A Freedom Day Reid: Lincoln and the Contrabands

President Lincoln didn't exactly free the slaves. But the slaves still got free.

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris was born in Philadelphia in 1863, the year the Civil War broke out. His father was a portrait painter who so admired the prolific “Orientalist” French portrateur Jean-Léon Gérôme that he named his son after him. Ferris, like the man who inspired his name, was among the most prolific painters of his time — painting idyllic scenes …