Summers with Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments

by James A. Percoco, Harold Holzer (Foreword by)

Overview

Across the country, in the middle of busy city squares and hidden on quiet streets, there are nearly 200 statues erected in memory of Abraham Lincoln. No other American has ever been so widely commemorated.

A few years ago, anticipating the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in 2009, Jim Percoco, a history teacher with a passion for both Lincoln and public sculpture, set off to see what he might learn about some of these monuments—what they meant when they were unveiled, and what they mean to us today. The result is this captivating book, a fascinating chronicle of four summers on the road looking for Lincoln stories in statues of marble and bronze.

Of all the monuments, Percoco selects seven emblematic ones. He begins and ends the journey in Washington, starting with Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Group, erected east of the Capitol in 1876 with private funds from African Americans, and dedicated by Frederick Douglass. Here, Percoco and his multi-ethnic band of teenage historians explore the impact of this Freedman’s Monument showing Lincoln and a kneeling freed bondsperson. What does the statute say about race and freedom to today’s Americans-including What did Ball—and his sponsors—want it to say? From Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s majestic Standing Lincoln of 1887 in Chicago, which helped move our image of Lincoln from great emancipator to that of statesman to Paul Manship’s 1932 Lincoln the Hoosier Youth, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which glows with an art deco sleekness, Percoco mines a wealth of Lincoln legacies—and our reactions to them expressed across generations. Here are controversial gems like Barnard’s 1917 tribute in Cincinnati and Borglum’s Seated Lincoln, struggling with the pain of leadership, beckoning visitors to sit next to him on his metal bench in Newark, New Jersey.

At each stop, Percoco chronicles the history of each monument, spotlighting its artistic, social, political, and cultural origins. His descriptions of works so often seen as clichés tease fresh meaning from mute stone and cold metal—raising provocative questions not just about who Lincoln might have been, but also about what we’ve wanted him to be in the monuments we’ve built.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823228959
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2008
Edition description:	4
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

James A. Percoco is an award-winning history teacher at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Virginia, and is History Educator-in-Residence at American University. He was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s Advisory Board.

Harold Holzer is Roger Hertog Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and one of the nation’s leading authorities on Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era. He is chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and has written, co-written, or edited forty-seven books, most recently Lincoln and the Power of the Press.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Charlotte's Seed

Thomas Ball's Emancipati on Group / Freedman's Monument (1876), Washington, D.C.

SUMMER IN WASHINGTON always means the triple H's: heat, haze, and humidity. The surest way to tell summer has arrived in the nation's capital is by the proliferation of ubiquitous corrugated metal fireworks concession stands that populate just about every strip mall parking lot in Northern Virginia, where I live and teach. Graduation was last Tuesday. It is now Sunday, and I am with five of my former Applied History students, all recent graduates, in search of Abraham Lincoln, a mile east of the domed U.S. Capitol. Here in Lincoln Park stands an early monument to Lincoln's memory, Thomas Ball's Emancipation Group, also called the Freedman's Monument.

My eclectic band of students reflects the growing ethnic diversity of the region and the nation and how multiculturalism is increasingly playing a role in our schools and public life. Enzo's parents are from El Salvador, Dhrupad's parents hail from India, Bryan's dad is the pastor of Kirkwood Presbyterian Church in Springfield, and Leslie's folks are retired military, as are Michelle's. The different backgrounds of my students are not lost on me as we make our way from Northern Virginia across the Potomac River into the District of Columbia. Riding in Clio Car, my self-appointed chariot of time (this, the third incarnation, a cherry red Hyundai Elantra), paying homage to the Muse of History, complete with vanity license plate announcing its presence, I anticipate an engaging experience. It would have been easy for these teenagers, now full-fledged high school graduates, to tell me, their quirky history teacher, to take my Lincoln obsession and go packing. But they don't. Somehow I sense that they have come to appreciate that I am teaching about building bonds that last far beyond the halcyon days of high school. In history we have found a common passion which has led them to eagerly follow the Pied Piper in my soul, which manages to manifest itself on serious road trips. Four months earlier I had led these students and twenty of their peers on a civil-rights pilgrimage to the Deep South. Singing freedom songs such as "Ain't No Body Going to Turn Me Around" and "We Shall Overcome," we walked, in commemoration, from Brown Memorial Chapel across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, retracing the footsteps of those courageous souls who made a difference with their voices and feet in 1965. Those marchers continued the work Lincoln had begun a century earlier. It seemed fitting that our last collective visit should be to a statue that honors Lincoln and arguably his greatest act, emancipation. My students' sensitivity to racial issues today would boggle some of the minds of those involved in the erection of this statue.

