One of the most incongruous sights in this old plantation house was small statue of the Confederacy’s opponent, Abraham Lincoln. It is a miniature replica of Gutzon Borglum’s 1911 life sized statue of a “sitting Lincoln” outside the court house in Newark, New Jersey. Borglum, who also used Lincoln as one of the faces on his monumental sculpture at Mount Rushmore, treats Lincoln as very human here, a far cry from the brooding Lincoln of Daniel Chester French that graces the Lincoln Memorial. The Houmas House copy of Borglum’s statue is coated in silver. When I photographed it, it reflected the warmth of the orange lighting within the room. I shot the statue at an angle to make Lincoln seem to be look directly at us, one hand resting on a leg, the other on a bench near his stovepipe hat. Ironically, this Lincoln is visiting a plantation house that once controlled the lives of more than 800 slaves.