Abraham Lincoln

Artwork Description

Johnson's painting identifies key episodes in the life of Abraham Lincoln (1809--1865), from the log cabin where he grew up, to his election to the U.S. House of Representatives (symbolized by the U.S. Capitol), the capture of his assassin John Wilkes Booth, and the execution of Booth's co-conspirators. The crosses at the lower left honor the deaths of more than fifty thousand soldiers--Northern and Southern--who lost their lives at the battle of Gettysburg, which was considered the turning point in the Civil War. The red cross is likely a reference to Clara Barton, the government office-worker-turned-nurse who, with Lincoln's blessing, tended wounded soldiers on the battlefield. The flags and the hands holding the paper refer to the Gettysburg Address in which the sixteenth president reaffirmed that the nation, which had been "conceived in Liberty," was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." On the right, a Union soldier drags Booth from the burning barn in northern Virginia where he had hidden after killing Lincoln. Below are prison bars and a scaffold from which Booth's co-conspirators hang.