Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War Exhibition

Monday January 30, 2012

    Today was a field trip day!  We went to the library to view the Lincoln exhibit.  It was called “Lincoln: The Constitution and the Civil War.”  The American Constitution Center teamed up with the American Library Association and created this traveling exhibit.  It was an interesting exhibit and had both good and bad qualities. 
    Good Qualities.  To begin with, this exhibit was at the library, so it was open to anyone to view, free!  This makes learning available to everyone!  Also, the exhibit was easy to walk through and understand.  There were many images throughout!  There were pictures, painting, pictures of artifacts, and political cartoons!  The political cartoons were my favorite!  Depending on where there cartoon originated, Lincoln is either viewed as a tyrannical dictator, or a hero and liberator.  A pro-Lincoln sketch depicts him as a rail-splitter who is about to chop down a tree labeled “slavery.”  Up in the tree is a person, but this person looks wild and inhuman.  This shows how strongly Lincoln felt about ending slavery once and for all.  Second is an anti-Lincoln sketch.  Lincoln is portrayed as a very large monster who is wearing a crown.   The “monster-Lincoln” is also standing on the freedom of press and Habeas Corpus.  This cartoon pokes fun at every aspect of Lincoln and even goes as far to say that martial law was completely out of hand.  Political cartoons are an excellent source  of learning because they show how people felt about what was going on.
    Poor Qualities.  First, there is no one person, or group of people that work the exhibit.  This makes it difficult to ask questions or clarify any misconceptions.  Another downfall is the lack of actual artifacts.  Everything is on the panels: written texts, quotes, pictures, and pictures of artifacts.  While it would be very costly to use and insure actual artifacts, the presence of them would make the set-up more detailed and useful for students.    
     Last, this exhibition was designed for a specific audience.  Due to the lack of detailed information many people would say that this exhibit was designed for middle and high school students.  Each topic covered is only briefly touched upon and does not go into enough detail to be useful for college-level courses.  Though the information that is presented is indeed interesting, the displays are not well equipped for someone who has background knowledge of the Civil War era.
    I liked viewing this exhibit, but I would have never paid to see it.  I felt like we went from one extreme to the next in class.  I say this because the Farber book was SO detailed and almost killed a person with fact after fact while, on the other hand, the exhibit was a “dumbed-down” version of the topic.  We went from a great amount of details and examples to something that only focused on three main topics.  Both the book and the exhibit were from Lincoln’s eyes and dealt a lot with the Constitution.  In the end, I am still glad that I read Daniel Farber’s book and viewed the exhibit because it opened my eyes to some things that I never knew about Abraham Lincoln, the Constitution, and the Civil War.