Emancipation Memorial (1876). Bronze. 300. The Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman's Memorial or the Emancipation Group is a monument in Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was sometimes referred to as the Lincoln Memorial before the more prominent so-named memorial was dedicated in 1922. Designed and sculpted by Thomas Ball and erected in 1876, the monument depicts Abraham Lincoln holding a copy of his Emancipation Proclamation freeing a male African American slave modeled on Archer Alexander. The ex-slave is depicted on one knee, about to stand up, with one fist clenched, shirtless and broken shackles at the president's feet. The Emancipation Memorial statue was funded by the wages of freed slaves. The statue originally faced west towards the U.S. Capitol until it was rotated east in 1974 in order to face the newly erected Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial. The statue is a contributing monument to the Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C. on the National Register of Historic Places. The funding drive for the monument began, according to much-publicized newspaper accounts from the era, with $5 given by former slave Charlotte Scott of Virginia, then residing with the family of her former master in Marietta, Ohio, for the purpose of creating a memorial honoring Lincoln. The Western Sanitary Commission, a St. Louis-based volunteer war-relief agency, joined the effort and raised some $20,000 before announcing a new $50,000 goal. Another group that attempted to raise funds for the monument in 1865 was the National Lincoln Memorial Association. It was briefly considered merging the original funds with the National Lincoln Memorial Association but that mission soon failed due to conflicting visions. According to the National Park Service, the monument was paid for solely by former slaves: The campaign for the Freedmen's Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln, as it was to be known, was not the only effort of the time to build a monument to Lincoln; however, as the only one soliciting contributions exclusively from those who had most directly benefited from Lincoln's act of emancipation it had a special appeal. The funds were collected solely from freed slaves. The turbulent politics of the reconstruction era affected the fundraising campaign on many levels. The Colored People's Educational Monument Association, headed by Henry Highland Garnet, wanted the monument to serve a didactic purpose as a school, where freedmen could elevate themselves through learning. Frederick Douglass disagreed and thought the goal of education was incommensurate with that of remembering Lincoln. Harriet Hosmer proposed a grander monument than that suggested by Thomas Ball. Her design, which was ultimately deemed too expensive, posed Lincoln atop a tall central pillar flanked by smaller pillars topped with black Civil War soldiers and other figures. Mr. Ball was well known through several works when, in 1865, under his first influence of the news of Lincoln's assassination, he'd individually conceived and completed an original half-life-size work in Italian marble. When Ball's design was finally chosen, on the order of the Freedman's Memorial Association, this design, with certain changes, was to be expanded to about nine feet high, as the final Emancipation group in Lincoln Park in 1876. Instead of wearing a liberty cap, the slave in the revised monument is depicted bare-headed with tightly curled hair. The face was re-sculpted to look like Archer Alexander, a former slave, whose life story was popularized by a biography written by William Greenleaf Eliot. In the final design, as in Ball's original design, Lincoln holds a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in his right hand. The document rests on a plinth bearing patriotic symbols, including George Washington's profile, the fasces of the U.S. republic, and a shield emblazoned with the stars and stripes. The plinth replaces the pile of books in Ball's original design. Behind the two figures is a whipping post draped with cloth. A vine grows around the pillory and around the ring where the chain was secured. The monument was cast in Munich in 1875 and shipped to Washington the following year. Congress accepted the statue as a gift from the colored citizens of the United States and appropriated $3,000 for a pedestal upon which it would rest. The statue was erected in Lincoln Park, where it still stands.