The Great Emancipator image was actively constructed in real time during Lincoln’s presidency.

Evidence

Nevertheless, in the next two years, Lincoln sat for journalists, artists, and photographers seeking to sculpt him into history as the Great Emancipator. Painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter spent six months at the White House in 1864 to visually re-create the moment when Lincoln ended slavery; First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln was intended to “commemorate this new epoch in the history of Liberty,” Bicknell wrote. Some people who witnessed the construction of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator realized that racial-progress mythology was being used to cleanse white people of their guilt and responsibility. “The negro has saved himself,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed around this time, “and the white man very patronizingly says, I have saved you.” White people—embodied in the enslaver—enslaved Black people. And then white people—embodied in Lincoln—freed Black people. In the end, it was white people who righted the wrong of slavery. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1268

Categorization

• XREF: The visual construction of Lincoln via Carpenter’s painting parallels the reader’s case study of how origin stories get inscribed through deliberate cultural artifacts — connects to the Revolutionary-War-cause dispute and the Wilentz letter as competing constructions.