To commemorate passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Philadelphia publisher Powell & Co. marketed an oval photomontage composed of government-issued portraits of those who had voted to end slavery. In the draft and final versions seen here, senators and leaders of the executive branch frame an inner scrum of representatives surrounding the speaker of the house. Between the January 1865 congressional vote and ratification by the states eleven months later, a change in circumstances rendered this roster historical. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April, he was replaced not by Hannibal Hamlin (his first vice president, who surmounts the composition) but by Hamlin’s briefly serving successor, Andrew Johnson.
Powell and Co., Philadelphia, Anti-Slavery Constitutional Amendment Picture, 1864. Left: draft version. Right: final version. Albumen prints. Purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund, 2019.66 and 2018.64.