abraham lincoln and the civil war essay

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. Second Inaugural Address

When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, seven slave states left the Union to form the Confederate States of America, and four more joined when hostilities began between the North and South. A bloody civil war then engulfed the nation as Lincoln vowed to preserve the Union, enforce the laws of the United States, and end the secession. The war lasted for more than four years with a staggering loss of more than 600,000 Americans dead. Midway through the war, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves within the Confederacy and changed the war from a battle to preserve the Union into a battle for freedom. He was the first Republican President, and Union victory ended forever the claim that state sovereignty superseded federal authority. Killed by an assassin's bullet less than a week after the surrender of Confederate forces, Lincoln left the nation a more perfect Union and thereby earned the admiration of most Americans as the country's greatest President.

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Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. “Abraham Lincoln.” Accessed March 01, 2023. https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln.

Chair in Lincoln Studies

Michael Burlingame

Professor Burlingame is the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

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Congressman Abraham Lincoln in 1846

Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky in 1809, but he was raised mostly in Indiana. As a young man, Lincoln became a lawyer and served in the Illinois state legislature as a member of the Whig Party.

Lincoln with his son

Lincoln married Mary Todd in 1842, and they had four sons. He is shown here with his youngest son, Tad.

Candidate Lincoln

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the nomination for president from the Republican Party. He won the presidential election and took office in 1861.

Battle of Antietam

In 1862, the Union Army defeated the Confederate Army at the Battle of Antietam. President Lincoln visited with his generals after the battle.

President Lincoln with Pinkerton and McClernand

After the Battle of Antietam, President Lincoln, center , was photographed with Allan Pinkerton and Major General John A. McClernand.

President Lincoln

In 1864, Civil War photographer Mathew Brady took this photo of President Abraham Lincoln. Robert Todd Lincoln said it was the best likeness of his father.

Last known photograph of Lincoln

This is the last known photograph of President Lincoln before John Wilkes Booth shot him at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Photographer Henry F. Warren took the photograph on the White House balcony on March 6, 1865.

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This Is the Story of How Lincoln Broke the U.S. Constitution

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By Noah Feldman

Mr. Feldman, a professor at Harvard who specializes in constitutional law, is the author of a new book on Abraham Lincoln.

Who created the Constitution we have today? As a law professor, I’ve always thought the best answer was the framers: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the other delegates who attended the Philadelphia convention in the summer of 1787.

The Constitution they drafted has since been amended many times, of course, sometimes in profound ways. But the document, I’ve long reasoned, has also exhibited a fundamental continuity. We’ve always had one Constitution.

I no longer think this conventional understanding is correct. Over the course of several years of research and writing, I’ve come to the conclusion that the true maker of the Constitution we have today is not one of the founders at all. It’s Abraham Lincoln.

This might sound like mere rhetorical license, since Lincoln did not take office until 1861, some 70 years after the Constitution was ratified. And we all recognize that his presidency played an instrumental role in the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which, by making a decisive break with slavery, became a turning point in our nation’s history.

But I’m making a stronger argument. What has become clear to me is that even before the passage of those Reconstruction amendments — indeed, as a kind of precondition for them — Lincoln fatally injured the Constitution of 1787. He consciously and repeatedly violated core elements of that Constitution as they had been understood by nearly all Americans of the time, himself included.

Through those acts of destruction, Lincoln effectively broke the Constitution of 1787, paving the way for something very different to replace it. What began as a messy, pragmatic compromise necessary to hold the young country together was reborn as an aspirational blueprint for a nation based on the principle of equal liberty for all.

Today, when the United States is engaged in a national reckoning about the legacies of slavery and institutional racism, the story of Lincoln’s breaking of the Constitution of 1787 is instructive. It teaches us not only that the original Constitution was deeply compromised, morally and functionally, by its enshrining of slavery, but also that the original Constitution was shattered, remade and supplanted by a project genuinely worthy of reverence.

Let’s go back to the 18th century. Americans today tend to think of the Constitution of 1787 in exalted moral terms. But the history is otherwise: The original Constitution was a complex political compromise grounded in perceived practical necessity, not moral clarity.

