President Lincoln and His Family

On April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln died after being shot the previous evening, plunging the nation into mourning at the very moment the Civil War was drawing to a close.

In 1866, just one year later, this engraved print of President Lincoln and His Family was published by Bradley & Co. of Philadelphia. The image was engraved by John Sartain after an oil painting by Samuel Bell Waugh.

The composition presents Lincoln not on the battlefield or in the White House, but at home — seated at a table with books, surrounded by Mary Todd Lincoln and their sons. A portrait of Willie Lincoln, who had died in 1862, hangs on the wall above them.

Images like this were widely distributed in the months after the war. Americans did not simply mourn Lincoln — they brought him into their homes. The engraving helped shape a powerful vision of Lincoln as a devoted father and moral leader at a moment when the nation itself was grieving and uncertain about the future.

This print came to the Sandwich Glass Museum & Historical Society from a descendant of someone connected to the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company — a reminder that factory families here, too, participated in the shared national work of remembrance.