Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced on Wednesday that the Chicago Monuments Project, which convened in August to decide whether any of the city’s monuments should be removed, had compiled a list of 41 statues and commemorative plaques for review.
Among the statues are five depicting Abraham Lincoln, two of George Washington and one of Ulysses S. Grant. One of the Lincoln statues is in Lincoln Park and another is in Lincoln Square, no less.
The official Illinois state slogan is the “Land of Lincoln.”
Prior to the Civil War, Lincoln spoke out in an 1858 speech in Chicago against Democratic Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas’ “popular sovereignty” plan, which allowed slavery to expand into the western territories and states formed from those lands to enter the union as slave states if they so chose.
Republicans argued that the Founders had placed slavery on the path of “ultimate extinction” and that’s where it should remain.
During the war, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freeing the slaves in the states which were then in rebellion, and two years later Congress passed the 13th Amendment, ending slavery nationwide.
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