In addition to their style and their dedicators’ stated intentions, the location of monuments is important for interpreting their meaning. The Confederate monuments at Gettysburg were deliberately placed in their current locations in order to further a pro-Confederate telling of the story of the battle of Gettysburg. That these monuments were erected at Gettysburg rather than at Manassas, Vicksburg, or Appomattox is itself significant. Furthermore, each monument’s placement at its specific location on the battlefield is calculated to support a heroic Confederate narrative by freezing the imagined landscape of the battle at the dramatic moment of greatest possibility. Visitors’ experiences of the battlefield is profoundly shaped by the placement of monuments, and that placement tells a particular story.
In some ways, Gettysburg is a strange place for Confederate memorials. After all, communities generally prefer to commemorate their proudest moments rather than their embarrassments or defeats:
Lexington and Concord rather than
New York,
San Juan Hill rather than
Manila,
D-Day rather than
Hiroshima. Although Southern states erected monuments at other battlefield sites during the 20th century, many erected their most spectacular memorials at Gettysburg and no other battle site can boast monuments commemorating every Confederate state. Undoubtedly, some Southerners’ interest in building monuments at Gettysburg sprung from a practical desire to present their version of history to the greatest possible number of visitors at the country’s most popular Civil War site. In addition, by the early twentieth century, Gettysburg had become a national shrine to reunification and industrial-age might with a focus on military glory that “eclipsed the fundamental issues of race and freedom that propelled the war and continued to linger” (
Weeks, 83).
The Confederate defeat at Gettysburg also occupied a special place in the mythology of the Lost Cause. In the years following the war, veterans and historians searching for explanations for the South’s defeat pinpointed Gettysburg as a crucial turning point in the war. Confederate sympathizers rushed to exonerate their beloved General Lee from any wrongdoing, eventually pinning most of the blame for the Confederacy’s defeat on General Longstreet’s supposed blunders during the second day’s fight, which necessitated the calamitous charge on the third.
According to many Confederate veterans and apologists, the loss at Gettysburg was a blow from which the Confederacy could not recover. Though most modern historians identify other factors – including the implosion of the slave-labor system, rampant desertion, and the collapse of support from Southern civilians – as the true causes of the Confederacy’s eventual demise, “elevating Gettysburg to mythical status” allowed Confederate sympathizers to “[explain] the loss of the war as a whole in a more palatable way” (
Nolan, 23).
After deciding that Gettysburg was an appropriate place to honor the Confederacy, state monument committees had to choose specific sites for their memorials. These decisions were anything but straightforward, owing to the battlefield’s immense size, the dispersal of a single state’s troops among several different divisions and corps, and the historical fact of troop movements over the course of the three-day battle. How could the state of North Carolina possibly honor the men of the
23rd North Carolina, who suffered 84% casualties on July 1st in an assault northwest of the town, and the men of the
26th North Carolina, who were decimated during Pickett’s Charge on July 3rd, with a single, stationary monument?*
Monument committees could not place markers at sites that were significant only to one or a few regiments without slighting others, so they erected their monuments at places that they believed would be significant for all. New York placed its state monument in the Gettysburg National Cemetery; Pennsylvania chose the geographic center of the Union battle line; all eleven ex-Confederate states chose Seminary Ridge.
The
Gettysburg battlefield is generally described as two opposing ridges, Seminary and Cemetery Ridge, which run parallel, about a mile apart, for several miles South of the town of Gettysburg. Cemetery Ridge is flanked by hills: Cemetery and Culp’s Hill to the North and Little and Big Round Top to the South. Excluding the first day’s battle, which was fought in the town and to its northwest, the two ridges form the defining topographical features of the battlefield. After the fighting on July 1st, the Army of the Potomac took up their famous “Fish Hook” position along Cemetery Ridge and dug in. On July 2nd, Confederate forces attacked the hills on both Union flanks, but were repulsed and fell back to Seminary Ridge.
From this position, Lee ordered Pickett’s disastrous charge on July 3rd. The Confederate monuments form a mile-long line on Seminary Ridge, approximating the Confederate line of battle in the early afternoon of July 3rd, just before
Pickett’s Charge was launched and lost.
