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The Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman's Memorial or the Emancipation Group is a monument in Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was sometimes referred to as the "Lincoln Memorial" before the more prominent so-named memorial was dedicated in 1922.
Designed and sculpted by Thomas Ball and erected in 1876, the monument depicts Abraham Lincoln holding a copy of his Emancipation Proclamation freeing a male African American slave modeled on Archer Alexander. The ex-slave is depicted on one knee, about to stand up, with one fist clenched, shirtless and broken shackles at the president's feet.
The Emancipation Memorial statue was funded by the wages of freed slaves. The statue originally faced west towards the U.S. Capitol until it was rotated east in 1974 in order to face the newly erected Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial.
The statue is a contributing monument to the Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C. on the National Register of Historic Places.
Frederick Douglass spoke as the keynote speaker at the dedication service on April 14, 1876, with President Ulysses S. Grant in attendance.
Douglass explained that Lincoln's legacy was complex. "Truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory. Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man." He pointed out that Lincoln was more motivated to save the union than to free slaves, telling the New York Tribune: "If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." Douglass said that Lincoln "strangely told us that we were the cause of the war"—in 1862, Lincoln had told African-American leaders visiting the White House, "But for your presence amongst us, there would be no war." Douglass had many complaints about Lincoln's treatment of African Americans willing to and actually fighting in the war. But in the end, he judged Lincoln on his accomplishment rather than his motivation, saying: "It was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement.
After delivering the speech, Frederick Douglass immediately wrote a letter to the editor of the National Republican newspaper in Washington, which was published five days later on April 19, 1876. In his letter Douglass criticized the statue's design, and suggested the park could be improved by more dignified monuments of free Black people. “The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude”, 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.” This long-forgotten vital American artifact was found Saturday, June 27, 2020, in a search of Newspapers.com, by Scott Sandage, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Jonathan W. White, who teaches at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. Sandage and White sit on the board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute. Sandage alerted Mr. White and texted an image of the letter to David Blight, a Douglass biographer and history professor at Yale University.
Rodney Young of American University wrote that:
If there is one slavery monument whose origins are highly political, the 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 monument has been criticized for its paternalistic character and for not doing justice to the role that African Americans played in their own liberation. While the funds for the monument were raised from former slaves, a white artist conceived the original design. An alternative design depicting Lincoln with uniformed black Union soldiers was rejected as too expensive. According to historian Kirk Savage, a witness to the memorial's dedication recorded Frederick Douglass as saying that the statue "showed the Negro on his knees when a more manly attitude would have been indicative of freedom". In a recently uncovered letter from Douglass that appeared in the National Republican five days after the dedication, he said that the monument did not tell the "whole truth".
Admirable as is the monument by Mr. Ball in Lincoln park, it does not, as it seems to me, tell the whole truth, and perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate. The mere act of breaking the Negro's chains was the act of Abraham Lincoln, and is beautifully expressed in this monument. But the act by which the negro was made a citizen of the United States and invested with the elective franchise was pre-eminently the act of President U.S. Grant, and this is nowhere seen in the Lincoln monument. The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude. 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. There is room in Lincoln park for another monument, and I throw out this suggestion to the end that it may be taken up and acted upon.
White and Sandage, who rediscovered the letter, saw in it "a solution to the current impasse" over the Emancipation Memorial. Since no one statue could provide the whole truth, they suggested enriching the memorial group by adding statues of Charlotte Scott, whose contribution began the process, and Frederick Douglass, who dedicated the original monument, to create a new "Emancipation Group", as the monument was sometimes called. Lincoln biographer, Sidney Blumenthal, noted that the kneeling slave was a widespread abolitionist motif, appearing on the masthead of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.
On June 23, 2020, DC delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton announced plans to introduce legislation to remove the memorial. That same day, protesters on site vowed to dismantle the statue on Thursday, June 25, at 7:00 p.m. local time. Subsequently, a barrier fence was installed around the memorial to protect it from vandalism.
In 1879, Moses Kimball, for whom Ball had once worked at the Boston Museum, donated a copy of the statue to Boston. It was sited in Park Square. The statue was removed on December 29, 2020.
As of December 2020 the bronze copy of the original in Washington D.C. has been removed from Boston, "The bronze statue is a copy of a monument that was erected in Washington, D.C., three years earlier. The copy was installed in Boston because the city was home to the statue’s white creator, Thomas Ball.