Great Emancipator, Supplicant Slave: The Freedman’s Memorial to Abraham Lincoln

III. Great Emancipator, Supplicant Slave: The Freedman’s Memorial to Abraham Lincoln

If there is one slavery monument whose origins are highly political, the Thomas Ball’s Freedman’s memorial is it. The development process for this memorial started immediately after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and ended, appropriately enough, near the end of reconstruction in 1876. In many ways, it exemplified and reflected the hopes, dreams, striving, and ultimate failures of reconstruction. The story behind the Freedman’s Memorial is rather interesting. According to much publicized newspaper accounts during the funding drive for the memorial, Charlotte Scott, an ex-slave, gave her ex-master five dollars to start financing a monument to the beloved emancipator.[1] That such a tale, whether true or not, would become so popular is in itself indication of the paternalistic ethos of the campaign. And a campaign it certainly was, for the Western Sanitary Commission of St. Louis, a volunteer war relief agency, immediately got involved. After several months, they raised some $20,000 to erect a monument but subsequently announced a new goal: $50,000.[2]
The politics of the fundraising campaign and the planning efforts were as turbulent as was the reconstruction era itself. Structural divisions within the campaign divided black and white donors. The “Colored People’s Educational Monument Association” headed by Henry Highland Garnet proposed a utilitarian monument in the form of a school, where freedmen could elevate themselves through learning. Fredrick Douglass disagreed, thinking the goal of education incommensurate with that of remembering Lincoln.[3] Although Thomas Ball’s model for the memorial had been the front runner (see photograph above), Harriet Hosmer proposed a grander scheme (see photograph at right) that showed, in part, a black soldier standing at attention, as if guarding his hard fought liberties. Hosmer’s monument takes a pyramid structure, with Lincoln’s coffin at the top, and it is obviously meant to be a grand, breathtaking work of art.
	However, it was also too expensive, and the commission eventually decided on an altered version of Ball’s design (see photographs at left and below).[4] Perhaps the most interesting part of this design are the changes the commission insisted on. Instead of wearing a liberty cap, the slave in Ball’s revised monument is bare headed, and his hair is tightly curled. The face has been re-sculpted to look like Archer Alexander, an ex-slave. His arms are separated in an attempt to break his chains. Compared to the original design, in which Lincoln’s hand seems to awaken the slave to his new freedom and to the realization that his shackles are gone, the current memorial is more of an amalgamation of approaches. It is no longer allegorical but realistic. In fact, Lincoln never met Archer Alexander, so it is historically inaccurate. While the original design poses a question—will this slave become a man?—
the revision erases that query and instead implies a relationship between two men who never actually knew each other.[5] In this sense, then, the memorial is truly the work of the same committee that planned the proverbial horse and ended up with a camel instead. Yet fully half of memorialization consists of what we think years later while looking on the event being commemorated. Do you think that the memorial is effective? What does it do well? What does it fail to do? What do you think are the major differences between Ball’s original design, Hosmer’s model, and the current monument?

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[1] Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997) 90.