Statue of Abraham Lincoln

The bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln on the south grounds of the state capitol is a work by Daniel Chester French, the sculptor also responsible for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. This earlier piece, cast in 1912, shows a standing Lincoln at Gettysburg — a more intimate scale than the Washington colossus, and more affecting for it.

The statue is on the capitol grounds and easy to visit in combination with a tour of the building. Lincoln the city was named after Abraham Lincoln (over the strong objection of Nebraska Democrats who found the name politically obnoxious), which gives the statue a peculiar civic significance — a monument to the man whose name the city carries, placed in front of the building that his party's policies helped make possible.

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The statue depicts Lincoln at Gettysburg — the pose is from the moment just before he delivered the Gettysburg Address in November 1863. The sculptor, Daniel Chester French, is best known for the giant seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The Nebraska version, made forty years earlier in 1912, is a quieter, standing figure: a younger man shouldering an enormous burden.

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