Lincoln’s New Assassins
The fact that we have produced senseless mobs willing to tear down our monuments testifies to the fact that we, the living, need to do more to honor our nation’s living spirit, not merely take selfies before dead bronze.
By Ken Masugi • June 25, 2020
Now the mob takes the role of John Wilkes Booth in removing perhaps the greatest of all Lincoln sculptures, the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, located in northeast Washington, D.C. The preeminent Lincoln scholar of our or any other time, Harry V. Jaffa, said many times that this sculpture, originally referred to as the Freedman’s Memorial, rivaled Daniel French’s Lincoln Memorial creation. The statue was dedicated to honor Lincoln on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Yet the furious mob blindly objects that the statue shows a kneeling slave before a standing Lincoln. The mob is even more blinkered in its art appreciation than it is in its historical understanding, as I will show in close-up views of the muscular freedman—no longer a slave!—and other details.
According to noted Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight’s account of the statue’s creation, the sculptor, Thomas Ball, had altered his conception from a “‘kneeling slave . . . represented as perfectly passive’ (freedom given), to an ‘emancipated slave [as] agent in his own deliverance’ (freedom seized), . . . the monument as an ‘ideal group . . . [was] converted into the literal truth of history.’â€
In other words, the Commission charged with coming up with an appropriate memorial and raising funds from freed slaves—yes, the mob would be desecrating the memories, labor, and donations of enslaved Americans—saw the potential problems in the design and persuaded the sculptor to alter the statue.
The model for the slave, Archer Alexander, was the last slave captured under the Fugitive Slave Act. With his broken shackle, he is rising, as a runner coming off the blocks on the track; this muscular man is ready to spring from the harsh school of slavery into freedom. He should never have been a slave to begin with. Before, he was flat on his face, like dirt; now he is rising as a man. He is an equal; he bows to no one.
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https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/25/lincolns-new-assassins/
