April 16, 2002

Let Freedom Ring

On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a law abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia—five months in advance of the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The act provided slave holders compensation for nearly 3,000 slaves living in the nation's capital. Before 1850, when slave auctions were ended in the city, Washington was a center of the domestic slave trade.

In this work by William H. Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, is linked with Frederick Douglass and John Brown, two important figures in the abolitionist and African American history. Johnson, considered one of the most brilliant African American artists of the early twentieth century, painted this work late in his career during a period in which he focused on social, historical, and political subjects. Frederick Douglass, who appears in center of the group, was a resident of Washington, D.C., and spoke at a commemoration of abolition in the city on April 16, 1883, twenty-one years after Lincoln signed the act.

Source: Regenia A. Perry. Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992).

Pictured: William H. Johnson, 1901–1970, Three Great Abolitionists: A. Lincoln, F. Douglass, J. Brown, about 1945, oil on paperboard, 37 3/8 x 34 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation.