A statue of Abraham Lincoln depicting the 16th president holding the Emancipation Proclamation in one hand and with his other hand stretched over a kneeling, newly emancipated slave has been removed from Boston’s Park Square after the city received objections from 12,000 people who signed a petition demanding its removal.
The statue features an inscription that reads, “A race set free and the country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors.”
Those objecting to the statue complained that because the liberated slave is kneeling before Lincoln, the statue is demeaning and lacks proper context. The statue, which had stood in Park Square since 1879, is a copy of the Emancipation Memorial statue that still stands in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park. The original memorial, sculpted by Thomas Ball, was erected in 1876. According to the National Park Service, the monument was paid for solely by former slaves. The first five-dollar donation was given by former slave Charlotte Scott of Virginia.
Three years after the erection of the memorial in Washington, Moses Kimball, for whom Ball had once worked at the Boston Museum, donated a copy of the statue to the city of Boston, erected at Park Square. The Boston replica will be placed in temporary storage while the city figures out “a new publicly accessible location where it could be better explained,” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said in a statement released earlier this month.
“The decision for removal acknowledged the statue’s role in perpetuating harmful prejudices and obscuring the role of Black Americans in shaping the nation’s freedoms,” Walsh maintained.
NPR reported that the Boston Art Commission voted to remove the Lincoln statue six months ago, in response to protesters who called for “controversial” monuments to be either taken down entirely or placed into a new historical context.
The removal of the memorial to Lincoln’s role in the emancipation of slaves is only the most recent example of a wave of actions taken in recent years to either remove, dismantle, or vandalize statues of long-revered individuals who played important roles in our nation’s history. This trend was described in an article that appeared in the August 24, 2020 print edition of The New American titled “Tearing Down Statues of Real Heroes.”
TNA noted that when Black Lives Matter and other Marxist vandals began toppling public monuments, they first targeted Confederates and others whom they labeled as “racists” to justify their destruction by calling it “anti-racist” action. However, such vandals and iconoclasts soon expanded their list of long-dead historic enemies to include Christopher Columbus, Father Junípero Serra, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee — and even Abraham Lincoln.
Washington and Lee are frequently criticized for having owned slaves, but Lee inherited slaves from his father-in-law, along with the large debts of the estate. As soon as Lee could do so, he freed the slaves. Likewise, Washington made provision in his will to free his 123 slaves upon his wife’s death. As the Mount Vernon website observes, “George Washington stipulated in his will that elderly slaves or those who were too sick to work were to be supported throughout their lives by his estate.”
In each case, those calling for the removal of statues of individuals long admired by most Americans rely on false historic narratives. The attack on Columbus, for example, “began three decades ago in communist history professor Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which falsely claimed that Columbus’ arrival at San Salvador was a dreadful genocidal cataclysm.”
Far from engaging in “genocide,” Columbus eradicated the practice of cannibalism prevalent among several native tribes, including the Caribs and Aztecs, and introduced the natives to Christianity, thereby conveying a special dignity upon them.
The common denominator of practically all of these attacks on statues, memorials, and public holidays honoring our historic figures is that they attempt to reverse the way previous generations of Americans, including this writer, were taught American history. Our textbooks described America as the new home of “Western Christian civilization” (sometimes referred to as “Judeo-Christian civilization”). The leftists who attack our beloved historic figures such as Columbus, Washington, and Lincoln seek to eradicate that Christian-style civilization, which safeguards the dignity of the individual, and replace it with a secular socialist state divorced from the principles that guided our forefathers.
Related articles:
Tearing Down Statues of Real Heroes
Virginia Removes Robert E. Lee Statue From U.S. Capitol
Will Churchill’s Statue Be Next to Fall?
Vandals Strike Again: Statue of St. Junipero Serra Decapitated and Splashed With Red Paint
Iconoclasts Vandalize Statues of Columbus in New York and Baltimore
Attacking America: Columbus Day Being Replaced With “Indigenous Peoples Day”
Communists, Socialists Pull Down Confederate Statue in North Carolina
