© Reuters/Brian SnyderLincoln Statue in Boston, Massachusetts
Progressives in Boston have had a statue of Abraham Lincoln -
commissioned and paid for largely by freed slaves - removed because some activists objected to it. Do even the most positive elements of our history have to be erased?
The morning after Abraham Lincoln died in 1865, a former enslaved woman named Charlotte Scott asked her employer to send $5 to help build a monument to the former president. In 1876, through
donations by the enslaved people he had freed and black veterans of the Union Army, a statue depicting Lincoln holding his hand over a kneeling black man - a figure modeled on Archer Alexander,
the last man captured under the Fugitive Slave Act - was erected in Washington, and a copy of it in Boston, the hometown of
its sculptor, Thomas Ball.
Now the authorities in Boston have
removed the statue that Scott wanted to see built
because some progressives found it offensive. There have been cries that it needs to be taken in a certain context, which is why it was taken down. Yet
at whichever context of emancipation you care to look, there is not a single way you can see that doesn't show Abraham Lincoln at the apex. If there is reservation that the monument does not tell the whole story, we should take into consideration what Frederick Douglass, the famous 19th century black abolitionist, said about it.
"Admirable as is the monument by Mr. Ball... it does not, as it seems to me, tell the whole truth, and perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate."
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