ABSTRACT
Financed entirely by African-American contributions, "Freedom's Memorial" became the nation's standard image of emancipation, so canonical that it was reproduced on a twentieth-century postage stamp commemorating the end of slavery. The memorial effort originated immediately after Lincoln's death in 1865, when a former slave offered five dollars of her wages to start a monument fund; by the time the monument was installed and dedicated in the national capital, with an oration by Frederick Douglass and an audience that included the president and the Supreme Court, the project had spanned nearly the whole era of Reconstruction. The campaign for the monument was one of the most conspicuous attempts in any cultural arena to capture the spirit of Reconstruction. While the nation attempted to redefine itself as a new interracial order, the Freedmen's Memorial sought to make the interracial nation a palpable reality, to translate into the sculptural language of the human body principles of freedom that remained abstract and barely imaginable.
