Is That an Emoticon from 1862?

That's the question posed recently by the New York Times.

From the piece...

Were they using emoticons back in the era of Abraham Lincoln?

There has been a lot of recent attention focused on the inspirational quality of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. Perhaps those speeches inspired emoticons a century before they proliferated in the digital world.

A historical newspaper specialist at the digital archival company Proquest believes he has found an example of a sideways winking smiley face embedded in The New York Times transcript of an 1862 speech given by President Lincoln. Other historians are not so sure, saying the semicolon alongside a closed parenthesis is either a mistake or a misinterpretation of something that is perfectly grammatical for that era.