Abraham Lincoln had scarcely been elected as the sixteenth president when the death threats began to arrive. They continued all through his presidency with such regularity that he set aside a special section of his upright desk in the White House, marked simply “Assassination,” to hold them. He should have taken them more seriously. After giving a speech on April 11, 1865, proposing at the end of the Civil War that freed slaves and black Union Army veterans in Louisiana be given the vote, an enraged white supremacist promised that he would “put him through.” And three nights later, that is just what that white supremacist—the actor John Wilkes Booth—did.
One hundred and fifty-five years later, some of the descendants of the people Lincoln determined to free from slavery are, by a cruel twist of logic, demanding the toppling of the bronze Freedman’s Memorial (sometimes known as the Emancipation Memorial) to Lincoln in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. “This statue right here embodies the white supremacy and the disempowerment of black people that is forced upon us by white people,” announced Glenn Foster, the founder of Free Neighborhood, at a raucous meeting held at the Memorial on June 23. Marcus Goodwin, a candidate for an at-large seat on the D.C. District Council, assembled a petition for the statue’s removal with more than 5,000 signatures. And D.C.’s Congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, announced in a tweet that, since Lincoln Park is National Park Service property, she was introducing legislation in Congress to move the statue because “the designers of the Emancipation Statue in Lincoln Park in DC didn’t take into account the views of African Americans. . . . It shows.”
But what, exactly, is the message of the Emancipation Memorial? And is it true that the views of African Americans were not taken into account by the artist and the patrons responsible for setting up the statue in 1876? The historical record suggests otherwise. The work’s sculptor, Thomas Ball, was not a black man—unsurprisingly, since there were no established black sculptors in the 1860s and ’70s when the monument was made.1 But the original impulse for the work came from a freedwoman, Charlotte Scott; the statue was entirely funded by the contributions of former slaves; the design of the statue was thoroughly revised in response to African-American sentiment; and the celebrations for the unveiling of the statue in 1876 were almost entirely the work of Washington D.C.’s African-American community. No work of American sculpture in the nineteenth century, in fact, was more the product of collective African-American agency than the Freedman’s Memorial.