ARCHER ALEXANDER

On February 12, 1809, 217 years ago, Abraham Lincoln was born. In his 1858 campaign speeches, he would use the phrase “united we stand, divided we fall.” He would use this to explain how our country needed a universal decision on the subject of slavery. He would become our sixteenth president and lead us through the most difficult trial our nation would experience. He would emancipate the enslaved in the Confederate states on January 1, 1863, when they refused to concede to this decision. The war would continue with over 800,000 casualties for the Union Army, and an even greater number for the Confederates. The U.S. Colored Troops made up 10 percent of the Union death toll, and 15 percent of Union deaths from disease. The surrender of the Confederates would make this country one again, at a great price. Ultimately, over 400,000 African Americans would gain their freedom.  

Five days after the Confederates surrendered at Appomattox, President Abraham Lincoln lay dead. Shot by a stage actor at Ford’s Theatre, who couldn’t accept what Lincoln had done. When word reached the town of Marietta, Ohio, a formerly enslaved woman named Charlotte Scott gave her first $5 ever earned in freedom to the “best friend the colored people ever had” to make a Memorial to Lincoln. The U.S. Colored Troops donated to her dream, the freedmen donated, and those whose freedom had been gained by Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. It took years before those small donations could total something that would create such a monument.

Donations began to slow, reconstruction was ending, but some still held onto the dream. Finally, on the 11th Anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, a huge dedication was held in Washington DC of the first ever memorial by the colored people to be erected in that great city. And there with Lincoln is a former slave, experiencing the birth of freedom and rising to greet the future that is his now, thanks to Lincoln. That man on the Memorial is not just anyone. He is Archer Alexander, the last fugitive slave taken in Missouri, where he heroically broke his own chains helping the Union Army and saving hundreds of lives.

The Emancipation Memorial is celebrating its 150th Anniversary this year, as America experiences its 250th birthday.