Abraham Lincoln Statue

Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County (now LaRue County), Kentucky on February 12, 1809. His parents, Thomas Lincoln and Nancy (Hanks) Lincoln, were both born in Virginia and came from humble families. When Lincoln was seven years old, his family moved to Indiana. Two years later, his mother died. As a young man, he received very little formal education. Despite this, he possessed a voracious appetite for knowledge and read as much as possible, often by candlelight well into the night. In 1830, his father moved the family to Illinois. Two years later, Lincoln served as a militia captain during the Black Hawk War, but never saw combat. After his military service ended, he read law and attempted to launch a political career, campaigning for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly as a member of the Whig Party. Lincoln was defeated, but a second attempt in 1834 was successful. He would ultimately serve four terms in the Illinois General Assembly from 1835 to 1843. During this time, he received his law license and practiced in Springfield throughout his tenure in the state legislature. In 1842, after a tumultuous courtship, Lincoln married Mary Todd, the daughter of wealthy slave-owning family from Lexington, Kentucky. The couple met a few years earlier at a ball in Springfield. The marriage produced four sons, only one of whom (Robert Todd Lincoln) lived to adulthood. 

Four years later, Lincoln won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. His time in Congress, however, was short-lived; serving only one term from 1847 to 1849. After, Lincoln resumed his legal career, but the passage of the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 reinvigorated his interest in politics. Four years later, Republicans in Illinois nominated him to run for the U.S. Senate. While he ultimately lost the race to Democrat Stephen Douglas, Lincoln earned a national reputation. Two years later, in 1860, the Republican Party nominated him as their candidate for president of the United States. Despite not receiving a single electoral vote from the slave states and winning just about forty percent of the popular vote, Lincoln enjoyed a relatively comfortable win in the Electoral College. 

Before Lincoln took the Oath of Office in early March 1861, seven southern slave states had already seceded from the Union. His decision to resupply Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor the following month led to its bombardment by South Carolina troops. While the federal installation surrendered, the incident galvanized northerners, who enthusiastically answered Lincoln’s subsequent call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the southern rebellion. His call for volunteers, however, acted as a double-edged sword; four additional southern slave states seceded and joined the Confederacy. After the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all enslaved individuals living in the Confederacy free. While in reality it did not free any slaves given that the Confederacy did not recognize or obey U.S. federal law, the Emancipation Proclamation did allow for the enrollment of African American men in the U.S. armed forces. In addition, it dashed the Confederacy’s hopes of securing foreign recognition, since both Great Britain and France had abolished slavery decades earlier and thus could not support the creation of a slave-owners’ republic. In late 1864 and early 1865, Lincoln worked assiduously to secure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States.  

On the evening of April 14, 1865, less than a week after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln was shot by southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth while attending a performance of the comedy Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. He died early the next morning. He was fifty-six years old. Nearly two weeks later, federal troops tracked down and killed Boothe in Virginia. Four of his fellow co-conspirators were apprehended, tried, convicted, and executed that summer. 

Less than two weeks after Lincoln’s death, a group of D.C. business and civic leaders formed a committee to erect a memorial to the slain president in the city. To raise the necessary funds, the committee solicited donations from the public. Most of the donations were nominal and came from residents of the city. The largest, however, came from a former resident, John T. Ford. The former owner of the theatre in which Booth shot Lincoln, Ford had since sold it to the federal government, moved to Baltimore, and opened another theatre. Eager to pitch in for the planned memorial, he held a benefit performance at his Baltimore theatre and raised about $1,800 for the project. As money started coming in, the committee selected D.C. resident Lot Flannery to design the memorial. Dedicated in front of Old City Hall in Judiciary Square on April 15, 1868, the third anniversary of Lincoln’s death, the memorial consisted of a life-sized marble sculpture of the president perched atop a more than thirty-foot-tall marble column. Flannery depicted Lincoln standing, seemingly ready to deliver a speech. His right hand gestures at his side while his left gently rests on a fasces, an ancient Roman symbol of power and authority. The statue and its pedestal were disassembled and moved to storage in 1919 when Old City Hall underwent renovations. When the marble sculpture returned to its original location in 1923, it was placed on a simple, much shorter, granite pedestal. 

"Abraham Lincoln." American Battlefield Trust. Web. 15 May 2021 <https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/abraham-lincoln>.

Freidel, Frank and Hugh S. Sidey. The Presidents of the United States of America. Washington, DC: White House Historical Association, 2006.

Jacob, Kathryn Allamong. Testament to Union: Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.