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Headline in the Decatur Daily Republican reporting the death of Alexander Hesler in 1895.

    The famous "Hesler Photographs" of Abraham Lincoln were taken in Springfield, Illinois on June 3, 1860. Two weeks after Lincoln was nominated for President by the Republican National Convention in Chicago, party leaders asked well-known Chicago photographer Alexander Hesler to take photos of the nominee for use in the upcoming campaign. Lincoln's business in Springfield prevented him from going to Chicago but he agreed to get "dressed up" if Hesler would bring his equipment to the state capital for a sitting. On that Sunday inside the Old State House, Hesler took four poses of the future President. It is said that about 10,000 copies of two of the most popular poses were sold during the campaign.

    Of these portraits Lincoln said, "That looks better and expresses me better than any I have ever seen; if it pleases the people I am satisfied." Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, had even higher praise for the poses: "There is a peculiar curve of the lower lip, the lone mole on the right cheek, and a pose of the head so essentially Lincolnian; no other artist has ever caught it." Prints of these photographs are being sold today by Millikin University.

    Most authorities agree that in 1866 the glass plate negatives that Hesler used to produce the original 1860 photo prints were sold to photographer George Bucher Ayres. Luckily, Ayres quit his Chicago studio and moved to Buffalo, New York before the October 1871 fire that destroyed most of downtown Chicago. In 1881 Ayres made more contact prints from the plates and some photo historians claim that Ayres made a duplicate set of glass plate positives of the originals. Upon his death, the negative plates were willed to his daughters Edith L. Bunce and Anne Smith Ayres and were stored at the provident Trust Company in Philadelphia. After both of these women died the estate administratrix Elizabeth K. Cline sold the negative plates to attorney William H. Woodward. He in turn agreed to sell them to William H. Danforth of the Ralston Purina Company in St. Louis in 1933. The glass negatives were broken in the mail and after several experts confirmed that these were authentic 1860 Hesler photo plates of Abraham Lincoln, Woodward received a $1000 insurance settlement from the United States Post Office. Subsequently A. J. Olmsted, Assistant Curator of Photography at the Smithsonian Institution's United States National Museum arranged for the broken plates to be accessioned by his agency in February 1935. They now reside in the museum's Division of Information Technology and Communications - Photographic History Collection.

At about this same time in Illinois, King V. Hostick started to assist Governor Henry Horner in collecting Lincoln documents and artifacts for the state. King Hostick eventually became a well-known Lincoln collector and in the fall of 1952 claimed to have purchased two glass plate positives from the Ayres estate in Philadelphia. Hostick had a few prints made for friends and government officials in the 1950s by the famous Herbert Georg studio in Springfield. (Single, unframed prints from that era have recently been listed for sale online at $1000.) When Hostick died in Decatur, March 28, 1993, his will transferred ownership of his plates to the Illinois State Historical Society. At the time of this transfer, Illinois State Historian Thomas Schwartz said that the plates were significant in part because they "are the sharpest, clearest surviving images of the two photos." Most existing pictures are "copies of copies of copies," he said, and lack clarity. The Society had these 8 x 10 inch plates appraised by Christie's auction house in New York and were assured that they are the sole surviving set. In February 2007 the George Eastman House Photo Museum announced that they had received another version of a Hesler/Lincoln glass plate positive, but that this plate from the Ayres collection was also broken. The Illinois State Historical Society has now approved the digital reproduction of a limited number of prints of their famous Lincoln photographs from the only known set of unbroken Hesler glass plates.

    The first known photo of Abraham Lincoln was taken by N.H. Sheperd in Springfield in 1846 at about the time of Lincoln's election to his only term in Congress. According to Lincoln scholar, Mark E. Neely, Jr., "Although Abraham Lincoln was a modest man and anything but vain about his appearance, he nevertheless sat for photographers on more than 60 occasions. Well over 100 different photographs resulted from Lincoln's sittings." However, it wasn't until July 11, 1854 that J.C.F. Polycarp von Schneidau produced a daguerreotype in Chicago of Lincoln is holding a copy of the German anti-slavery newspaper Staat Zeitung. Lincoln photo historian Lloyd Ostendorf wrote that several years later while campaigning for the new Republican Party in Chicago on February 28, 1857, some of his attorney friends urged him to have his third photo made. They went into the gallery of Alexander Hesler with Lincoln's hair "all a tumble." Lincoln later commented: "This coarse, rough hair of mine was in a particularly bad tousle at the time, and the picture presented me in all its fright." When called upon to photograph Presidential candidate Lincoln in 1860, Lincoln's advisors requested that Hesler make sure that this time the subject was well coiffed.

Alexander Hesler was born in Canada in July, 1823, but he grew up in Vermont and Wisconsin. In 1847 he learned the daguerreotype process in Buffalo, NY, and about 1850 he opened a photo studio in Galena, Illinois. In a single day in August, 1851, Hesler and his assistant Joel E. Whitney took 85 photo views of the future site of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, including several daguerreotypes of Minnehaha Falls. While on display in Hesler's Chicago studio, at least one of them was purchased in 1854 by a George Sumner, as a gift for his brother, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner. Sumner in turn gave them to his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who reportedly used the image to draw inspiration for his narrative poem "The Song of Hiawatha."

    In 1853, Hesler exhibited a daguerreian panorama of Galena and three views of St. Anthony Falls at the Crystal Palace exhibition (New York City). He received the first place medal at the Exhibition. In 1856, he received first prize at the American Institute, New York for best daguerreotypes. The same year, he also received first prize at the Charitable Institution Fair, Boston, Mass., for daguerreotypes.

    By 1855 Hesler had opened a Chicago gallery. In 1858, after he took the "tousled hair" Lincoln photograph, Hesler climbed to the top of the Cook County Courthouse and took a series of eleven photos of the city which formed a panoramic record or the "first visual census" of the City of Chicago. View this "first visual census"

    Hesler eventually moved to Evanston, Illinois for five years before reopening another studio in Chicago. He died of a stroke on July 5, 1895 and was described in the Washington Post as "Chicago's first photographer." The Decatur Daily Republican reported his obituary on July 6, 1895 under the banner, "DEATH OF THE GREATEST DAGUERREOTYPIST AMERICA HAS PRODUCED." Critics have written that other photographers rarely equaled the lifelike poses and expressions Hesler achieved. Hesler defined something of the amazing "presence" his daguerreotypes captured when he wrote: "Many, both in and out of the profession, wondered at the soft and delicate detail both in shadow and high light, and roundness of the portraits I exhibited."

Several books have been published describing the photographs of Abraham Lincoln. The first editions of these include:

    Photographs of Abraham Lincoln by Frederick Hill Merserve, 1917

    Lincoln: A Picture Story of His Life, by Stefan Lorant, 1952

    Lincoln in Photographs: An Album of Every Known Pose, Lloyd Ostendorf and Charles Hamilton, 1963

    The Face of Lincoln, James Mellon, 1980

    Both Merserve and Ostendorf assigned catalog numbers to each of the known Lincoln photographs. The two 1860 Hesler photos for sale by Millikin University are classified as Lincoln profile (O-26) (M-26) while the three-quarter Lincoln face is cataloged as (O-27) (M-25).