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of Christians have reason for deep interest in it. The symbols of faith should transcend the lower conceptions of sense, sorrow, disappointment, and darkness, giving to our cemeteries instead a characteristic expression of chastened confidence and joyful hope.
A very few days after the death of President Lincoln, a poor colored woman of Marietta, Ohio, made free by his proclamation, proposed that a monument should be erected, by the colored people of the United States, to their dead friend; and she handed to a citizen of that place five dollars as her contribution for the purpose.
Twenty-three thousand dollars were raised and deposited in the hands of a committee, with the request that they would take measures for the erection of a monument in Washington.
Miss Hosmer heard of the proposed “Memorial to freedom,” and, prompted by her friends, designed a monument, a plaster cast of which has been exhibited in Boston.
The structure consists, first, of a base sixty feet square, to which seven steps ascend.
Four bas reliefs in bronze surround this base, representing incidents in the life of the president, his early occupations, his career as a member of the Legislature, his inauguration at Washington, memorable events of the war, his assassination and funeral obsequies.
On the corners of this base are four short, round columns, on which stand four statues of the negro, finely idealized, showing him in four conditions,--sold as a slave, laboring on a plantation, a guide to our troops, and finally a freeman and soldier.
An octagonal base rests on the lower, on four sides of which are the inscriptions:--“Abraham Lincoln;
martyr President of the United States;
emancipator of four millions of men;
preserver of the American Union.”
Upon this is a circular base, around which is a bas relief
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S. M. Betts and Company. Hartford, Conn. 1871.
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