Lincoln’s Legacy: Historic Americana from the Life of Abraham Lincoln

Stuffed; woven cotton; stitched buttons and attire. Depicts Abraham Lincoln in a long frock coat and tan trousers, with Lincoln's face rendered in pencil and watercolor on a paper mask laid over a stuffed black head; likely once with paper hands, now perished; possibly created as an effigy doll, and possibly depicting Lincoln as a "Black Republican". Height: 10 1/2 in. (310 mm).

The term "Black Republican" was coined by Stephen A. Douglas in Ottawa, Illinois on 21 August 1858 during the first of his seven debates with Abraham Lincoln for the Illinois Senate seat. Referencing Lincoln's "House Divided" speech of the previous June, Douglas charged that Lincoln wanted to overthrow state laws preventing Blacks from living in Illinois. This prompted Lincoln to respond that while he had his own reservations about equality, he believed that former slaves were equal "in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."

Despite Lincoln's loss to Douglas their debates propelled him into the national consciousness, and with it the impression that Lincoln sought nothing less than the complete destruction of the right to own slaves and, by extension, the entire Southern way of life. Even before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, cartoonists and folk artists depicted Lincoln as something foreign and inherently anti-American, with an 1864 satirical pamphlet dubbing him "Abraham Africanus I." Effigy dolls were often burned at anti-Republican rallies.

Provenance:

Louise Taper, Beverly Hills, California

Exhibition:

The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America, at the Huntington Library, October 1993-August 1994

Blood on the Moon, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, 19 April-16 October 2005