This depiction of a review stand packed with white men and women at a ceremony intended to honor black troops is is reminiscent of a scene that had been depicted in Frank Leslie's and described by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, commander of the African-American 1st South Carolina Volunteers. To mark the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1862, his troops were presented with their colors. However, it was not the black soldiers who were given the places of honor on the dais:

My companies were marched to the neighborhood of the platform & collected sitting or standing, as they are at Sunday meeting; the band of the 8th Me regiment was here & they & the white ladies & dignitaries usurped the platform—the colored people from abroad filled up all the gaps....Thomas Wentworth Higginson's diary entry for January 1, 1862, as published in his book Army Life in a Black Regiment