Focus on Emancipation Memorial and analyze the Dedication.
Frederick Douglass spoke as the keynote speaker at the dedication service on April 14, 1876, the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln's death. President Ulysses S. Grant attended the service with members of his cabinet, Congress, and the Supreme Court. A procession preceded the service, where the Howard University law school dean, John Mercer Langston, was in attendance. The dedication was declared a federal holiday.Douglass explained that Lincoln's legacy was complex. "Truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory. Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man." He pointed out that Lincoln was more motivated to save the union than to free slaves, telling the New York Tribune: "If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." Douglass said that Lincoln "strangely told us that we were the cause of the war"—in 1862, Lincoln had told African-American leaders visiting the White House, "But for your presence amongst us, there would be no war." Douglass had many complaints about Lincoln's treatment of African Americans willing to and actually fighting in the war. But in the end, he judged Lincoln on his accomplishment rather than his motivation, saying: "It was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement."After delivering the speech, Frederick Douglass immediately wrote a letter to the editor of the National Republican newspaper in Washington, which was published five days later on April 19, 1876. In his letter Douglass criticized the statue's design, and suggested the park could be improved by more dignified monuments of free Black people. "The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude", Douglass wrote. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”
African American New York Tribune slave African Americans Abraham Lincoln Frederick Douglass Republic National Republican Ulysses S. Grant