The need to garner the support of smaller states, for example, gave us the Senate. More damning were the compromises over slavery, without which the Constitution could never have been ratified: the repugnant “three-fifths” provision, by which enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of political representation; the promised 20-year preservation of the slave trade; and the fugitive slave clause, which required even free states to support slavery by returning escapees to their putative masters. These compromises were reaffirmed and reinforced by further compromises enacted by Congress from 1820 to 1850.

In April 1861, when the Civil War began, Lincoln was thoroughly committed to the compromise Constitution, which he had endorsed and embraced for his whole political life. Indeed, the month before, in his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln promised to preserve slavery as a constitutionally mandated permanent reality.

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” he said, vowing never to defy what was “plainly written” in the Constitution. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

But in the 18 months that followed, Lincoln violated the Constitution as it was then broadly understood three separate times.

First, he waged war on the Confederacy. He did this even though his predecessor, James Buchanan, and Buchanan’s attorney general, Jeremiah Black, had concluded that neither the president nor Congress had the lawful authority to coerce the citizens of seceding states to stay in the Union without their democratic consent. Coercive war, they had argued, repudiated the idea of consent of the governed on which the Constitution was based.

Second, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus unilaterally, without Congress, arresting thousands of political opponents and suppressing the free press and free speech to a degree unmatched in U.S. history before or since. When Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court held that the suspension was unconstitutional, Lincoln ignored him.

Lincoln justified both of these constitutional violations by a doubtful theory of wartime necessity: that as chief executive and commander in chief, he possessed the inherent authority to use whatever means necessary to preserve the Union.

Third, and most fatefully, Lincoln came to believe that he also possessed the power to proclaim an end to slavery in the Southern states. When he finally did so, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, he eliminated any possibility of returning to the compromise Constitution as it had existed before the war.

Unlike his first two violations of the Constitution, which came quickly, Lincoln’s movement toward emancipation was agonized and slow, precisely because he knew that emancipation would have the effect of destroying the core of the constitutional compromise he had pledged to uphold.

As Lincoln explained in a letter to Senator Orville Browning of Illinois in September 1861, emancipation would be “itself the surrender of the government” he was trying to save. “Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S. — any government of Constitution and laws,” Lincoln asked, if a general or a president were able to “make permanent rules of property by proclamation?”

In the end, Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation turned on his realization that the war could not be won as he had originally hoped — namely, by inducing the Southern states to rejoin the Union on compromise terms similar to the status quo before the war. To proclaim the enslaved people of the South as emancipated was to announce that there was no going back. The original compromise Constitution would no longer be on offer, even if the South gave up and rejoined the Union.

Contemporary observers, even those unsympathetic to slavery, understood that the Emancipation Proclamation left the original Constitution in tatters. The retired Supreme Court justice Benjamin Curtis, who had dissented from the notorious 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (in which the court held that Americans of African descent could not be citizens), said as much in a pamphlet condemning Lincoln’s declaration as a repudiation of the constitutional rule of law.

“By virtue of some power which he possesses,” Curtis wrote, Lincoln “proposes to annul laws, so that they no longer have any operation.”

In the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln did just that. The 13th Amendment, which with Lincoln’s encouragement was passed by Congress and sent to the states in February 1865, outlawed slavery in the United States. But in a meaningful sense it merely formalized Lincoln’s guarantee, in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation nearly three years before, that whatever new constitutional order followed the war would no longer be a slavery-based compromise.

Likewise, the 14th and 15th Amendments, enacted after Lincoln’s death in April 1865, formally secured the equal protection of the laws and enfranchised African American men. But Lincoln had already transformed the Constitution from a political compromise into a platform for defending moral principles by invoking its authority to end slavery.

In the last paragraph of the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, Lincoln declared “this act” to be “warranted by the Constitution” — notwithstanding the consensus view to the contrary, which he himself had long endorsed.

The fact that the Constitution of 1787 was not so much modified as broken and remade during and after the Civil War should be a starting point for nuanced conversations about the true meaning of the Constitution today. Indeed, even before Lincoln broke the Constitution, some of the most sophisticated thinkers about the nature of the Constitution were attuned to the complexities of the question.

Frederick Douglass, for example, began his career as an abolitionist in the late 1830s by rejecting the Constitution as immoral. Over time, however, his views changed. In 1850, he wrote that “liberty and slavery — opposite as heaven and hell — are both in the Constitution.” The Constitution, he concluded, was “at war with itself.”