By placing their monuments along Seminary Ridge, Confederate monument committees enshrined the mythology of Pickett’s Charge as the “high water mark of the Confederacy.” The idea that Pickett’s Charge marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy is a central tenet of Lost Cause mythology, and the moments preceding the charge occupy a prominent place in the neo-Confederate imagination. In his 1998 book,
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, Tony Horwitz describes reading the following passage from
William Faulkner’s
Intruder in the Dust (1948) to a group of Confederate reenactors as they prepared to recreate the doomed charge:
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are loaded and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out . . . it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances . . . yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed even a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.
This fantasy had “lingered in the Southern imagination” long before the Confederate monuments were constructed, but their placement embodies the reverie, giving pilgrims a destination and firing the imaginations of visitors.
The position of the Confederate monuments also supports the curious fiction of the two armies’ physical separation during the battle. Although a few Confederate markers denote the point of farthest advance at the Angle, most Confederate monuments were erected far from any Union monuments. Union regiments such as the 72nd Pennsylvania and 20th Maine placed their memorials near the places that saw the fiercest fighting, but the monumental landscape bears little indication that Confederates also fought in those places.
On Little Round Top, the 20th Maine fought against men from Alabama, but, although the 20th Maine monument sits near “the spot where the colors stood,” the Alabama state monument is over a mile and a half away. Many sections of the battlefield that lie beyond the Union “Fish Hook,” including the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, and the Peach Orchard, are littered with dozens of Union monuments, but they are unopposed by Confederate memorials. The 114th Pennsylvania commemorated their desperate fight around the Sherfy farm by erecting their monument a few feet from the Sherfy’s front door, while a monument on faraway Seminary Ridge honors the Mississippians who opposed them.
Though Union veterans undoubtedly wished to draw attention to their role as active combatants by placing their monuments at these sites, the absence of adversaries ultimately supports a history of reconciliation, in which Union and Confederate soldiers never get close enough to stab or maim one another.
The most recent Confederate monuments reflect the enduring resonance of both the Pickett’s Charge mythology and the reconciliation narrative. Two, the General Longstreet equestrian statue (1998, image at right
via justmecpb) and the 11th Mississippi monument (2000), are located on Seminary Ridge among the Confederate state monuments. Two others, the Maryland state monument (1994) and the “Friend to Friend” memorial (1993) are removed from the most active parts of the battlefield; the former stands in a small plaza near the old visitor’s center parking lot, the latter is the centerpiece of the WWII annex of the Gettysburg National Cemetery.
While the two Seminary Ridge monuments merely contribute to the established monumental landscape there, the Maryland and Masonic monuments are part of an expanding effort to commemorate the battle by emphasizing mutual aid and suffering with monuments placed in locations that visitors do not generally associate with fierce fighting.**
Other monuments that contribute to this reconciliationist landscape are the
Elizabeth Thorn Memorial (2002, image at left
via), which honors the women of Gettysburg, and the
Amos Humiston monument (1993), dedicated to a Union soldier whose mangled body was identified when a burial detail found a picture of his children in his hand and published it in newspapers across the North.*** By shifting their attention from military valor to the trauma that soldiers and civilians shared, the growing 21st-century monumental landscape characterizes the battle as a national calamity similar to September 11th or a massive natural disaster, in which Americans banded together to overcome a tragedy that they seemingly had no hand in causing. In the coming years, we might expect to see new monuments erected at ostensibly neutral sites, such as the locations of field hospitals, in and around Gettysburg.
It is easy to glean meaning from sculptural forms and the words that are spoken over them, but most of Gettysburg’s visitors pass over monument placement without a second thought. At most, some might wonder why a monument to
Confederate sailors or to the last surviving Union veteran,
Albert Woolson (d. 1956), neither of whom fought at Gettysburg, were erected on this particular battlefield.
Still, the position of monuments influences the visitor’s experience and his or her historical imagination. When the principal Confederate monuments stand along the edge of the field immortalized by Pickett’s Charge instead of near Culp’s Hill or Little Round Top, they elevate the failed assault’s importance in service of the “High Water Mark” narrative. The physical distance between Confederate and Union monuments subtly deflects attention from the bloody reality of battle by separating the combatants and glorifying each side’s deeds without necessarily impugning the valor of the other. In recent years, efforts to extend the monumental landscape into putatively neutral spaces with explicitly reconciliationist sculptures have begun to temper the battlefield’s military focus, but without really challenging the older landscape’s values.
