ABSTRACT
In 1922, President Harding, Chief Justice William Taft, Civil War veterans, and Dr. Robert Moton of Tuskegee College led the ceremony commemorating the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The presence and speeches of these distinguished men illuminated the controversy over the nation’s historical memory of President Lincoln: was he the man who saved the Union? Or was he the man who freed the slaves? While we may think that he did both, the answer was not so simple for a nation which seven years prior to the memorial’s dedication was commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War’s termination. For the majority of white Americans, the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial was another in a series of events to salute national reconciliation. For African Americans, of course, the commemoration ceremony was about the ambivalent (not to say bloody) legacy of emancipation and Reconstruction, and Tuskegee President Moton said as much: “The claim of greatness for Abraham Lincoln lies in this, that amid doubt and distrust . . . he put his trust in God and spoke the word that gave freedom to a race.”1 Lest anyone was confused about the reasons for the gathering and Lincoln’s Memorial, President Harding reminded them that “the supreme chapter in American history is [union,] not emancipation.”2
