Compiling his
Reminiscences in the final years of his life, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) recalled how the coming of America’s Civil War had moved him. Saint-Gaudens had been an aspiring artist, aged 13, and a New York cameo-cutter’s apprentice when the war’s first shots were fired; from the lathe where he learned to cut lions, dogs, and horses into amethyst and malachite, he watched the Federal army gather. ‘From my window,’ he wrote, ‘I saw virtually the entire contingent of New England Volunteers on their way to the Civil War, a spectacle profoundly impressive, even to my youthful imagination.’ Amid strains of abolitionist song, and the marching of feet, one silhouette loomed in his memory: ‘above all, what remains in my mind is seeing in a procession the figure of a tall and very dark man, seeming entirely out of proportion in his height with the carriage in which he was driven, bowing to the crowds on each side. […] the man was Abraham Lin