassination.
There was an understandable personal explanation for Stanton’s action. Mary Lincoln was devastated by her husband’s murder, and the government had strong reasons to protect the family from sensational treatment of the corpse while maintaining dignity around a state funeral.
Yet the practical effect went further than privacy. Americans were permitted to see Lincoln inside a controlled ceremonial environment, while an image capable of circulating independently from that environment was suppressed.
The Lincoln Log does not treat the ordinary explanation as false. Instead, the book asks us to notice what the decision actually accomplished: the state drew a boundary between public viewing and uncontrolled possession of Lincoln’s physical image, turning the dead president into something that could be displayed widely while still being closely managed.
Photography Had Changed the Meaning of Death
Photography in 1865 was no longer merely a novelty for portraits. Four years of Civil War had taught Americans that a camera could bring physical death into homes and parlors with a bluntness that drawings and patriotic language often softened.
Battlefield photography had already shown soldiers where they fell. Images associated with Antietam, Gettysburg, Petersburg, and other battlefields changed the visual vocabulary of war because the camera appeared to offer mechanical testimony rather than an artist’s reconstruction.
A photograph of Lincoln’s corpse had even greater potential force. The president had been assassinated in a public theater, carried across a street to a private boarding house, treated by physicians through the night, subjected to an autopsy after death, embalmed, placed inside a coffin, and then sent on a national funeral journey.
The photograph attached itself directly to the body moving through that chain.
An engraving could transform Lincoln into martyrdom. A lithograph could arrange flags, angels, mourning women, military banners, and allegorical figures around him, while the photograph offered a much less cooperative object: there was the dead man, lying inside the box.
The Lincoln Americans Were Allowed to Buy
The difference becomes especially clear when the Gurney photograph is compared with the imagery that did circulate. Currier & Ives produced an elaborate lithograph showing Lincoln lying in state at New York City Hall, and the Library of Congress preserves the print today with no known restrictions on publication.
The lithograph made Lincoln’s death visually manageable. It could present the coffin inside a composed scene that fit nineteenth-century mourning conventions and allowed buyers to bring an image of national grief into their homes without owning a direct photographic record of the corpse.
That distinction does not mean the government was coordinating every engraving or deliberately manufacturing a single approved myth. It shows something simpler: memorial representation and photographic possession were treated differently, and the surviving historical record preserves that difference.
The state funeral could turn Lincoln into an image.
Gurney had turned Lincoln into a photograph.
Those were not yet the same thing.
One Print Survived Anyway
Stanton’s destruction order nearly erased Gurney’s work. According to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, however, one print had been sent to Stanton before the destruction order was completed, and Stanton retained that photograph among his own materials.
That survival creates one of the strangest contradictions in the entire episode. Stanton had the authority to prevent the photograph from circulating publicly, yet the last surviving copy remained inside his own documentary custody rather than disappearing with the negatives and other prints.
There is no need to invent a sinister explanation for why he kept it. A historically safer conclusion is that Stanton suppressed public reproduction while preserving one copy of an extraordinary object connected to the assassination and funeral he had helped administer.
The image then moved through another layer of private custody. After Stanton’s death, his son Lewis found the photograph among his father’s papers and in 1887 sent it to John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s former private secretary and one of the men most deeply involved in preserving and shaping the documentary record of Lincoln’s presidency.
Instead of returning to public view, the photograph disappeared again.
The Fourteen-Year-Old Who Found Lincoln
In 1952, fourteen-year-old Ronald Rietveld was working through Lincoln-related manuscript material at the Illinois State Historical Library, the institution that preceded today’s Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Rietveld later recalled finding the photograph in the archival material and realizing that he was looking at the supposedly destroyed image of Lincoln lying in his coffin.
The discovery astonished historians because the suppression story was already known. What had been missing was the physical survivor—the actual print that demonstrated that Stanton’s destruction order had not completely succeeded.
That makes Rietveld’s discovery much more than a charming story about an unusually knowledgeable teenager. The photograph had survived the assassination generation, Stanton, the Stanton family, Nicolay, decades of archival transition, and nearly ninety years of historical writing before someone recognized what had been sitting inside the papers.
The photograph had never ceased to exist.
It had ceased to be visible.
A Body Becomes an Archive
That distinction leads directly into one of the larger themes of The Lincoln Log. After April 1865, Lincoln increasingly existed through a collection of controlled objects and places: the bullet removed from his brain, the Petersen House death room, the bloodstained material associated with the assassination, Ford’s Theatre, the coffin, funeral artifacts, family papers, locks of hair, photographs, the Springfield tomb, and eventually the monumental Lincoln created in Washington.
