Some saw it as a symbol of the Union reunited through Lincoln’s own body. The crack seems to trace the path of Wilkes’ bullet. Gardner pulled a single print and then discarded the plate, so only one such portrait exists.
At some point, possibly by accident when the glass-plate negative was heated to receive a coat of varnish, a crack appeared in the upper half of the plate. Taken on February 5, 1865, it is one of the most important and evocative photographs in American history. An equally frightening portent of the 16th president’s violent end is a portrait by Alexander Gardner, known as the cracked-plate, housed in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. The story resonates because, of course, Lincoln was assassinated as the prophetic dream predicted. Coupled with the President’s quirky individuality, he was also susceptible to signs and portents as he sought to divine the ways of the world and the activity of mankind. He had a melancholic temperament-today, he would probably be diagnosed as depressive. It was not unusual for Lincoln to be visited by otherworldly haunts. The dream troubled and annoyed Lincoln, according to his bodyguard Ward Lamon, who recorded the story. “The President, he was killed by an assassin,” came the reply.
He finally came to a room with a body laid out on a catafalque, crowded with mourners, weeping. Three days before his fatal visit to Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, he had a strange and troubling dream in which he imagined walking through a White House, empty but echoing with sobs and lamentations. He was worn out and felt that he might die of exhaustion. As his second term began, Abraham Lincoln thought he might not survive it.
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