When this picture was painted, fewer than four years had passed since slavery had been abolished in the District of Columbia. There is an undeniable sense of the anecdotal and the picturesque, yet here this effect is subordinated to a theme of signal importance. Two bootblacks listen with rapt attention to a young veteran from the Civil War, identified by one scholar as an artilleryman. His lips parted, he looks upward as though recalling his exploits in the great struggle from a deep reservoir of memory. The soldier's open, athletic and self-confident pose announces the arrival of a new ideal of liberty to his old neighborhood. His classical stance and the clear, symmetrical grouping of the figures have all the effect of a monument to freedom.