I ease Clio Car into a perfect parking space on the edge of the park. It is just after 6:00 p.m., and the heat begins to dissipate. With the drop in temperature, there's now the possibility of us dodging a pesky pop-up thundershower, always a potentiality during a Washington heat wave. Judy Collins's jaunty version of "Hey Nellie, Nellie," a vintage civil rights anthem invoking Lincoln's memory, fills my car with an appropriate theme.

The students are not surprised to see me sporting a Lincoln T-shirt that I picked up at Tinsley's Dry Goods Store on one of my forays to Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois. In fact, last year I had a running joke with Enzo about historical T-shirts. I picked one up for him, too, and presented it to him one day at the beginning of class. The silkscreen artist, Thomas Trimborn, using pen and ink, depicted a provocative image of the sixteenth president — a composite, based on the last known series of photographs taken of him, in Alexander Gardner's Washington studio in early 1865. Lincoln's cockeyed face in a thoughtful pose, complete with his lazy left eye drifting upward, imparts a warm attitude of the subject. My students responded as I presented it to Enzo with a chorus of, "Now that's a cool Lincoln T-shirt."

In some ways, the teens with me are kind of history geeks, like their teacher, and they don't mind talking about things that matter: what makes good history, the civil rights movement, policies of race and slavery, and the tricky ground of public memory. That is why I asked them to give up part of their weekend and join me. I know their comfort levels. The conversation would be inspired and passionate, and my fleeting moments with these young, diverse Americans would conjure up a kind of collective visit to a sacred site.

Historian Nicolaus Mills contends, "We do not visit a memorial to engage in a critique of it. Instead we bring a sense of history with us when we come to a memorial and we expect that as public art, the monument will lead us beyond its own materiality and back in time to the person or event it commemorates." I agree with Mills but take him one step further, for I view visiting public art as an act of deliberate engagement. Public monuments work best when those visiting them leave their experience somehow richer and better informed about the historical moment or person they celebrate. At the same time their experience should also challenge them to consider the meaning imparted by the work of art. I want my students to understand this, and I want to take them back to a time and place where small-scale public sculptures were meant to be visited in a thoughtful manner. The German word for monument, Denkmal, literally means "thought object." For the past two decades I have been using "thought objects" to teach American history. They have had a profound impact on my instruction and on my students, making them aware of not only the emotional power of such monuments, but also how that power is constructed, physically as well as metaphorically.

Ball's sculpture was erected in the horse-and-buggy day, when people passed leisurely and not in a whirlwind. Today, most folks zip by Lincoln Park on their way to work at the Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the nearby Congressional Office buildings without even giving a glance to Lincoln and the Freedman. Unlike the monuments on the Mall, like the new National World War II Memorial or the Korean and Vietnam War memorials, which by virtue of their location and design requires active public participation, Ball's sculpture is a throwback to a different era.

Reaching the pedestal that supports the heroic-size Lincoln and Freedman, I open my copy of Thomas Ball's autobiography, My Threescore Years and Ten, to the photograph of the sculptor and pass it around to the students. He looks like Rasputin. They laugh at the image of Ball, agreeing with my assessment of his looks. Ball, like many American artists of the mid-nineteenth century, was an expatriate American, born in Massachusetts, worked at his craft, shuttling back and forth between the United States and Italy, establishing an opulent and luxurious residence and studio, Villa Ball, on the crest of a hill overlooking Florence. He sought inspiration from the works of the great Italian sculptors, particularly Michelangelo and Donatello. "Ball is a man of great talent and versatility — a fine musician, an excellent painter and an admirable modeler," reported Ballou's Pictorial Drawing Room Companion. By the time Ball received the commission for the Freedman's Monument, he was best known for his heroic equestrian statue of George Washington, dedicated in the Boston Public Gardens in 1869.