Even this would turn out to be a transitional position for Douglass. In 1851, he declared that he now believed that slavery “never was lawful, and never can be made so.” He pointed out, as some defenders of the framers still do today, that the Constitution of 1787 did not actually use the word “slavery.” Douglass would hold this view for the next decade, until the war came. It was intended to leverage a redemptive reading of the Constitution to change the existing document into something new and better.

Of course, the “moral” Constitution made possible by Lincoln’s defiance of the Constitution of 1787 has too often been thwarted. About a decade after the Reconstruction amendments were ratified, the moral Constitution was betrayed by the imposition of segregation and disenfranchisement on Black Southerners. It took Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the modern civil rights movement to start redeeming the promise of Lincoln’s new Constitution.

Persistent inequality still afflicts the United States, including inequality before the law of the kind the moral Constitution prohibits. The reality is that Lincoln’s moral Constitution, like all constitutions, is not an endpoint but a vow of continuing effort. Through that Constitution, we define our national project and strive to achieve it, even if we never fully succeed.

Noah Feldman ( @NoahRFeldman ) is a professor of law at Harvard and the author, most recently, of “The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery and the Refounding of America,” from which this essay is adapted.

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Abraham Lincoln, Slavery and the Civil War

Introduction, winning the war, emancipation.

Slavery was practiced in all the American states during the colonial period. After independence, the northern states were challenged on the rights of all and started to shift their view on slavery. They considered it to go against the ideals of the war they fought with their colonial masters the British. The end of the Mexican war caused anxiety with some states wondering whether to join the United States as free states or slave states.

The southern part of the country relied heavily on slavery for the provision of cheap labor. Slavery was the main political issue in the whole of America (Johnson 30). War mostly happens as a result of human ambition or the breakdown of peaceful means to conflict solution. When this happened America’s north fought against the south, at the time when Lincoln was President. This paper seeks to highlight the roles of slavery and President Lincoln in the civil war.

America’s north had most of the industries which got their raw material from the south. The southern states were mostly large farms that grew cotton and other farm produce. This meant that they were labor-intensive states. To achieve the level of productivity needed, the southern states relied on the slaves to provide cheap labor. The African American’s were enslaved for life with the settler’s children inheriting them after their parents.

At this time, war erupted in Kansas over its decision to be a free state. A similar uprising occurred in West Virginia by John Brown, who tried to start a slave uprising. Abraham Lincoln got elected to the United States Congress in 1846. With American politics centered on slavery, he became a vocal voice against slavery. With the slow rise in the anti-slavery sentiments, Lincoln won a Republican nomination for president, aided by his great oratory skills (Johnson 43).

Over this period, the southern states of America had enlisted to join as slave states. They were largely aided by the Compromise of 1850, which allowed them to choose whether to be free or slave states. The Republican Party that had just been formed pegged its campaign on an anti-slavery platform. The southerly states issued a series of warning on cessation if the Republican Party does win (Johnson 58).

After the election, Abraham Lincoln won by 40% and was sworn in as President even as it emerged that no southerly state had voted for him. The south felt that they no longer had a place in the Union and made good their threat to secede. Starting from South Carolina, Mississippi followed by Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Alabama. They then moved ahead and created the Confederate States of America, electing Jefferson Davis as their president.

The northern States under Lincoln were more interested in preserving the Union of America. On April 12, 1961civil war broke out in South Carolina upon the provocation by the Confederate army. The President rallied the northern states for the retention of the Union as a cause for fighting the civil war (Johnson 65). The north was developed with factories that manufactured ammunition, money, and a large labor force. Its army war larger than the southern one.

The only way the south could have won was if they could garner external support from Europe, which at one point was being considered. They apart from the fact that they were undercapitalized had the best generals in America. President Lincoln sought to deny them external support by wisely juggling between the idea of fighting for the union and fighting to free the slaves. This kept the loyalty of the northern states, and the freeing of slaves kept at bay the European intervention (Johnson 66).

