Lincoln Exhibit @ National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery’s “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln” opened today.

It isn’t all that big but it is very worth the trip, especially in light of the National Portrait Gallery being the site of Lincoln’s second inaugural ball.

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After walking over there, I got back to work just in time to hear Obama’s first press conference as President-Elect.

Obama mentioned reading Lincoln’s writings so now I want to check out some of his speeches.

The historical background for his second inaugural speech is pretty rich:

At a time when victory over the secessionists in the American Civil War was within days and slavery was near an end, Lincoln did not speak of happiness, but of sadness. Some see this speech as a defense of his pragmatic approach to Reconstruction, in which he sought to avoid harsh treatment of the defeated South by reminding his listeners of how wrong both sides had been in imagining what lay before them when the war began four years earlier. Lincoln balanced that rejection of triumphalism, however, with a recognition of the unmistakable evil of slavery, which he described in the most concrete terms possible. Unbeknownst to him, John Wilkes Booth, David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Paine, John Surratt and Edmund Spangler, a few of the conspirators involved with his assassination were present in the crowd at the inauguration.

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I’ve embedded some audio of a historian talking about the photo above. I thought it was the National Portrait Gallery but I think it’s the Capitol building.

It’s pretty damn creepy that Booth is actually in the shot.