The sculptor learned about Lincoln's assassination while en route to Munich, and shortly thereafter he began to dabble with some ideas, "a study, half life size, of the 'Emancipation Group' which had been impatiently bubbling in my brain ever since receiving those horrible tidings."

Thinking like historians, the students eagerly take up my directive to spend some serious time looking at Ball's composition and then weigh in with their assessment. As they take a deeper look at the sculpture, I hear them talking and making comments about the pose of the figures, particularly the Freedman, which Ball posed for by using two mirrors and kneeling down in front of one to capture the posture he was seeking. They also make observations about the assorted symbols Ball used in his design.

Finished, the students gather around me, wanting to know more about the sculpture, anticipating a good story. Sometimes the stories of their creation are as compelling as the monument. These students have taken to heart one of the tenets I teach, about the construction of history and historical memory.

We sit in the shade of the trees and I tell the story of Thomas Ball and his creation to my fellow sojourners. In many ways this story is so typical of the history of white-black relations in America, a history with which my students are familiar. Freedmen wanting to honor the man whom many referred to as "Massa Linkin" or "Father Abraham" were upstaged by white "do-gooders," the "friends of the freedmen," willing to accept the cash donated principally by former members of the United States Colored Troops, but paternalistically unwilling to let them participate in the process of who would "determine the character of the monument." Given the tenor of the times, African Americans accepted the image, cheering at the dedication as they did when the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, was approved by Congress on January 31, 1865.

April 14, 1876, eleven years to the day since Lincoln was assassinated, found a large throng gathering at the intersection of East Capitol and Eleventh Streets, waiting for the dedication to commence. Among them were representatives of Washington's diplomatic corps, assuring that Abraham Lincoln belonged to not only America, but also the world at large. The Baltimore Sun reported it "the event of the day."

The sun struggled to appear for the 2:00 p.m. dedication as the sky threatened showers. Large numbers of African Americans, "resplendent in all manner of regalia, the Pioneer Corps of Alexandria uniformed in black pants and blue shirts, the Knights of St. Augustine sporting black hats with yellow plumes and blue, sword-ensheathed baldrics," representing twenty different Negro charitable and civic organizations from Washington and Baltimore, assembled in the vicinity of Seventh and K Streets. At noon they headed out on a circuitous route heading down K Street to Seventeenth Street, crossing over to Pennsylvania Avenue through the White House grounds, past the grand and stately Willard Hotel along Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol, where, after a few quick turns, they found themselves on East Capitol Street and headed to Lincoln Park on a direct access to the Capitol. Marching bands were mixed in among the groups. Banners were proudly unfurled. Keynote speaker, orator, and writer Frederick Douglass, the most strident voice for abolition and the rights of African Americans during the nineteenth century, rode in a carriage in the parade not far from his home at 318 A Street. I once drove, as best I could, the procession route in the ever more security- conscious capital, navigating the approximate route. It took more than a half hour to make the drive, which was somewhat less than five miles long, even well after rush hour. Marchers in 1876 completed the loop in two hours.

When the procession arrived, Douglass joined on the dais President Ulysses S. Grant, members of his cabinet, members of Congress, and the Supreme Court. Despite the distinguished company on the rostrum, the day belonged to Douglass and Lincoln.

That November, the contested election between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel J. Tilden would effectively end Reconstruction, dashing any hopes that Douglass and the African American community had for future progress. Within a generation Jim Crow would become the ruler in the South, while Douglass fumed at what he saw as a sellout to African Americans in the name of Blue-Gray Reunions. Twenty years later the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson would legally codify the doctrine of "separate but equal."