As the Union army moved southwards, lots of fleeing people crossed the Frontline into the northern side. The north had at this time developed a great transportation system, through its railroad, which meant that the logistical supply of its troops was easy. The Confederates had to deal with the use of traditional horseback and other not up to date transport systems. The black fleeing population did offer to fight in the war but were kept from enlisting. In the navy, they had some experience and were therefore enlisted in the naval The Union then blockaded the ports limiting the supplies to the Confederate’s and cutting short their refinancing through the sale of cotton.

The ideological reason for fighting the war was used as a war tool. The confederate’s main reason seemed to be a selfish one. During this time of war, the slaves who were in the fields left under the supervision of the white women started to abscond work. Those who through the war found gaps of escaping did so in large numbers. At this time and due to his great leadership skills, the President issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. With the full proclamation, the African-Americans were able to be enlisted to join the Union army (Johnson 74).

The slaves now fought for their freedom alongside the Union which fought for the unity of the states. The slaves were freeing themselves, creating a humanitarian crisis. This saw the change of the aims of the war to one whose aim was to abolish slavery. The union army grew with the new African American manpower. The war continued with the north suffering defeats but their resolve to win was strong. In the year 1865, the Congress approved the thirteenth amendment that abolished slavery (Johnson 75). President Lincoln got reelected, and the union won the war. Efforts now were redirected at the reconstruction of the Union. It is during this period that the president was assassinated.

President Lincoln became one of the greatest figures in the history of the United States. The cessation and war with the south are the chance that provided him an opportunity to become the great inspirational founders of America. The thirteenth amendment was then ratified putting an end to slavery in America making all the states free. Clearly, at his death, the whole nation knew that the days of slavery were behind them. History has proven right the major cause of the civil war was indeed slavery.

Johnson, Michael P. Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Writings and Speeches . California: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. Print.

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Abraham Lincoln and northern memory

Lincoln and idealized depictions of him loom large over Civil War history.

Statue of Abraham Lincoln in Portland, Oregon, toppled during the Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage on October 11, 2020. George Fite Waters, Abraham Lincoln , 1927, bronze, 10 feet high, photo © Sergio Olmos

On October 11, 2020, protesters in Portland, Oregon, toppled a statue of Abraham Lincoln, spray painting its hands blood red and its plinth with reminders of Lincoln’s role in suppressing Indigenous peoples: “LAND BACK,” a protester scrawled on one side of the stone marker, connecting Lincoln with the accelerated dispossession of Native lands that occurred during and after the Civil War, and “DAKOTA 38” on another side, referencing the mass execution of Dakota men that Lincoln ordered in 1862.

In December 2020, city officials in Boston removed from a public square a statue of Lincoln, commonly known as the Emancipation Group , in which a standing Lincoln appears to bestow freedom on a kneeling Black man. This was a copy of a Thomas Ball statue erected in 1876 that is still on site in Washington, D.C. The Boston statue had drawn the ire of residents who found its composition demeaning, seeing it as emphasizing Black subservience.

Boston officials remove a statue of Abraham Lincoln standing above a kneeling emancipated person on December 29, 2020. Thomas Ball, Emancipation Group (recasting of Freedmen’s Memorial ), 1879, bronze, photo © Nancy Lane/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald

A reckoning

To some observers, the removal of statues of Abraham Lincoln—the sixteenth president of the United States, who led the nation to victory in the Civil War (1861–65) and signed the Emancipation Proclamation —was a sign that the recent iconoclasm of Civil War statues had gone too far. “What started out as an earnest effort by some to remove statues glorifying a rebellion by the slavery-defending Confederacy has devolved into an absurd effort to destroy all vestiges of the past,” opined the editorial board of the Denver Gazette , noting that the original Ball statue in Washington, D.C. had been financed by formerly enslaved Black people in the years after the Civil War. [1] Others celebrated the removal of statues which they had perceived as chilling public reminders of white supremacy and Indigenous erasure . The Boston mayor’s office told the press that “The decision for removal acknowledges the statue’s role in perpetuating harmful prejudices and obscuring the role of Black Americans in shaping the nation’s fight for freedom.” [2]

But the Portland and Boston Lincoln statues are only two of the more than 100 statues of Civil War-era public figures that have been removed since 2015, with most protesters and cities focusing their efforts on removing monuments honoring the defeated Confederacy. Although there was no small amount of controversy over taking down Confederate monuments , efforts to remove statues honoring figures from the victorious U.S. forces—like Lincoln—has led to some head scratching. Weren’t these the good guys in the Civil War, who kept the country from splitting apart and brought about emancipation? Why should their likenesses be torn down alongside those of the men who fought to preserve slavery? Are “all vestiges of the past” really doomed to be expunged from the landscape?

