Difference in the defense stopping you or you giving yourself up <| sep |> George Grey Barnard ' s bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln was originally intended to stand outside the Houses of Parliament , a tribute from the USA to Britain to mark the 100 years of unbroken peace that had existed between the two countries since 1814 . Barnard ' s depiction of Lincoln proved controversial and eventually led to a more statesmanlike image of the president being sent to London at the end of the First World War . Barnard ' s Lincoln was without a home . Manchester argued that it was an appropriate city for such a statue because of its connections with Lincoln . This was a reference to the sacrifices that Lancashire cotton operatives had made in support of the Union and the abolition of slavery during the American Civil War , a sacrifice that Lincoln himself acknowledged . No reference was made to the fact that not all of the people working in the cotton industry during the cotton famine , let alone those in other parts of the country , were sympathetic to the northern states . from a m e r i c a n c i v i l w a r a n d t h e l a n c a s h i r e c o t t o n f a m i n e p l a c e s s t a t u e o f a b r a h a m l i n c o lnlincolnsquaremanchester . html