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.Their linked arms, intentionally out of proportion as if to stress their common human experience, cut diagonally across the full canvas, dominating the background scenes of the long-ago Civil War, as well as references to both old and modern aspirations like education and good housing.Lincoln seems to be rising from a pedestal that is reminiscent of the view of a tree stump—was the tree itself felled by the young rail-splitter, or does the stump represent politics?Lincoln soars above the scene like a timeless totem, connecting the sacrifices of the past with the dreams of the future.(Lincoln University, ©T.H.and R.P.Benton Testamentary Trusts/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.) 1.Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (rev.ed., New York: Cornwall Books, 1984), 260.TELLING HIS HEART1As the world headed toward war, America witnessed a period of revived interest in historical art, even as its black community created its own historical narrative.African American Horace Pippin’s short, sparkling career included seven historical paintings, all portraying antislavery heroes: three of John Brown and four of Lincoln.Pippin’s simplicity cut to the heart of the Lincoln story by portraying a good man.In this view Pippin (1888–1946) was much like Hartley, who used that very phrase in a title.One of the paintings reproduced here (top), Abe Lincoln, The Good Samaritan (1943), carries both biblical and frontier connotations, as Pippin’s Lincoln offers to help a child to split wood.In the other painting (bottom), General Grant looks on as Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator (1942) pardons the sleeping sentry—a story that, as with so much touched by Lincoln, reached the heights of legend.For once, the kneeling man, about to rise to freedom, is not a black man.Pippin’s“Great Emancipator” emancipates whites, too.As art historians Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson explained, whites also required emancipation, as expiation for the sin of slavery.2 Or, as Lincoln had told an often reluctant public in 1862: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”3( Samaritan: Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia.Bequest of David J.Grossman in honor of Mr.and Mrs.Charles S.Grossman and Mr.and Mrs.Meyer Speiser; Emancipator: Museum of Modern Art, New York)1.With acknowledgment for the caption title to Judith Stein, et al., I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1993).2.Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists, 365.3.“Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862,” Basler, et al., eds., Collected Works of Lincoln, 5:537.LET MY PEOPLE GOThose artists of Lincoln’s era who portrayed the so-called Emancipation Moment depicted either imaginary scenes showing whites literally unshackling blacks, or councils of white leaders gathered around official tables reading, hearing, or signing the Proclamation.1 The best-known of the latter type was Francis B.Carpenter’s painting, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (1864), shown below in its engraved adaptation.2 But when the African American artist William H.Johnson (1901–1970) created his own version, Let Me Free (top), Frederick Douglass had been “invited” to the symbolic table—as he had been to the White House in Lincoln’s day and so honored.But in 1945, the Proclamation still sits there awaiting Lincoln’s signa-ture, as does the body of a murdered slave.Other casualties, executed in a mass hanging, loom in the background, along with a contraband fleeing from bondage.3 With lynching still alive at the time, the painting’s protest is poignant.Long before historians had proposed the thesis of black self-liberation, Johnson (and others outside of the art world) suggested something of it.In this painting, Douglass is the symbolic equal of the president and a slave is shown freeing himself.Lincoln himself had some understanding of this possibility.In November 1863, soon after returning from Gettysburg, he told his secretary John Hay, apropos of the influx of black people into the Gulf States, that freedom would come even if secession succeeded.“The slaves, despairing of liberty through us would take the moment into their own hands, and no longer opposed by the government of the United States they would succeed.”4 (Carpenter: The Lincoln Museum; Johnson: The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)1.David Brion Davis, “The Emancipation Moment,” in Gabor S.Boritt, ed., Lincoln the War President: The Gettysburg Lectures (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10–12.2.See Harold Holzer, Mark E.Neely, Jr., and Gabor S.Boritt, The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York: Scribner, 1984), 110–23.3.Richard J.Powell, Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H.Johnson (Washington: National Museum of American Art, 1992), 203.4.Michael Burlingame and John R.Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 117.FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGOJohnson most likely created Lincoln sketches for a never-completed WPA (Works Progress Administration) mural around 1939–42.1 These gouaches, pen and ink on paper, with the most developed version reproduced here, show the giant folk hero dominating the compositions—just as elsewhere the artist’s rendering of John Brown created a giant of folklore more than of history.At Gettysburg, the nearly complete absence of black soldiers from the greatest battle of a war to which African Americans were central, has caused major moral problems for historians and artists both.Not for Johnson
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