ON THE NATIONAL STAGE, in the center of political power, a monument to “freedom” finally emerged. This was the Freedmen’s Memorial to Abra- ham Lincoln, a project begun immediately after Lincoln’s death and com- pleted finally in 1876—neatly spanning the whole era of Reconstruction. Financed entirely by contributions from free blacks, the monument cam- paign was the most conspicuous attempt in public sculpture to capture the spirit of Reconstruction, to translate into the sculptural language of the human body principles of freedom that remained abstract and barely imaginable. While the nation attempted to redefine itself as a free inter- racial society, the Freedmen’s Memorial—first on its own, then in concert with other national monument projects—sought to make the interracial nation a palpable reality in public space. - Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), ch. 4, p1