Nevertheless, Douglass continued, “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, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.”ĭouglass highlighted Lincoln’s ability to marshal the “earnest sympathy and the powerful co-operation” of those loyal to the United States to accomplish what was otherwise impossible, the destruction of the Confederacy and slavery along with it. Frederick Douglass’s speech at the dedication did not shy away from rebuking Lincoln for his flaws: his early plan to remove blacks from the United States, his delay in embracing the cause of emancipation, his restraining of more radical abolitionists in his command. It was inaugurated in the presence of President Grant and other representatives of the federal government along with DC’s black community. The monument was financed at considerable expense by freed (and free) blacks. But the historical pedigree of the memorial should give serious pause to those calling for its removal. The iconography of the Emancipation Memorial is indeed unfortunate, appearing to depict a relationship of paternalism between Lincoln and the slaves. DC delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton plans to introduce a bill to remove the statue from Lincoln Park, the same bill that would remove a statue of Andrew Jackson. In Washington, DC, protesters announced they plan to tear down the Emancipation Memorial depicting Lincoln hovering over a kneeling freed slave. In Madison, Wisconsin, a statue of Colonel Hans Christian Heg, an antislavery activist who dedicated his life to abolition and died fighting the Confederacy, was torn down, beheaded, and dumped in a nearby lake. Grant served as a Union general and as president he used every power at his disposal to dismantle and suppress white supremacy in the former Confederate states. Grant, described by one observer as “a slave owner too, before the Civil War,” was torn down. Yet the recent wave of removals of Confederate statues has been interspersed with protesters tearing down Union memorials. Protesters tearing down confederate monuments and public officials ordering their removal is the right step to rectifying the injustice done to the memory of those they sought to subjugate. Protesters attempting to topple down a statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square in Washington, DC. Confederate statues are idols of the order they sought to preserve and extend, one of white supremacy and black bondage. Most were raised decades after the Civil War to mark the defeat of Reconstruction and restoration of white supremacy to the South and elsewhere in the United States. This is why the removal of statues commemorating Confederate figures is entirely justified.Ĭonfederate monuments were erected to read back into history the lie that these men acted with honor and out of duty, and that their public service should be commemorated. It honors those it depicts and exerts a subtle moral influence over the society that raises them in its public spaces. A statue is not merely a marker of some neutral historical fact.
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