In 1903, the same year Douglass's heir to civil rights concerns, W. E. B. DuBois, published his landmark Souls of Black Folk, arguing that the problem of the twentieth century was the color line, fellow sculptor and art critic Lorado Taft called "Ball's conception of Lincoln a lofty one, which he has conveyed in a language intelligible to all. ... The Lincoln monument is one of the inspired works of American sculpture: a great theme expressed with emotion by an artist of intelligence and sympathy, who felt what he was doing." At best Taft's assessment is a qualifying statement skirting any real criticism of a statue that aesthetically falls short of the mark. Nevertheless, Ball's sculpture is important to consider in the realm of Lincoln public sculpture because of the tale of its creation, Frederick Douglass's complex and intriguing remarks regarding Lincoln's memory at the dedication, and the way the sculptural image suffused and reinforced for several generations the "Great Emancipator" sobriquet. In an episode of art imitating art, the same year, Thomas Edison would glean from Ball's Lincoln statue to conclude his five-minute short Uncle Tom's Cabin. In doing so, Edison was the first to integrate Lincoln's image in motion picture, using a facsimile inspired by Ball's monument.

By today's conventions and sensibilities, no sculptor would attempt a composition portraying Lincoln and the Freedman as Ball did. His composition is anachronistic. Art historian Kirk Savage accuses the sculpture of being a "hybrid of allegory and realism" and a "failure to imagine emancipation at its most fundamental level, in the language of the human body and its interaction with other bodies."

The project's stewards — the energetic President James E. Yeatman and fellow commissioner, Unitarian minister, and college president William G. Elliot of the Western Sanitary Commission, headquartered in St. Louis — insured that the undertaking would not fail. During the Civil War, the Sanitary Commission served as a wartime volunteer relief agency responsible for philanthropic endeavors dedicated to alleviating the suffering of troops and thousands of displaced refugees in the Mississippi Valley and the Western theater of the war. By the end of the Civil War, the Sanitary Commission began to focus its energies on caring for black orphans. As a final tribute to the people they had served, the commission undertook sponsorship to see a fitting tribute raised to Lincoln and the Freedman. The plaque affixed to the front of the pedestal of the monument relates the moving story of Charlotte Scott's role in the history of the monument and the seed money she contributed that jump-started the project.

Scott's deep sense of loss and respect for the slain president provided an impetus for the monument's seed money as the first financial contribution. The apocryphal story, most likely comfortable to paternalistic whites and retold on the bronze plaque, tells how Scott, a former slave, employed in 1865 as a washerwoman in Marietta, Ohio, scraped up her first few meager savings — five dollars — upon hearing about the assassination "to build a monument to good Massa Lincoln." However, a deeper look indicates otherwise. Scott really said, "The colored people have lost their best friend on earth. Mr. Lincoln was our best friend and I will give five dollars of my wages toward erecting a monument in his memory." Her owner, William P. Rucker, a pro-Union man who had fled from Virginia to Ohio, freed Charlotte in 1862, but she continued to live with the family. At the Ruckers' urging Scott entrusted the money to Marietta minister C. D. Battelle, who collected other offerings from the black community. "I received her offering," he said, "and gave notice through the press that I would receive other donations and cheerfully do what I could to promote so noble an act." Shortly, news of the grassroots monument movement caught the attention of Brigadier General T. C. H. Smith, commander of the St. Louis garrison. Smith convinced the Western Sanitary Commission president, James E. Yeatman, that this was a worthy project and that the commission should see it through, arguing, "Such a monument would have a history more grand and more touching than any of which we have account." A letter sent from Rucker to Yeatman urged that "every dollar should come from former slaves." Yeatman sent out a call through local newspapers and letters to the white officers of black regiments, soliciting donations. By December 1865, more than $16,200.00 poured in to the St. Louis office.

