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New Lincoln Exhibit Tells how New York City Shaped his Image

Abraham Lincoln visited New York City only five times in his life, and only once as president, yet the growing 19th-century metropolis played a central role in burnishing his enduring public image.

That's the point of a new exhibition, "Lincoln and New York," that opened Friday at the New-York Historical Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side to celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. The exhibition runs through March 25.

It begins with Lincoln's historic speech at Cooper Union in 1860 and the iconic Mathew Brady photograph taken the same day, more than two months before he won the Republican presidential nomination. The events led Lincoln later to state: "Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me President."

It concludes with his 1865 funeral procession down Broadway, an event attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners. Along the way, it traces New Yorkers' varied reactions to Lincoln, from veneration to vilification...
Read entire article at Artdaily.org