'The Resolute Lincoln': A statue's story
Near the entrance to New Salem State Park in Illinois - one of this nation's great historic shrines - there stands a majestic nine-foot statue of Abraham Lincoln. In his left hand is the frontiersman's axe which he is laying aside, and in his right, a large book intended to represent a copy of Blackstone Commentaries. [*]
Entitled "The Resolute Lincoln", the statue symbolizes the story of New Salem as the crossroads in Lincoln's evolution from the gangling, rawboned youth, who arrived in 1831, to the determined lawyer who bade farewell to his friends and neighbors six years later.
Viewing this bronze-cast work, one pictures 'The Resolute Lincoln' setting out for Springfield, where he lived and practiced for almost a quarter of a century, but it's his eyes that are resolutely fixed on his ultimate destiny.
New Salem - that tiny frontier community where a struggling young Abraham Lincoln found his direction - will always hold a luminous place in the story of America.
Mac
Works Cited
[*] This statue was created by renown Lincoln sculptor Avard T. Fairbanks (1897-1987) and dedicated to the New Salem State Park in 1954.
The idea and parts of this story came from a passage in John J. Duff's 1960 work, A. Lincoln: Prairie Lawyer. (NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.) pp. 33-34.
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