A Bitter Coda to American Reconstruction
· The Atlantic
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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.
The idea for Alexander’s pose had a long history, reaching back to 18th-century British abolitionism. The potter Josiah Wedgwood first produced a medallion of a crouching, half-clothed Black figure looking upward and asking, “Am I not a man and a brother?” It had been a staple of antislavery iconography ever since. Versions appeared on teapots and woodcuts and the masthead of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. During the Civil War, popular lithographs depicted Lincoln next to the crouching Black man, and army-camp photographers posed white Union soldiers beside Black men in a similar arrangement.
The years leading up to the creation of the Freedman’s Memorial saw the full enfranchisement of Black men—and then the dimming of this vision. The most productive period of Reconstruction saw vital civil-rights legislation and two amendments (the Fourteenth and Fifteenth) that defined national citizenship and established equal protection in voting rights. But by the spring of 1876, when the memorial was dedicated, the country was moving away from Reconstruction. White northerners looked on with growing indifference as white southerners waged campaigns of murder, terror, and intimidation to restore their control of state and local governments; they greeted the news of a wave of violence in Mississippi’s 1875 state elections with a shrug. As Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his attorney general, “The whole public are tired out with these annual, autumnal outbreaks in the South.”
When Frederick Douglass rose to speak at the dedication of the Freedman’s Memorial, he was painfully aware of both the grim symbolism of the monument and the grim drift of events. Before an audience that included President Grant, Douglass asked Americans to confront the ways in which racism belied their claims to liberty and equality, just as he had 24 years earlier when he’d asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Although Douglass gave Lincoln his due, he also offered an unvarnished account of how and why the president had succeeded: Lincoln understood the limit of white Americans’ commitment to emancipation, and with it, their hesitancy to embrace equality. Douglass aired his feelings about the monument soon after in a letter to a Washington newspaper, discovered in 2020 by the historians Jonathan W. White and Scott Sandage. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal,” he wrote, “but erect on his feet like a man.”
In 1876, the monument registered the retreat from Reconstruction’s expansive promise; in 2026, some wish to retreat from history itself. Under the mandate of the Trump administration, the National Park Service has been ordered to purge references to slavery—even from places such as Harpers Ferry, which can’t be understood without it—to eliminate so-called corrosive ideology. The constitutional order established with the end of slavery is now no less in question: The birthright-citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is being challenged in the Supreme Court, and the Voting Rights Act written under the auspices of the Fifteenth is also under threat.
Immediately after the Civil War, it had been possible to view abolition as an expression of the nation’s highest ideals. William Dean Howells had said so in The Atlantic in 1866, when he took up the “Question of Monuments” in an essay assessing what kinds of memorials should fill American public spaces. “Our immutable destiny,” Howells wrote, is “to give freedom to mankind”—and public sculpture should represent that. As a model, Howells held up John Quincy Adams Ward’s 1863 sculpture The Freedman. The figure in Ward’s essay wouldn’t have been exactly what Douglass had in mind—he was seated and only partially clothed—but he was dignified, classical in form, and hardly a supplicant at the feet of another.
Writing a decade later in 1876, not long after the dedication of the Freedman’s Memorial, Howells’s tune changed when he encountered another statue representing the end of slavery. This one came in the form of the Italian sculptor Francesco Pezzicar’s The Freed Slave, on display at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. It was a far cry from what had been unveiled the previous month in Washington. The powerful figure stands, with his arms spread, as if he has just broken his own chains. The copy of the Emancipation Proclamation he’s holding is the only indication of Lincoln. Howells, who was serving as The Atlantic’s editor by that point, was not impressed with the assertive portrayal before him. Presented with the “most offensively Frenchy negro,” Howells concluded, “One longs to clap him back into hopeless bondage.”
In 1866, Howells had been able to recognize the connection between ending slavery, envisioning equality, and the broadest expression of the American idea. By 1876, on the country’s centennial, he appeared to have given in to the forces that had severed that connection. As some seek to erase the history of slavery from our public sites and to reject the ideal of equality, Howells’s change of heart is instructive. Confronting the history of slavery and realizing the Founders’ vision of equality isn’t an expression of “corrosive ideology.” Turning your back on it is.