Lincoln as the Great Educator: Opinion and Educative Liberalism in the Civil War Era

Abstract

In Edinburgh, Scotland in 1893, a monument honoring Scotsmen who fought for the Union Army was unveiled in the Old Calton Cemetery. At the center of this transatlantic celebration were two bronze figures situated atop a plinth of red granite: on one level, a former slave extends a hand upward toward a large and imposing Abraham Lincoln, who stands looming far above. The familiar pairing of a kneeling slave and a standing president resembled Thomas Ball’s Freedman Memorial in Washington, DC, which had earlier given iconographic representation to the understanding of Lincoln as the “Great Emancipator.” Much else about this monument and its unveiling had the ring of the familiarity, from the young American woman depicting Columbia dressed in a flowing white gown to the toasts to “Saxon freedom” during this decade of Anglo-American rapprochement.¹