Holding a Newspaper, Chicago, October 27, 1854

The second-oldest known photograph of Lincoln, by the Swedish-born daguerreotypist Polycarpus von Schneidau in Chicago. George Schneider, editor of the antislavery German-language Illinois Staats-Zeitung, had brought Lincoln to the city to speak and talked him into sitting for a portrait. The original daguerreotype is lost, so what survives are copies, including this print. It catches Lincoln in 1854, the year the Kansas-Nebraska Act pulled him back into politics, with a newspaper in his hand and his hair already refusing to lie flat.