1865: Cartes de visite, the Lincoln conspiracy, and the evolution of transnational imagination

Alexander Gardner’s photographs of the Lincoln conspirators have generally been understood by modern scholars and in popular retellings of the conspiracy as mugshots in a rogues’ gallery, but they also point toward the kind of celebrity culture with which we would be familiar. This essay focuses on cartes of the relatively unknown Lewis Payne – a co-conspirator of presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth – and how they came to feature in carte albums in the United States, North and South. Using archival resources from London to Charleston, SC., the essay frames this imaginative process as one that could be at once social, notable, and martial, depending on the local and national context. The essay discusses Gardner’s influences, both artistic and historical, and contends that the perhaps the key influence on his conspirator portraits was the extraordinary popularity in art, theatre and literature of the legendary English rogue Jack Sheppard.