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Lincoln Park Memorials

  • Writer: tourdeforcedc
    tourdeforcedc
  • Apr 11
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Lincoln Park, Washington DC


Photo credit: Russell Smith


Overview

An interesting place to begin our reflections on race, art, and place in Washington, DC is Lincoln Park, which contains two very different sculptural works dedicated a century apart. We begin with the controversial Freedman’s Memorial, unveiled on the eleventh anniversary of President Lincoln’s assassination, in April 1876. It was sculpted by the white New England artist Thomas Ball and paid for by donations from thousands of African Americans, including Black US military veterans and formerly enslaved people.


Visual Description

A standing Abraham Lincoln is displayed in his familiar frock coat. His left hand is raised in the act of freeing or blessing a nearly naked, kneeling enslaved Black man, wearing only a loin cloth. On the Black man’s wrists broken shackles are visible.  Lincoln’s right hand rests upon a document, clearly the Emancipation Proclamation, situated upon a column on which is inscribed the face of George Washington, with five pointed stars and fasces (classical symbols of law and authority) arrayed around its base.


Location

Lincoln Park, along East Capitol Street, is one mile east of the US Capital. It is along the central monumental east-west axis of the District of Columbia, which is also occupied by the National Mall, Washington Monument, the US Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.   


Access:

Lincoln Park is located in between 11th and 13th streets, NE/SE, and East Capitol Street NE and East Capital Street SE. Street parking is usually available in the neighborhood.  

The Park is located along the 96 Bus route, is about a 30 minute walk from the Union Station Red Line Metro station, and about a 22 minute walk from the Capitol South Orange and Blue Line Metro station.


Historical Background

At the end of the second year of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, taking effect January 1, 1863. This document declared that all enslaved people being held in states in open rebellion against the United States were henceforth forever free. (The Proclamation did not emancipate people enslaved in States loyal to the Union, that is to say Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri; enslaved people in the District of Columbia had been emancipated eight months earlier, on April 16, 1862 )., As a practical matter, the Proclamation did not immediately liberate the millions of enslaved people in the Confederacy, which did not recognize the lawful authority of the United States, but it  did profoundly alter the meaning of the conflict, turning it into a struggle for liberation in the eyes of Americans and international onlookers. The Proclamation laid the groundwork for the service in the US military by hundreds of thousands of Black men and for the eventual 13th amendment to the US Constitution, forever prohibiting involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.


Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865 by a pro-Confederate sympathizer; his successor Andrew Johnson was notably less sympathetic to the civil rights claims of African Americans. In the view of most  historians the full promises of the Proclamation and the post Civil War constitutional amendments were delayed and denied for over a century. 


Charlotte Scott, a previously enslaved woman residing in Ohio, was deeply distraught upon learning of President Lincoln’s death in mid April 1865 and determined to give her entire life savings, of $5.00, towards a memorial for Lincoln. The Western Sanitary Commission, an organization that provided relief and medical aid to Civil War veterans, developed plans to build a statue of Lincoln. Building on Charlotte Scott’s example, the Commission solicited funds from thousands of people of color, primarily previously enslaved. African Americans, however, were not consulted in the selection and design process that led to the memorial.


A much more elaborate design for the memorial was initially selected, created by Harriet Hosmer, the preeminent US woman sculptor of the 19th century. This composition included a set of figures depicting the passage from slavery to freedom, culminating in a heroically posed African American soldier, bearing a rifle. These Black figures were arrayed around a central image of Lincoln, holding broken chains. The design was ultimately rejected, in part for reasons of cost, by the Commission, in favor of Thomas Ball’s simpler design, of a standing President Lincoln and the kneeling slave.


Ball’s earlier rendition of the Emancipation assemblage showed an anonymous kneeling slave wearing a Phrygian cap, Ancient Roman symbol of freedom, with an open hand. 

Ball responded to early criticism of his design by making minor alterations to the kneeling slave image. He removed the Freedom cap, added a clenched fist and modeled the face of the enslaved man on a real person, Archer Alexander, a formerly enslaved man who had assisted the Union military cause during the Civil War and been detained under the Fugitive Slave Act. Alexander was not consulted in the usage of his likeness and was not invited to the memorial dedication; he later expressed shock at his being used as a model in this way.

In 1876, the Memorial was installed facing west, towards the US Capitol one mile away. It was turned around  in 1974, when the Mary Beth McLeod memorial was installed at the eastern end of the park, so the two memorials are now facing one another.


Until 1922, when the Lincoln Memorial opened at the west end of the National Mall,  Lincoln Park was the primary site in the District of Columbia devoted to honoring the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln Park is administered collaboratively between the US National Park Service and the non profit Friends of Lincoln Park.