Those objects did not all remain under one authority. They passed through family members, military officers, government departments, collectors, museums, libraries, cemeteries, memorial organizations, and private hands.
Each piece developed its own custody chain.
The Gurney photograph offers that process in miniature. A photographer created it, military authority allowed it, Stanton suppressed it, Stanton’s files preserved it, his son transferred it, Nicolay received it, an archive stored it, and Rietveld finally restored it to public knowledge.
The manuscript describes the photograph’s history in almost exactly those terms, noting that the image was displayed, suppressed, preserved, forgotten, recovered, and reintroduced through successive custodians.
Lincoln’s body was inside the coffin.
The photograph became another container for the body.
The Photograph Does Not Reveal a Hidden Wound
It is important not to make the surviving image perform work it cannot do. The photograph is not a forensic close-up capable of overturning the medical evidence surrounding Lincoln’s gunshot wound, nor does it reveal some obvious physical secret that would explain why Stanton wanted it suppressed.
The camera was positioned at a considerable distance. Lincoln’s body appears inside a ceremonial environment rather than as the subject of a medical examination, and there is nothing in the picture that establishes an alternative cause of death.
The historical significance lies in the handling of the image rather than in some concealed anatomical clue.
Stanton’s order tells us that control over representations of the dead president mattered almost immediately after the assassination. The surviving print tells us that even strong official control could never be absolute.
The Same Problem Returned at the Tomb
Eleven years later, Lincoln’s body generated an even more extreme custody crisis. Chicago counterfeiters attempted to remove his coffin from the tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery and intended to ransom the body for money and the release of imprisoned engraver Benjamin Boyd.
That 1876 plot concerned physical possession rather than photographic possession, but the structural problem was remarkably similar. In both cases, an object associated directly with Lincoln escaped or nearly escaped the institutions attempting to control it.
In 1865, a photographer created a portable Lincoln.
In 1876, thieves tried to create a portable Lincoln.
The motives were completely different, and the events should not be collapsed into one conspiracy. What links them is the continuing problem created when a private human body becomes an object of national importance.
After the attempted tomb robbery, Lincoln’s physical remains were subjected to increasingly severe protection. His coffin was moved, concealed, guarded, and eventually placed beneath steel and concrete so that another group of men could never simply open the tomb and take him away.
The government could destroy a photographic plate.
It could not eliminate the underlying custody problem.
From the Coffin to the Monument
Over time, Lincoln became increasingly difficult to encounter in uncontrolled physical form. His actual body disappeared beneath the architecture of the Springfield tomb, while his public image became more monumental, polished, and symbolically available.
Ford’s Theatre eventually became a historic site. The Petersen House became a preserved death room, Lincoln’s papers entered archival institutions, and the Lincoln Memorial placed an enormous marble version of the president inside a classical temple in Washington.
The public gained more Lincoln while gaining less access to Lincoln’s actual physical remains.
That contradiction is one of the reasons the Gurney photograph remains so powerful. It comes from a brief moment before the long process of memorialization had finished converting Lincoln from a murdered man into national architecture.
The photograph still contains the body.
Why This Photograph Opens The Lincoln Log
The Lincoln Log: The Machinery Behind the Lincoln Assassination begins with the documented fact that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. From there, it asks a larger question about the machinery surrounding the event: the money, routes, theater networks, government offices, counterfeiting systems, family custodians, archives, courts, and security structures that shaped what happened before and after the shot.
The Gurney photograph belongs to that investigation because it shows how quickly Lincoln’s death became administrative. Before the funeral train had even reached Springfield, government authority was already making decisions about who could reproduce the body, what images could circulate, and which physical traces of the assassination would remain accessible.
Nothing about that observation requires claiming that Stanton concealed the real assassin or that the coffin photograph contains some secret explanation for Lincoln’s death. The documented story is already more interesting than that: a photographer made an image, the Secretary of War tried to destroy it, a single print survived inside the Secretary’s own papers, and nearly ninety years later a fourteen-year-old researcher returned it to public history.
The attempt to erase the photograph ultimately became part of the photograph’s meaning. Stanton succeeded in controlling it during the generation closest to Lincoln’s death, but he could not control what happened after the image entered the archive, and the archive eventually outlived the order.
That tension between event and custody, evidence and memory, physical object and official history runs throughout The Lincoln Log. The photograph of Lincoln in his coffin is a remarkably small object through which to see the larger machine, because the entire problem is already there inside the frame: the body, the guards, the ceremony, the camera, the state, and an image that refused to disappear.
The Lincoln Log: The Machinery Behind the Lincoln Assassination follows those threads far beyond the photograph and back into the world that produced Ford’s Theatre in the first place. The book is available here: The Lincoln Log on Amazon.