Image Problems

PETER: Major production support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the University of Virginia.

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts. Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century Guy, and I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: 19th Century Guy.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s with us.

PETER: 18th century ago.

BRIAN: In a small park just east of the US capitol, there’s a tall monument depicting two bronze figures on a high pedestal. One is Abraham Lincoln, his right hand resting on a scroll. That scroll is the Emancipation Proclamation. His left hand is outstretched over the head of the second figure who’s crouched at Lincoln’s feet. It’s a newly freed slave, broken manacles hanging from his wrist. This man isn’t identified anywhere on the monument, but he was modeled on a real person.

KIRK SAVAGE: by the name of Archer Alexander, who was a man who had escaped from a Confederate-sympathizing slave owner in Missouri.

PETER: This is Kirk Savage, an art historian at the University of Pittsburgh. He explained that Alexander escaped from slavery in the spring of 1863, a few months after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. But here’s the thing. Alexander was from Missouri, and Missouri was a slave state that was loyal to the Union, and Lincoln’s Proclamation only applied to states in rebellion, which meant that under federal law, Alexander would still have been considered a fugitive slave. And he would have remained a fugitive slave until Missouri abolished slavery in 1865.

KIRK SAVAGE: So here’s the irony. You have the figure of Lincoln up above this man, Archer Alexander, who’s now modeled after Archer Alexander. And Lincoln is actually literally holding in his right hand the Emancipation Proclamation, a document that did absolutely nothing to free the man at his feet.

ED: Stories like Archer Alexander’s show us just how complicated the transition from slavery to freedom was. So today on the show, we’re marking the 150th anniversary of Emancipation Proclamation. We will look at what emancipation actually meant in 1863, and what it’s meant to subsequent generations of Americans.

BRIAN: Let’s return to that monument in DC. It’s the only national monument to emancipation, and it was conceived by former slaves as a tribute to Lincoln after his assassination. But the money those former slaves collected for the project was controlled by an all white charitable organization. And before that group settled on the design we just heard about– Lincoln standing, Archer Alexander kneeling– it considered a very different idea.

KIRK SAVAGE: They initially chose a design by woman sculptor, actually, by the name of Harriet Hosmer in 1866. And the design called for a huge, sculptural kind of assemblage that would have featured an image at the top of Lincoln on his sepulchre, you know, dead, horizontal at the top of the monument, surrounded at the base by a series of figures of African Americans that sort of told a archetypal story of African American History, starting with a slave figure and working its way around the pedestal until you get to a soldier figure adjacent to it on the other side, so that you had this pairing of the slave and the soldier in the front of the monument. It would have been about 60 feet high. Something like that.

BRIAN: Really? So monumental.

KIRK SAVAGE: It would have been the largest monument in Washington at that time by far. They were after really a big, bold statement. And the inclusion of the figure of the African American soldier was a really big and bold statement for that time.

BRIAN: With the prone Lincoln and the slave literally rising, this seems to convey a pretty front and center role for the formerly enslaved people.

KIRK SAVAGE: Absolutely. And that’s what’s so striking about that design, is that it really gives agency to African Americans and their history. It really puts them front and center in the story of emancipation. Because Lincoln is dead up at the top of the monument, he is no longer an agent in this monument. And it’s, in fact, the African Americans below him who become the agents in the monument. And this is a complete reversal of the history of representation of slaves and African Americans in the US.

BRIAN: Now I do a lot of research in Washington. I have missed this monument that you just described. Did I take a wrong turn?

KIRK SAVAGE: [LAUGHS] No. Well, they simply didn’t get anywhere near the money that they needed to be able to erect this design. So they went to a plan B. And plan B was in a sense, almost the opposite of plan A. Plan B was a design that was kind of off the shelf, already made, by a sculptor named Thomas Ball.

Basically, it’s a rehash of the typical imagery of the slave prior to emancipation. The figure of the kneeling slave who implores an unseen kind of Savior around him, says, am I not a man and a brother?

BRIAN: Where would Ball have seen this before the war?

KIRK SAVAGE: Well, he would have seen it everywhere. I mean, it was in print form. It was circulated in prints. Women would create pin cushions with this image on it, and handkerchiefs, and all kinds of household items, and sell them at fundraisers for the Abolitionist movement.

And this was the most famous and the most common image of an African American really in the world. It was a loan slave figure. So there was nobody with him. That was part of the power of it. He’s sort of appealing, even though he’s shown in profile, he’s in a sense appealing to you.

He’s asking you, am I not a man and a brother? And it’s a notorious image nowadays, because it really expresses the kind of total lack of agency. The idea that the slave couldn’t possibly engage in any kind of resistance or any kind of effective action on his own behalf, but has to rely on a white savior.

BRIAN: And that white savior was Abraham Lincoln in this case?

KIRK SAVAGE: Then becomes Abraham Lincoln. So what Ball realized was that, hey, we can complete the image now. We can kind of complete the narrative. Right? This was a question mark before. Am I not a man and brother? Now we’ve answered it. And we can answer it with the figure of Abraham Lincoln, who comes in as the great white savior responding to the plea of the lowly slave.

BRIAN: So Kirk, help me understand, what do you make of all of this?

KIRK SAVAGE: Well, I understand all the reasons why it was made the way it was in its own time and place. But I think this could not be imagined and understood in any kind of way that was truly emancipating for the ex-slave population. The fact that they had to fall back on antebellum formula of the representation of the passive slave, and in a sense had to re-enslave this slave in the monument, I think speaks to a much larger cultural failure to actually rethink our society in the wake of the end of slavery.

BRIAN: Kirk Savage is a professor of art history at the University of Pittsburgh. You can read more about the emancipation monument to his book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. And you can check out images of the monument on our website, backstoryradio.org.