The purpose of public monuments, and which voices and images ought to be celebrated in public art and memorials, is a topic that will likely continue to be hotly debated in the coming years. But the calls for removing monuments to Abraham Lincoln and other heroes of the United States during the Civil War help to illuminate the ways in which these portrayals have often escaped the scrutiny given to Confederate monuments.

When we think of the mythology that emerged from the American Civil War, we tend to focus on the myth of the Lost Cause —white southerners’ efforts to rewrite the reasons for the war and its outcome. But white northerners also engaged in mythmaking, elevating political and military leaders to sainthood and downplaying the importance of emancipation (and self-emancipation ) in the war effort. [3] Therefore, monuments to U.S. Civil War heroes, just like monuments to the Confederacy, are not neutral or objective records of the past; like any work of art or historical source they promote some ideas and obscure others.

S.J. Ferris, Washington & Lincoln (Apotheosis) , 1865, albumen print on carte-de-visite ( Library of Congress )

This essay will examine visual depictions of Abraham Lincoln, whose image has mirrored the broader project of northern Civil War memory and mythmaking. While he was in office, Lincoln’s image was closely tied to public opinion of the war effort and the actions of his administration. But after his assassination—the first of a president in U.S. history—Lincoln was portrayed in art as a Christ-like figure who had died in pursuit of the Union’s salvation. Art celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation celebrated Lincoln alone, rather than a vast network of abolitionists , soldiers, and self-emancipated Black people who worked to end slavery. These images both reflected and helped to reinforce the process of reunion that took place between white northerners and former Confederates in the fifty years after the Civil War. As the federal government abandoned its pursuit of Black citizenship, memorials ceased to emphasize the end of slavery as an important part of U.S. victory in the Civil War.

Lincoln’s image during the Civil War

Depictions of Lincoln during his lifetime and during the war itself remind us that he was far from universally beloved: not only was Lincoln broadly despised by southern slaveholders who fomented secession after his election in 1860, Lincoln was also a focus of criticism by northerners. As a leader, he faced accusations of incompetence, of being both too radical and too conservative in his stance toward slavery, of being both too willing to sacrifice American lives in the pursuit of winning the Civil War and not willing enough. The only thing that his critics seemed to agree on was that he was an exceptionally ugly man, a fact that Lincoln himself made light of. “If I had two faces,” he joked in response to accusations of being deceitful, “would I be wearing this one?” [4]

During his more than four years in office, Lincoln and his supporters faced opposition from many groups in the North in addition to the South. There were Copperheads who sympathized with the slaveholding rebels and, on the other side, abolitionists who demanded immediate emancipation. The Civil War, a conflict northerners initially imagined would last mere months, stretched to four years and hundreds of thousands of casualties. As deaths mounted, contemporaries criticized Lincoln’s management of the war, and political cartoonists took aim at him.

Political cartoon critiquing Lincoln’s handling of the war. Joseph E. Baker, Columbia Demands Her Children! Boston , 1864, lithograph ( Library of Congress )

In this political cartoon from 1864, the figure of Columbia (an allegorical representation of the United States) wears ancient Roman garb, an American flag skirt, a shield on her back, and a crown inscribed “Liberty” as she accuses Lincoln of wasting the lives of U.S. soldiers. She points at Lincoln’s request for more troops, and demands, “Mr. Lincoln, give me back my 500,000 sons!” (the approximate number of men who had died in the war up until that point). Lincoln is portrayed as disheveled and grotesque, his leg thrown clumsily over a chair. A proclamation calling for more troops lies at his feet as he tries to distract Columbia by mumbling “Well the fact is—by the way that reminds me of a STORY!!!” The artist channeled the anger felt by many white northerners that their sacrifices had not translated into victory after three years of fighting, and that Lincoln had mismanaged the war. After Lincoln’s death in 1865, however, such unflattering depictions became extremely rare. This representation of Lincoln as incompetent contrasts with the god-like depictions made after his death, where he bestows liberty on enslaved people who appear unable to take action on their own behalf.