Not much of this story is conveyed on the plaque. Like all history, the truth can only be found by digging.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Summers with Lincoln"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Fordham University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Fordham University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Harold Holzer,
Preface,
Acknowledgments,
List of Photographs,
1 Charlotte's Seed: Thomas Ball's Emancipation Group / Freedmen's Monument (1876), Washington, D.C.,
2 The Hero of Hoosierdom: Paul Manship's Lincoln the Hoosier Youth (1932), Fort Wayne, Indiana,
3 A Different Kind of Civil War: George Grey Barnard's Lincoln (1917), Cincinnati, Ohio,
4 Contemplative Statesmanship: Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Standing Lincoln (1887), Chicago, Illinois,
5 Lincoln of Gethsemane: Gutzon Borglum's Seated Lincoln (1911), Newark, New Jersey,
6 Lincoln the Mystic: James Earle Fraser's Lincoln (1930), Jersey City, New Jersey,
7 A Lincoln for the Masses: Daniel Chester French's Seated Lincoln (1922), Washington, D.C.,
Afterword,
Appendix 1. Other Lincoln Memorials of Note,
Appendix 2. State-by-State Breakdown of Lincoln Sculptures,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

In Summers with Lincoln: The Man Behind the Monuments, James A. Percoco intrepidly explores the past to share the history of how seven of these monuments came to be, what they meant to their sculptors and the public at their unveilings and what they mean to us today.

The Washington Times

Percoco, a Lincoln scholar who recently published his third book, "Summers With Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments," doesn't run a typical history course. The seniors spend only part of the year in class. Many of their lessons come as they volunteer at or visit the area's historical sites. That's the "applied" part of the course.

Washington Post

Looks ata the American President and his legacy from the viewpoint of seven monuments around the country.

The Lewisboro Ledger

. . . A captivating book that chronicles four summers on the road looking for Lincoln stories in statues of marble and bronze.

The AIHE Gazette

Percoco, a Lincoln scholar who recently published his third book, "Summers With Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments," doesn't run a typical history course. The seniors spend only part of the year in class. Many of their lessons come as they volunteer at or visit the area's historical sites. That's the "applied" part of the course.

Washington Post

". . . A captivating book that chronicles four summers on the road looking for Lincoln stories in statues of marble and bronze."-The AIHE Gazette

In Summers with Lincoln: The Man Behind the Monuments, James A. Percoco intrepidly explores the past to share the history of how seven of these monuments came to be, what they meant to their sculptors and the public at their unveilings and what they mean to us today."-The Washington Times

"Percoco, a Lincoln scholar who recently published his third book, Summers With Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments, doesn't run a typical history course. The seniors spend only part of the year in class. Many of their lessons come as they volunteer at or visit the area's historical sites. That's the applied part of the course."-Washington Post

"Blending scholarship with masterful flair, Percoco smoothly weaves historical stories into his research; the result is a thoroughly accessible account sure to fascinate as well as enlighten readers of all backgrounds."—The Midwest Book Review

"A high school history teacher in Virginia with a passion for Lincoln."-Daily Herald

"Jim Percoco's Summers with Lincoln will amaze readers and inspire teachers."-Gabor Borritt, author of The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an American Icon

"Summers with Lincoln is pure pleasure. Part Lincoln biography, part cultural exploration, this one exceptional teacher's journey. . . . takes us all on a wonderful tour of quintessential American monuments. . . . fun and enjoyable."-Kate Clifford Larson, author of The Assassin's Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln

"This splendid evocation of Lincoln's image in sculpture combines poetic description, human-interest anecdotes, and incisive analysis. James Percoco shows how the different styles of public art shed light on the changing memories of our greatest president. Each chapter alone is worth the price of this book."-James M. McPherson, author of This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War

"The real secret of the Percoco classroom magic is that unbeatable combination of a love of teaching and an all-out love of his subject. One of the finest examples the nation has of a history teacher."-David McCullough

''Lincoln monuments have become traditional. Tradition is something permanent that reminds the public of something notable. The Lincoln sculptures covered in this book give meaning to life by providing our communities a way to communicate their traditions and beliefs from generation to generation. James Percoco tells us how these statues represent Lincoln's lasting ideas that commemorate those principles we preserve, honor and cherish.''-Frank J. Williams, Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court of Rhode Island and founding chair of The Lincoln Forum

From the Publisher