“Monuments attempt to mold a landscape of collective memory, to conserve what is worth remembering and discard the rest,” writes Kirk Savage in
Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. At Gettysburg, the Confederate monumental landscape has preserved and elaborated on the mythology of the Lost Cause for the benefit of generations of 20th- and 21st-century visitors. Over the course of the 20th century, pro-Confederate memorialists have presented the Confederacy and its cause through images of heroic and suffering soldiers that elicit visceral, emotional responses in ways that the stiff, formal, and, in many cases, funerary sculpture of the Union monumental landscape does not. Is it any wonder that young visitors often feel drawn to the Confederate side, preferring to identify with the heroic underdogs of those awe-inspiring monuments rather than with the stolid and formulaic Union?
Despite the efforts of academic historians to challenge the foundations of the Lost Cause mythology, more Americans experience the Civil War through interactions with the monuments at Gettysburg than by reading an academic text, and the Lost Cause remains central to American historical memory. Rather than diminishing in power over the years, the central tenets of the Lost Cause have been packaged in more palatable forms and preserved. It is difficult to oppose the construction of monuments such as the “Friend-to-Friend” memorial, which is not blatantly offensive in any way. Still, the trajectory of the monumental landscape at Gettysburg suggests that future monuments will continue to represent Confederate soldiers as sympathetic and continue the “urgent” project of “dissociat[ing] the Confederacy from slavery” (Savage, 131). For now, at least, the only mention of any “new birth of freedom” at the battlefield will remain hidden away in the darkened room that houses the original copy of the
Gettysburg Address.
*The 26th North Carolina marched into battle on July 1st with 843 officers and men. Of these, only 70 remained alive and unwounded three days later, a casualty rate of 92%. See Earl Hess,
Lee's Tar Heels: The Pettigrew-Kirkland-McRae Brigade, 153.
**Of course, the battle of Gettysburg raged through all parts of the town, so it impossible to draw a sharp distinction between the town and the battlefield. Nevertheless, certain parts of the battlefield, including the Angle, Little Round Top, and the fields to the northwest of town belong to the National Park Service, and are considered to be “the battlefield.” The monuments discussed here are located in developed areas of the town of Gettysburg, near hotels, shops, and restaurants. Though there was fighting in these areas, visitors generally experience them as places to sleep, shop, and eat, not as battle sites.
***Elizabeth Thorn was the wife of the caretaker of the Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg. Six months pregnant during the battle, she personally buried approximately one hundred soldiers in the following weeks. Her statue stands just inside the entrance to the Evergreen Cemetery.
Isbell, 136.
Amos Humiston, a sergeant in the 154th New York, was killed on July 1, 1863. When his body was recovered by a burial detail after the battle, the only identifying document they could find was a photograph of Humiston’s three children, 8-year old Franklin, 6-year-old Alice, and 4-year-old Frederick. On October 19, 1863, the Philadelphia Inquirer published the photograph under the headline, “Whose Father Was He?” The story was reprinted in many newspapers, and Humiston’s wife, Philinda, eventually recognized the photograph. The tragic story of the Humiston children became a fundraising cause throughout the North, and so much money was donated that the Humistons built a house for war orphans in Gettysburg after the war. see Mark Dunkelman,
Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier: The Life, Death, and Celebrity of Amos Humiston, (Greenwood Publishing, 1999).
Reader!!!
Today, I finished Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2007). I won't say I finished "reading" it because, technically, I listened to the audiobook, but that shouldn't matter. I like having nice, long audiobooks on my iPod as I walk around Cambridge — in the past few months, I've listened to The Killer Angels, Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, Simon Schama's A History of Britain, The Red Tent, The Ghost Map, Fred Anderson's The War that Made America, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and my weekly "This American Life" podcasts.