Apotheosis and idealization

In the years since his death, the instantly recognizable figure of Lincoln has become a symbol of emancipation, freedom, honesty, and civic virtue. Why and how did this transformation occur? First, Lincoln was assassinated, not only in the midst of the triumph of U.S. forces at the end of the Civil War but also on Good Friday, the day that Christians commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He became not just a president but a martyr, ascending to a national pantheon along with George Washington .

John Sartain, after a design by W.H. Hermans, Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr, Victorious , 1866, engraving, 61 x 48 cm ( Library of Congress )

Lincoln was the first U.S. president to be assassinated, and Americans reacted to his death with shock. Soon after, an explosion of images of Lincoln appeared that mourned his death and depicted him as a martyr . Several illustrators imagined what happened to Lincoln’s spirit after he died, showing his apotheosis (transformation into a divine figure), such as John Sartain’s Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr, Victorious . In a long tradition of deification of leaders going back to ancient images of Roman emperors , Lincoln’s spirit ascends to heaven, where he is welcomed by George Washington and angels, some playing harps. One angel crowns him with laurels and holds a palm frond—both Roman symbols of victory (the palm was also a Christian symbol of eternal life and often depicted in images of martyred saints . The palm frond would also have reminded contemporary viewers of Jesus Christ , who was welcomed into Jerusalem with palms.

But the idealizing imagery of Lincoln in the wake of his assassination and the victory of the United States in the Civil War increasingly marginalized the most important participants in the saga of emancipation: the formerly enslaved people themselves. It also obscured Lincoln’s interactions with Indigenous people, whose suffering increased as a result of U.S. Army actions in the Civil War. Although Lincoln’s policies toward Indigenous peoples were not markedly different from those of earlier administrations, the Civil War’s impact on native communities was catastrophic. U.S. Army units forced thousands of Din é (Navajo) and Apaches in the southwest to march to a concentration camp in Bosque Redondo, New Mexico, where they were interned in conditions so unsanitary that more than a quarter of them died. The Third Colorado Cavalry attacked a settlement of Cheyenne and Arapaho women, children, and elderly people and murdered at least 150 of them in a rampage known as the Sand Creek massacre. Until recently, neither of these grim episodes has figured much in public histories of the Civil War.

Envisioning emancipation

In September 1862, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all enslaved people living in areas then in rebellion against the United States would become forever free on January 1, 1863. Artists hoping to commemorate this world-changing event faced a unique challenge: how could they depict emancipation? The Black people who were enslaved at 11:59 pm on December 31, 1862 would look exactly the same at 12:00am on January 1, 1863 when they became legally free. Was emancipation a process of subtraction—taking away chains, perhaps—or was it the addition of something new?

Abraham Lincoln may have signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was enslaved people themselves who made emancipation a reality, forcing the issue long before Lincoln accepted emancipation as a war goal. Many escaped at great personal risk, often making their way to U.S Army lines and serving in the war. In addition to providing military intelligence, many of these refugees went on to enlist to fight their former enslavers directly. One person wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, while millions more enacted it—often at great cost to themselves and their families.

P.S. Duval & Son after a drawing by R. Morris Swander , Emancipation Proclamations, Allegorical Portrait of Abraham Lincoln , Philadelphia: Swander Bishop & Co., 1865, engraving, 77.4 x 62.4 cm ( Brown University Library )

Visual representations of emancipation, however, focused on Lincoln’s role as author of the Proclamation, sidelining or erasing the role of Black people altogether. An 1865 engraving depicts Lincoln made of the words of the Emancipation Proclamation, with the portrait separating two vignettes below: one showing an enslaved man being lashed, another showing him being armed with a sword by Columbia (an allegorical representation of the United States) and sent off into battle with another Black man in an army uniform. Early images of emancipation, like these vignettes in the Emancipation Proclamations allegory, often portrayed formerly enslaved men joining the military and achieving full citizenship.

