Emancipation Memorial (Boston)
On April 4, Lincoln disembarked from the USS Malvern, and was greeted by a group of freed slaves who shouted "Glory Hallelujah" and mobbed the president, some of them kneeling before him and kissing his feet.
The scene has been portrayed in other commemoratory works, such as a painting by Black artist Gus Nall commissioned by the State of Illinois in 1963 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Massachusetts abolitionist and poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem for the occasion, concluding with these lines: "Stand in thy place and testify/ To coming ages long,/ That truth is stronger than a lie,/ And righteousness than wrong."
He told the crowd "it is his [Kimball's] desire, by this memorial bronze, not only to adorn the city and gratify our sense of the beautiful, but to elevate and instruct the popular mind by its solemn lessons of justice, philanthropy, and patriotism."
The rest of Prince's speech expanded upon his belief that justice had been served by ensuring the key tenets of the Declaration of Independence applied equally to African Americans.
Despite his condemnation of slavery and the South, he did not admonish the North for tardiness to act nor offer many encouraging remarks directly to Boston's African American community.
Conversely, the statue has also received thorough criticism for representing paternalistic power dynamics between Lincoln and the freed slave and downplaying the role African Americans had in securing their own liberation.
In an 1876 letter to the editor of National Republic, Frederick Douglass, the eminent abolitionist, orator, statesman, and former slave, called the work "admirable" but noted it does not "tell the whole truth of slavery."
Park Square had long been the terminus of the Boston & Providence Railroad, continuing to serve as a major transportation center with the Union Bus Terminal in the mid twentieth century.
Bullock argued that the statue could serve a better purpose in a museum as a learning tool, stating "I think to put it into a space where we can actually acknowledge that history would be 30 times better than actually leaving it up in public right now."
[12] Although supporters argued that freed had funded the monument and represented the victory of Emancipation, the commission sided with critics who believed the statue conveyed subservience more than freedom.
"After engaging in a public process, it's clear that residents and visitors to Boston have been uncomfortable with this statue, and its reductive representation of the Black man's role in the abolitionist movement."
[13] The future plans for the monument have not been determined, but the city announced it hopes the work will be better moved to a "publicly accessible location where its history and context can be better explained.
Architect Edward Francis Searles purchased an early small demonstration version from Ball and brought it to Methuen, Massachusetts, where it rests in the Town Hall atrium.
