Abraham Lincoln Signing the Emancipation Proclamation - Lemay, MO
Posted by: 
YoSam.
N 38° 30.377 W 090° 17.044
15S E 736823 N 4265486
The original sits on the campus of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. This one is at the Missouri Civil War Museum, next to the old Jefferson Barracks Post Exchange building.
Waymark Code: WM14WG6
Location: Missouri, United States
Date Posted: 09/01/2021
Views: 3
County of building: St. Louis County
Location of building: Worth Rd., between Hancock Rd, & Sherman Rd., Jefferson Barracks, Lemay
Artist: Stanley Watts
Statue Text:
President Abraham Lincoln singing the
Emancipation Proclamation
January 1, 1863
A "bronze statue of President Abraham Lincoln was dedicated outside Stevens Hall. The statue, which stands nine feet tall, depicts a seated President Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation and was designed by Stanley Watts, who also designed the Lincoln statue outside the Gettysburg Public Library on Baltimore Street. ...
"On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation. Attempting to stitch together a nation mired in a bloody civil war, Abraham Lincoln made a last-ditch, but carefully calculated, decision regarding the institution of slavery in America.
"By the end of 1862, things were not looking good for the Union. The Confederate Army had overcome Union troops in significant battles and Britain and France were set to officially recognize the Confederacy as a separate nation. In an August 1862 letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln confessed “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” Lincoln hoped that declaring a national policy of emancipation would stimulate a rush of the South’s enslaved people into the ranks of the Union army, thus depleting the Confederacy’s labor force, on which the southern states depended to wage war against the North.
"Lincoln waited to unveil the proclamation until he could do so on the heels of a Union military success. On September 22, 1862, after the battle at Antietam, he issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declaring all enslaved people free in the rebellious states as of January 1, 1863. Lincoln and his advisors limited the proclamation’s language to slavery in states outside of federal control as of 1862, failing to address the contentious issue of slavery within the nation’s border states. In his attempt to appease all parties, Lincoln left many loopholes open that civil rights advocates would be forced to tackle in the future." ~ History