Dennis Malone Carter, Lincoln’s Drive Through Richmond , 1866, oil on canvas, 45 x 68 inches ( Chicago History Museum )

But others saw Lincoln as the divine deliverer, like Dennis Malone Carter’s 1866 painting Lincoln’s Drive Through Richmond. Here, the artist portrays Lincoln’s April 4, 1865 visit to the recently captured Confederate capital of Richmond, where he was greeted by grateful Black and white citizens. Sunlight falling on the wall behind Lincoln’s head gives the effect of a halo.

Not all attempts to commemorate emancipation in art focused on Lincoln alone. When formerly enslaved people began collecting money after Lincoln’s death to build a monument in his honor, some designs foregrounded the Black struggle for emancipation and equal citizenship.

Left: Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free , 1867, marble, 106 cm high (Howard University Gallery of Art; photo: Art History Project ); Right: Harriet Hosmer, early design for Freedmen’s Memorial to Lincoln, published in The Art-Journal, (January 1, 1868), London: Virtue & Co., p. 8.

Neoclassical sculptor Edmonia Lewis, an American sculptor who had both Black and Indigenous ancestry who worked in Rome, created an emancipation group called Forever Free soon after the conclusion of the Civil War. Lewis’s sculpture centers on the experience of a Black man and woman at the moment of emancipation. Overcoming the common visual trope of the kneeling slave begging for freedom seen in much abolitionist imagery , Lewis depicts a formerly enslaved man raising one arm with a broken shackle in a victorious attitude, his other hand resting on the shoulder of a kneeling woman whose own hands are clasped in prayer as if thanking God for the gift of freedom. With a protective, independent male figure and chaste, pious female figure, Lewis suggested that this newly free Black couple is finally able to participate in the family framework that was prized in the Victorian era. [5] Another proposed sculpture group, white female sculptor Harriet Hosmer’s unrealized designs for an emancipation memorial, featured a sculptural cycle of Black history with four standing male figures at each corner, representing kidnapping, enslavement, self-emancipation, and military service. [6] The figures are shown standing and appear as dignified and active agents in their own destinies.

Thomas Ball, Emancipation Memorial, 1876, bronze, Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. (photo: Renée Ater)

Eliminating Black agency

But Hosmer’s design was ultimately discarded by the committee tasked with choosing the form of the monument. Despite being funded by the formerly enslaved, the committee sought no direction from their Black patrons, and ultimately chose to build a smaller group sculpted by American sculptor Thomas Ball. The Ball memorial group, which was erected in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. (and whose copy was removed from view in Boston, as discussed earlier), showed Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation and bestowing freedom on a semi-nude Black man crouched at his feet. Unlike Hosmer’s active, standing men, the Ball statue’s enslaved man is passive and diminished.

The statue implies that freedom was a gift given by Lincoln to the grateful enslaved. This is problematic in several ways: first, it eliminates the agency of Black people in obtaining their own freedom; second, it presents emancipation as a single event rather than an ongoing process of securing equality and citizenship; and third, it freezes the Black man in a powerless pose, forever locked in a state of subservience—while suggesting that he ought to be grateful for it.

This change in narratives—from Hosmer’s design foregrounding Black citizenship to Ball’s forever-kneeling passive recipient of freedom—tracked with the larger social changes in the period we call Reconstruction . By the time the monument was erected in 1876, the federal government and the Republican Party had abandoned their commitment to Black equality and allowed white supremacist state governments to retake power in the South. Frederick Douglass , who gave a speech at the Ball statue’s dedication in Washington, D.C., in 1876, reportedly disliked the pose of the kneeling figure, which did not impart a “manly attitude” indicative of freedom. [7] Douglass’s remarks laid bare the tenuous relationship between Black freedom and Abraham Lincoln, stating simply that Lincoln “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men . . . [but] we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.” [8]

Travis Blackbird, Ledger art on map , (and detail at right), 2017, ink on antique ledger, © Travis Blackbird used by permission

