Photographs which until now had been mislabeled at the Library of Congress were recently discovered to be images taken at Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in 1865.

From the LOC Press Release:

Details of Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration come into clearer focus with the recent discovery at the Library of Congress of three glass negatives that show the large crowd gathered at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., for the president’s address on March 4, 1865.

These negatives had been labeled long ago as being either the Grand Review of the Armies or the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant. Carol Johnson, a curator of photography at the Library of Congress, spotted the misidentification on Friday, Jan. 4, while checking old logbooks and finding the annotation “Lincoln?” in the margin. Only two other photos of Lincoln’s second inauguration were previously known, but a careful visual comparison confirmed that these three negatives portray the same event.

“These negatives add to our knowledge of this special event,” said Johnson. “They show what that wet Saturday looked like with the massing of the crowd. They also convey the excitement of the people.”

Johnson was prompted to examine the negatives after a Library of Congress patron alerted her to the fact that these visually similar photos had radically different identifications in the Library’s online Civil War photographic negative collection. But instead of choosing between Grant and the Grand Armies Review, she opened a new door to the past by looking closely at the images and recognizing Lincoln’s second inauguration.

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