Crowd of citizens gathers at the unfinished dome of the U.S. Capitol for Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration as president.
National Archives
It was the morning of March 4, 1861—Inauguration Day—in a nation fractured by the institution of slavery and driven to the brink of civil war. Seven southern states had already seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. In the coming weeks, four more states would follow and, in mid-April, the war would begin with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina.
In this rarely seen photograph from that fateful morning, a crowd of curious citizens begins to gather in the shadow of the unfinished dome of the U.S. Capitol. Later that day, they would witness frontier lawyer Abraham Lincoln take the oath of office as the country’s 16th president and, afterward, utter some of his most famous words: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
The unknown photographer, perched on a camera platform, most likely captured this view as a test shot. An image taken during the ceremony—by which time the crowd had swelled into a solid mass of humanity—from this same position survives, as do three other photos from two more distant locations.
Bob Zeller is president of the nonprofit Center for Civil War Photography, which is devoted to collecting, preserving, and digitizing Civil War images.
