The strategic marginalization of black populations lay at the heart of Transatlantic Slavery. For black men this entailed a hyper-sexualization, criminalization, and animalization which sought to banish them from the category of manhood. To be owned and controlled by another – to be chattel – was as far away from western definitions of manhood as one could get. In the nineteenth century, how did this social, material, and political disenfranchisement impact their representation within the realm of neoclassical sculpture, a field in which many established American and European artists consistently represented enslaved black subjects? This lecture explores how white neoclassical sculptors sought to immobilize and infantilize black male subjects depicting the newly freed (recently liberated, formerly enslaved people), through compositional and aesthetic strategies which, even within the realm of abolitionist representation, standardly depicted the black male as socially and physically impotent. This symbolic visual denigration occurred even when they were depicted as fully-grown, physically powerful males. Through an exploration of the case studies of John Quincy Adams Ward’s Freedman (1863), Thomas Ball’s Lincoln Memorial (c. 1866), and Mary Edmonia Lewis’s Morning of Liberty/Forever Free (1867), this lecture examines whether any of these artists was able (or willing) to create sculptures which depicted enslaved black males gaining their freedom, as men.