After Thomas Ball learned that President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated in 1865, he decided to make a statue in his honor. His work helped form Lincoln’s legacy as ‘The Great Emancipator,’ but a closer look at the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, and responses to the sculpture help shape a more complex story about the freeing of enslaved people.
Copy and Paste the Following Code to Embed this Video:
What do you know about the Emancipation Proclamation?
– Ooh, I’m pretty sure it was a presidential order, and I think it came from Honest Abe, also known as Abraham Lincoln, and I’m pretty sure it has to do with the Civil War.
– Yeah, that’s right.
Do you know when it was issued?
– I don’t.
I’m really bad with dates, but I can look it up.
– Oh, oh.
[playful music] – It looks like… – Oh, there you are.
– It was January 1, 1863.
– Did you remember learning about it in school?
– I think it was an address that freed enslaved people.
– That’s pretty much what I learned, too.
But the real story is way more complicated than that.
– Really?
Well, can you tell me more?
– Yeah.
If you meet me at the Chazen Museum of Art.
– An art museum?
– You’ll see.
– All right, I’ll be right over.
[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [television static] – Janine Yorimoto Boldt: Good morning!
Welcome!
– Thank you so much for having us.
I’m Kacie.
– I’m Taylor.
– And I’m Janine.
I’m a curator here at the museum, which means that I help take care of the art collection and I help create some of the special exhibitions that you see at the museum.
So this exhibition is called re:mancipation, and it’s a really close look at a historic sculpture in our American Art collection celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation.
So this is the Emancipation Group sculpture that’s in the collection of the Chazen Museum of Art.
– There’s a lot going on in this sculpture.
Lucky for us, Janine could help us figure out what some of the details mean.
– Janine: Lincoln’s posed standing, and he’s got his hand out as if he’s sort of blessing the kneeling figure below him.
And the figure below him is supposed to represent all enslaved people or formerly enslaved people that Lincoln is freeing from the chains of slavery.
But the artist depicted him kneeling at Lincoln’s feet, so he’s not given an equal position in the sculpture.
– What can you tell me about the artist?
– So the artist was a man named Thomas Ball.
He was an artist from New England.
He actually worked in Florence, Italy, like a lot of American artists at the time.
They went to Italy to work because it was near Italian marble, that this sculpture’s actually made out of.
– “What’s marble?”
you asked.
Good question.
Marble is a type of limestone.
People as far back as ancient Greeks and Romans used marble to carve important historical and mythological figures.
Thousands of years later, American artists are doing the exact same thing by carving famous politicians and leaders.
Americans like the idea of linking themselves to the glory of ancient empires through things like art and architecture.
What is that supposed to be?
– It’s a self-portrait.
[ding] – So, can you tell us a little bit more about emancipation and how it connects to the art here?
– Sure.
When Lincoln died, he became known as the Great Emancipator because he was remembered for the Emancipation Proclamation.
And so, Thomas Ball wanted to commemorate the Great Emancipator by creating this Emancipation Group, which is supposed to represent the emancipation or the freeing of enslaved people.
– Janine is talking here about the context of when this was first made, the stuff that was going on.
Thomas Ball first started working on the sculpture when he learned of Lincoln’s assassination in April of 1865, but he wasn’t the only one.
There were lots of groups all across the United States who were interested in creating monuments to Lincoln.
It was quite the fad.
The sudden craze probably had to do with Lincoln being the first president who was assassinated.
And the really big deal of the end of the Civil War.
The war’s end meant the abolition of slavery and the preservation of the Union.
So there was a lot going on, and artists like Ball were trying to make sense of it in art.
– However, the story’s a little more complicated than that, right?
The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t actually free anybody at the moment Lincoln signed it, right?
The Emancipation Proclamation said that enslaved people in Confederate territory would be freed as of January 1, 1863.
However, because they were in Confederate territory, the Union actually had no control over the area, and it didn’t free any of the enslaved people who are still living in the Union along the border states and other states where slavery was still legal.
So the Emancipation Proclamation and the celebration of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator is actually pretty complicated.
It didn’t happen like this at all.
– So yeah, just to clarify, it was a long process, and it was a long time before all enslaved people were actually freed.
Juneteenth, which is celebrated on June 19th, marks the date that Texas finally emancipated enslaved people in its borders.
That was in 1865, over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Also, remember that Black Americans after the war had to keep fighting for their rights as citizens.
Lincoln didn’t magically make slavery and all it evils disappear.
But works of art like this build up that mythology around that belief, which is why we historians have to dig deeper.
– Janine: Exactly.
The Emancipation Proclamation sort of made the end of slavery a goal of the Civil War because it did say that any new territory that the Union won, enslaved people would be free.
And it sort of led the border states where slavery was still legal to realize that slavery was going to come to an end.
– So what did people think about this artwork, especially the enslaved, formerly enslaved people?
How did they receive all of these art pieces being done to commemorate?
– A lot of people, mostly white Americans, really loved this sculpture as an image of emancipation, and it actually was turned into a monument.
So the artist made a much larger, slightly different version of this sculpture.
– Wait, what is this about other versions?
– Well, according to Janine, Thomas Ball made several versions of the sculpture, including copies made in marble and bronze.
The Chazen has one, and they borrowed a couple other versions from different collections for this exhibit specifically.
We’re also going to hear about a big version that was made into a public monument in just a second.
How long were you sitting back there?
– At least some African Americans and formerly enslaved people did not like this sculpture.
When the monument in D.C. of this sculpture was unveiled, Frederick Douglass, who was a great civil rights leader and a formerly enslaved person himself, was invited to give a speech, and he criticized Lincoln.
And then in a newspaper article, criticized the sculpture, and he said, “Why can’t we have a sculpture “that shows African Americans on their feet, standing like a man?”
– Part of what made this exhibit so special was that a contemporary artist named Sanford Biggers was commissioned to create a work of art that was a response to the original sculpture by Thomas Ball.
– So in Sanford Biggers’s work, he showed Lincoln sitting with bare feet, sort of, you know, an echo of the nude African-American figure in this sculpture.
And standing over him is Frederick Douglass.
And Frederick Douglass is lifting a veil, trying to show Lincoln more about the history of enslaved people and maybe unveil to viewers the real history of the Emancipation Proclamation.
– So, what’s your takeaway after seeing the sculpture and learning more about it?
– Well, I feel like the artifact we explored is an example of how some works of art, like sculptures and monuments, can play a big role in influencing how people think of history.
What were your thoughts at seeing some of the modern responses to the sculpture?
– I thought it was really cool.
I didn’t know that response sculptures were really even a thing until we went to this exhibition.
– Yeah, I thought it was an interesting way to kind of rethink about monuments.
– Yeah.
And to even learn about the Emancipation Proclamation, things that we didn’t learn in school.
– Yeah, definitely.
– Sometimes, details in history get exaggerated or important parts of the story get left out.
Finding out the real story is part of the fun of doing history.
No matter where you live, I bet there are stories, monuments, or plaques that deserve a closer look.
See if you can dig into some local history.
Try talking to museum or library staff and see if you can find out the stories behind those stories.
Passport
Follow Us