By David L. Bristow
An estimated ten thousand people gathered at the Nebraska State Capitol on September 2, 1912, for the unveiling a new bronze sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. It remains in place today, the only structure on the grounds that pre-dates the present capitol.
The sculpture of a standing Lincoln was made by Daniel Chester French, who went on to create the famous seated Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
William Jennings Bryan was the keynote speaker during the dedication ceremony. When he asked the crowd if anyone present had ever seen Lincoln, “Instantly, a hundred hands were waving wildly, scores of eager voices shouted, ‘Yes, Yes, I did,’ and some rose from their seats in excitement.” Many Civil War veterans were in the crowd; at the end of the ceremony these old men gathered around the monument to sing “Marching Through Georgia.”
Carved in granite behind Lincoln are the words to the Gettysburg Address, a speech that has special relevance as the nation approaches its 250th birthday.
Everyone can quote the opening words, “Four score and seven years ago,” and most people can figure out that it adds up to eighty-seven. The United States was still a very young nation when it was torn apart by secession and violence. Nebraska was still a territory at that time, though it sent 3,000 men into the Union armies—out of a pool of only 9,000 men of military age.
The Declaration of Independence famously calls “self-evident” the idea that “all men are created equal.” Abraham Lincoln referred to this idea as a “proposition” to which the nation had been dedicated.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
And in the closing words of his brief speech, Lincoln summed up the Declaration’s assertions about self-government with the phrase, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
The Civil War was the most serious test that the nation’s founding ideals had yet faced. Nebraska was the first state to join the Union after the war was won, and the conditions of Nebraska statehood were shaped by the issues raised by the war.
Like most states—even most Northern states—Nebraska’s proposed state constitution restricted voting rights to White men. In 1867 this became controversial, and Congress rejected Nebraska’s application for statehood until the racial restriction was removed.
To some extent this was partisan politics. Republicans knew that Black men were likely to vote for the party of Lincoln, and they planned to force Southern states to honor Black voting rights as a condition of readmission to the Union. But the new requirement was also an expression of principle—the idea that after four years of war the causes for that war must be eradicated, and that having shed so much blood for the notion of Liberty, the nation must fully embrace its implications.
So Nebraska’s legislature altered the proposed constitution to guaranteed Black voting rights. President Andrew Johnson, however, believed Congress had no authority to regulate voting rights, and he vetoed the statehood bill. Nebraska became the only state admitted through an override of a presidential veto. Our state motto, “Equality Before the Law,” was adopted as a result of that controversy.
The Founders, of course, had not considered Black voting rights. When they thought of a voter, they pictured a white, male head of household—and in most states in the early republic, a man also needed to own a certain amount of property before he could cast a ballot. But once established, the idea of government by consent of the governed refused to stay within its assigned boundaries. One can, arguably, draw a line from the Declaration of Independence to the Gettysburg Address to Nebraska’s constitution and state motto, tracing the development of our nation’s core ideas.
Read more about the 1912 dedication of the Lincoln Monument (PDF).
See more photos of the Lincoln Monument at the Nebraska State Capitol.
Photo: RG0863-4-1
(Posted 9/17/2025)
