Emancipation Ordinance of Missouri, An Ordinance Abolishing Slavery in Missouri little rock art The Men of the Hour

The Men of the Hour 1919 gathers the architects of the postwar settlement in the brittle afterglow of the Armistice — a group portrait of statesmen and commanders posed with the unwelcome gravity of a republic that had crossed an ocean to bury its dead

summoned by a reunited nation hungry to anchor its bruised present in the audacity of its founding

when Good Friday's gunshot at Ford's Theatre transfigured a wartime president into the republic's first secular saint

when the citizen-soldier had become ceremonial again

smoke and shattered hull pitched against a night sky that would

Emancipation Ordinance of Missouri, An Ordinance Abolishing Slavery in Missouri little rock art The Men of the HourEmancipation Ordinance of Missouri, An Ordinance Abolishing Slavery in Missouri the legislative breath by which a border state, long torn between Union loyalty and slaveholding habit, finally set its bondsmen free. The document carries the dry cadence of statute and the seismic weight of a republic dragging itself, clause by clause, toward its own stated creed. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive