The closest thing the United States has to a national monument to the end of slavery is in a park in the capital, a little more than half a mile from the National Mall. It depicts two figures: Abraham Lincoln, tall and stately, holding out his left arm and looking down at a barely clothed Black man with broken shackles kneeling at his feet. A single word, Emancipation, is emblazoned on the base below him. Dedicated on April 14, 1876, the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination—and 150 years ago this month—the imagery of the Freedman’s Memorial was as unsettling then as it is now. What had begun as an effort among Black Americans to honor the fallen president and emancipation has become a bronze-cast symbol of the movement’s limits.
The story of the Freedman’s Memorial shows just how quickly a nation’s ideals can erode. The concept for the monument began with a single donation of $5 from a formerly enslaved woman named Charlotte Scott following Lincoln’s assassination. The well-publicized gift inspired more gifts from other Black Americans, many of them Union-army veterans, who established a fund. When word reached a white Union-army general, the direction of the project changed. The funds and the organizing responsibilities were handed over to the Western Sanitary Commission of St. Louis, an outfit managed by white Americans.
Led by the founder of Washington University in St. Louis, William Greenleaf Eliot (the grandfather of T. S. Eliot), the commission debated over the monument’s design. A proposal by the sculptor Harriet Hosmer would have surrounded Lincoln with four standing Black figures, who would have represented the progression from slavery to citizenship, as well as the vital contributions of Black soldiers in the Civil War. The commission passed on Hosmer’s design—which was more expensive to build and more egalitarian in vision—for Thomas Ball’s concept of the kneeling Black man, with two modifications. First, the generic Black figure at Lincoln’s feet was replaced with a figure modeled after a Black Missouri man named Archer Alexander whom Eliot had sheltered following his escape, and who would later work as Eliot’s servant. But Alexander was an odd choice for the monument: He had escaped slavery on his own in Missouri, and was not freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—which didn’t apply to the state. The second modification was a small gesture to such agency: Alexander’s right arm was elevated slightly, to suggest his role in “helping to break the chain that bound him,” as the commission put it.