Freedman's Memorial

This guide to the Freedman's Memorial in Washington, D.C. traces a fundraising drive that began the day Lincoln's death reached Charlotte Scott, a formerly enslaved woman in Ohio, who gave her first wages as a free woman toward a monument. It follows how nickels and dollars from Black soldiers and freedmen built a fund a white relief agency then controlled, and how sculptor Thomas Ball designed the bronze that resulted, modeling its kneeling figure on Archer Alexander, a man once captured under the Fugitive Slave Act.