Garfield on a Painting and Lincoln and the Declaration

With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence upon us, it's a perfect time to look at Abraham Lincoln, the fiercest advocate for the deep meaning of that document. Read on, and for lots more on Lincoln's ties to the Declaration, visit Lincoln250.org.

By Mark B. Pohlad

Chicago

July 5, 2026

It might not be the most famous paintings in the U.S. Capitol. And because it hangs in a Senate stairwell, it’s easy to miss. Moreover, Frances Carpenter’s The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation Before the Cabinet (1865) is rather muddy because he couldn’t stop touching it up. But it remains important, perhaps even more so because of its link to Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and the Declaration of Independence.

Frances Carpenter's great work.

The engraving that Scottish-born Alexander Hay Ritchie made of it is clearer. It’s the morning of Tuesday, July 22nd, 1862, and Lincoln has finished reading the momentous document. He’s now doing something very Lincolnian: he’s listening. On either side of him are––from left to right––cabinet members Stanton, Chase, Wells, Smith, Seward, Blair and Bates. Seward, perhaps because he was from the artist’s home state of New York, is shown speaking in response to what they’ve just heard. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed exactly two months later and went into effect on January 1st, 1863. Lincoln thought he’d be most remembered for this single act.

To conduct research for his picture, Carpenter lived at the White House for months. There he conversed with and drew Lincoln and took measurements and photographs of everything. Lincoln apparently liked the resulting painting and had committed to buy one of Ritchie’s first prints of it (he died first). Twelve years later, the government accepted the gift of Carpenter’s painting from its owner, the activist-philanthropist Elizabeth R. Thompson. And on Lincoln’s birthday, 1878, Rep. James A. Garfield of Ohio rose to give a speech in the House formally acknowledging the bequest.

He spoke about Lincoln, Emancipation and the Declaration. Like Carpenter’s painting, it is vastly underappreciated. At the outset, Garfield referenced two other paintings in the Capitol, Vanderlyn’s Landing of Columbus and Trumbull’s picture of the drafters of the Declaration. Carpenter’s, he said, now joins them as it represents “the third great act in the history of America—the fulfillment of the promises of the Declaration.” 

Addressing Lincoln’s transformative love of reading, Garfield observed that one document above all “held him captive and filled his spirit with the majesty of its truth and the sublimity of its eloquence. It was the Declaration of American Independence.” Further, he noted that for Lincoln “the author and signers of that instrument became, in his early youth, the heroes of his political worship.” Garfield mused that “I doubt if history affords any example of a life so early, so deeply, and so permanently influenced, by a single political truth, as was Abraham Lincoln’s by the central doctrine of the Declaration—the liberty and equality of all men. That truth,” the Congressman asserted, “runs, like a thread of gold, through the whole web of his political life.”

The House voted unanimously to accept the gift of the painting, and the speech was published as a pamphlet soon after. Carpenter himself gifted Garfield a print of his painting. It still hangs prominently in the James A. Garfield home in Mentor, Ohio.

 Image from the Library of Congress