Lincoln’s image and Indigenous genocide

Although many artists have depicted Lincoln as a Christ-like figure, a work of contemporary ledger art by Travis Blackbird (Omaha/Oglala Lakota) includes an image of Lincoln on a map of western states, atop the state of Minnesota. Lincoln’s stance, with his arms outstretched, ironically mimics Christ on the cross or the Virgin Misericordia , who protects the blessed beneath her cloak. In 1862, Dakotas were starving in Minnesota after white settlers pushed them off their lands and the U.S. government failed to provide the food and money it had promised in earlier treaties. A faction of Dakota men attacked the reservation administration building where unscrupulous government agents had broken the terms of the treaty by refusing to sell them food, and the uprising escalated into all-out warfare. Throughout August and September of that year, Minnesota infantry regiments recruited for the U.S. Army turned their sights on the Dakota forces. After they were defeated at the Battle of Wood Lake in late September, the Dakotas were subjected to military trials that resulted in sentencing more than 300 men to death. Abraham Lincoln commuted the sentences of most but signed an order to execute 38 Dakota men, which was the largest mass execution in U.S. history. [9]

Blackbird wrestles with this legacy by showing 38 hanged Dakota men dangling from Lincoln’s arms: Lincoln’s quasi-religious status has condemned, rather than saved these men. Blackbird positions Lincoln among other symbols of white incursion into Indigenous land, with surveyors and a covered wagon suggesting the influx of white settlers after Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862. At the bottom right, a figure of Columbia drawn from John Gast’s painting American Progress symbolizes Manifest Destiny, the imperialist idea that white Americans were destined to occupy North America from Atlantic to Pacific, which spurred westward expansion and Indigenous genocide.

The Civil War was caused, in part, by westward expansion—or, more precisely, by the conflict over the future of slavery in the West . But neither white northerners or southerners envisioned a place for Indigenous people in the lands they intended to possess. For decades, U.S. history books taught the Civil War and westward expansion after the war as separate units, subtly signaling that the two topics are unrelated. But in the last decade, scholars have emphasized the connections between the war (that was largely fought in the South) and the conflict between Indigenous people and white settlers in the West. [10]

Mathew Brady, Delegation of Plains peoples to the White House, 1863, photograph ( White House )

Lincoln’s policy proposals were based around reserving the West for individual white farmers to counteract the influence of slaveholders. In office, he signed The Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act , both signature policies of Lincoln’s administration. These acts gave Indigenous lands to white settlers and railroad companies and pushed Plains peoples onto reservations . Although Lincoln invited a delegation of Plains peoples to the White House in 1863—whom he urged not to ally with Confederates, and who in turn urged him to honor land treaties —he continued ongoing U.S. government efforts to force Indigenous people onto reservations. There was no equivalent to the Emancipation Proclamation for Indigenous peoples.

Lincoln’s legacy

Although there is much to celebrate in Lincoln’s legacy, there’s also much to critique. Looking beyond an idealized image of Lincoln helps us to see the past more clearly and to confront the legacy of the Civil War in all its complexity: a war of freedom, but one with catastrophic effects on Indigenous people. How the actions of U.S. forces have been remembered must also be viewed anew: just as white southerners championed a highly subjective and damaging narrative of the war’s causes and consequences, white northerners’ story of victory and emancipation has left out the contributions of Black Americans and erased Indigenous suffering at the hands of the army.

[1] “ The Idiotic Removal of a Lincoln Statue ,” Denver Gazette, January 4, 2021 . Note that although formerly enslaved people contributed to financing the Ball Lincoln statue, there were many entities involved in raising money for its construction, and Black donors or representatives had no say in the statue’s design. See Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 90–94.

[2] Christina Zdanowicz and Sahar Akbarzai, “ Boston removes statue of former slave kneeling before President Lincoln after 141 years, ” CNN.com, December 29, 2020.

[3] For more on how white northerners crafted Civil War memory, see David Blythe, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

[4] Lincoln supposedly made this joke during the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858.

[5] See Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 54.

[6] Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves , pp. 89–98.

[7] Freeman H. M. Murray, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture (Washington, D.C.: Murray Brothers Printing Company, 1916), pp. 198–99.

[8] Oration delivered by Frederick Douglass at the Unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, 1876.

[9] For more information on the Dakota War, see “ The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 ” at the Minnesota Historical Society.

[10] For a review essay on recent scholarship on the West in the Civil War, see Stacey L. Smith, “Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4. (December 2016): pp. 566–91.

Additional resources

Explore Lincoln images and artifacts in the Library of Congress.

Learn more about Ledger Drawings at the Smithsonian.

Browse the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

See more works of art by Edmonia Lewis at Google Arts and Culture.

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