Debating the Memorial

From the time of its unveiling the memorial has attracted considerable criticism.  Frederick Douglass, who spoke at the memorial’s dedication in 1876, was distressed by its depiction of a freedman as prostrate and barely naked, and by the implication that 4 million previously enslaved people had played no role in liberating themselves.  In an 1876 letter, Douglass wrote ““What I want to see before I die…is a monument representing the Negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”


A replica of the memorial, known as the “Emancipation Group,” was erected in central Boston’s Park Plaza in 1879. Following critiques catalyzed by the death of George Floyd it was removed by the city of Boston in late 2020. Around the same time, some Black political leaders called for the original Emancipation Memorial in Washington DC to be removed, but to date, this has not happened.


Interpretive Notes

  • The motif of the kneeling slave is most likely inspired by the well known abolitionist 1787 image of the supplicant slave, “Am I not a man and a brother’, made famous by Josiah Wedgewood’s rendering. Like the Wedgewood image, the kneeling slave in Ball’s memorial is similarly open to charges of condescension and paternalism. It is possible that artist Thomas Ball, who spent much of his artistic career in Italy, was also alluding to Michelangelo’s famed Creation of Adam section of Sistine Chapel, in which the Lord reaches out his index finger to the newly created naked figure of Adam. In this sense, the newly liberated male slave may be thought of as newly born, being shaped or enlivened by the near divine figure of Lincoln towering over him. 


  • It should be noted that although the memorial is sited within Washington DC, no reference is made to the DC Emancipation Act, which freed all enslaved people in the District of Columbia on April 16, 1862, eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation.   Also note that there is no reference here to the role of enslaved people in freeing themselves through mass escape or the roles of hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers and sailors in securing Union victory in the Civil War.

 

Prompts for close looking

  • What differences strike you between the original Harriet Hosmer design and the Thomas Ball design, which was ultimately adopted by the Commission? Why, other than reasons of cost, might Hosmer’s emphasis on Black soldiers bearing rifles have been deleted from the ultimate design adopted by the Commission?


  • Compare the hands of the two figures: what is suggested by Lincoln’s right hand near the text of the Emancipation Proclamation, and his left hand extended over the enslaved man?  What is suggested by the position of the hands of the enslaved man?


  • Consider the relationship between the upright forms in the memorial: the plinth on which the two figures rest, the column (marked with George Washington’s face) on which Lincoln’s right hand and the Emancipation Proclamation rests, and the standing figure of Lincoln itself.  How is this verticality contrasted with the largely horizontal positioning of the enslaved man, and what is implied by this difference?


  • What other contrasts do you observe between the two male figures, in terms of standing and kneeling, clothed and unclothed, commanding and submissive, controlling a text and lacking relationship to written knowledge?


  • Compare the relationship between Lincoln and the Freedman with the relationship between God and Adam in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in The Sistine Chapel in Rome, Italy. What parallels and differences do you observe between the two compositions?


  • What seems to be implied by the image of George Washington, along with stars and fasces (a bundle of sticks that were a symbol of power, justice, and order in Ancient Rome and in American governmental architecture)  on the column that holds the Emancipation Proclamation?  Is the artist perhaps seeking to locate Emancipation in a trajectory of history that can be traced back to the American Revolution’s efforts to secure the blessings of liberty?  How does the memorial addressIs George Washington’s status as a major enslaverslaveowner conveniently obscured here?  How dDoes the memorial addressalso perhaps obscure a central tension in Lincoln’s conduct of the Civil War, torn between a commitment to preserve the Union and his growing sense of the immorality of chattel of slavery?


  • Compare the two written texts depicted in the Lincoln Emancipation memorial and the nearby Mary McLeod Bethune memorial (the Emancipation Proclamation and a scroll representing Bethune’s accumulated wisdom.)  What does this difference suggest about white and Black control over literacy and written knowledge?


  • Do you believe the Emancipation Memorial should be removed from Lincoln Park? If so, what should happen to it? Should it be placed somewhere else? Where? Should it be destroyed or repurposed in some way? Why or why not? If it is retained, what interpretive signage or other explanatory material should be placed in proximity to the work? Should it perhaps be supplemented by a new work about emancipation and freedom-making? If so, what might that new memorial look like?


Suggested Creative Responses

  • Sketch out an alternate memorial about Emancipation that might be placed near, or fully replace, this memorial.


  • Write or perform a dialogue that might take place between Abraham Lincoln and the enslaved man. What might a newly freed man say if he were to stand fully erect and face Lincoln?


Learning Resources

The most detailed scholarly discussion of the Memorial is found in Chapter Four of Kirk Savage’s book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, which is largely available through Google Books:

A very helpful discussion of Ball’s earlier 1875 sculpture by  1875, by Katherine Harnish, is at; 

Also see National Park Service on the Emancipation Memorial: https://www.nps.gov/places/000/emancipation-memorial.htm





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