The author who most directly addresses the fundamental question of gender disparity in migration is David Eltis. In The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000), Eltis attempts to explain why Europeans were willing to import enslaved African women but did not encourage European women to emigrate. He argues that white men were willing to accept African women as field workers who could contribute to the staple crop economy of the colonies, but that European women’s labor was neither profitable nor in demand in the colonies. English women were not coerced or coaxed into migrating because they were “never a significant part of the labor force of the export sectors of the Atlantic economies” (Eltis, 99). The idea that elite planners devising an ideal workforce preferred English men to English women is supported by the work of Robert C. Johnson, who found that when the Virginia Company sent vagrant children to their colony as servants, they chose to send three times as many boys as girls.**
In Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996), Brown contradicts many of Eltis’ key assumptions about the value of white women’s work by pointing out that tobacco production reached its peak only after women, “whose processing and commercial skills made possible both subsistence agriculture and internal markets,” reached demographic parity with men (Brown, 84). Where Eltis argues that “European settlers in the New World did not reshape European norms in family and sexual conduct,” Brown finds that colonial courts and legislatures spent a great deal of time passing and defending laws that struggled to impose ideal European gender relations on a populace that challenged them constantly (Eltis, 103). Where Eltis assumes that “demand for [English] women stemmed from their reproductive role,” and that “there was no economic demand to sustain the female component of transatlantic migration,” Brown argues that white women’s field labor was crucial to their husbands’ economic success because, unlike black women and all men, they were not taxed as potential field workers. This allowed white planters to profit from the field labor of their untithable wives and children while the law defined women as household laborers and ignored evidence that white women actually performed agricultural work (Eltis, 96; Brown, 121).
David Cressy’s appraisal of migrants’ motives in Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (1987), provides a useful model for extending “pull” arguments into more rewarding discussions. Rather than ascribing migration to the charms of the New World, he investigates the convoluted decision-making process of prospective migrants in England and argues that their manifold motivations and incentives were much more muddled than either pure “push” or “pull” arguments admit. Cressy rejects religious persecution as a “self-serving” narrative advanced by both colonists and historians searching for a useable past, neither of whom could admit that most migrants emigrated for economic gain or to escape personal troubles (debt, crime, bad marriages), and that some “crossed over in a casual or impulsive manner” (Cressy, 85, 98-106).*** By recognizing that uneasy conditions at home could prompt English subjects to contemplate alternatives, Cressy lays the groundwork for exploring why they were pulled to particular colonies.
In Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), David Hackett Fischer places religious persecution at the forefront of the many factors driving the “Great Migration” of Puritans to New England during the 1630s. Fischer argues adamantly that religion was “not merely [their] leading purpose[;] it was their only purpose” (Fischer, 18). Although he acknowledges economic opportunity in New England and the possibility of evangelizing among the Native Americans, Fischer sets out a strong “push” argument. “This exodus was not a movement of attraction,” he declares, “the great migration was a great flight from conditions which had grown intolerable at home” (Fischer, 16). Since the East Anglians who settled in New England intended to establish godly communities rather than plantations, gender ratios were more balanced and “normal family life was not the exception but the rule” (Fischer, 27).
Susan Hardman Moore echoes Fischer’s arguments in Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (2007), emphasizing Laudian policies as a driving force behind the Puritan exodus and characterizing movement to New England as “the most family-centered migration in America’s history” (Moore, 21). Moore draws a clear sociological distinction between those who migrated to New England and those who traveled to other Atlantic colonies, noting that the former were more prosperous, better skilled, and were spread across a wide age spectrum. The New England settlers’ most important trait was their tendency to travel in family groups along with “other local families, bound together by kinship and acquaintance over many years” (Moore, 21). By stressing the importance of family migration, Moore gives the impression that gender ratios among New England-bound migrants were balanced, and she does not offer any evidence to dispel that assumption.
In Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (1994), James Horn defines economic upheaval in 17th-century England as the result of three interconnected trends: demographic growth, the development of national markets, and the creation of new types of economic ventures, including cottage industries and joint stock companies. In this telling, overseas migration was merely an extension of England’s internal migration patterns as populations responded to new social and economic realities. While some wealthy individuals hoped to increase their fortunes by moving to America, most English inhabitants of the Chesapeake arrived as servants, for whom “poverty appears again and again as a determinant” (Horn, 62).
Alison Games makes a similar argument in Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (1999), contending that, “migration within England was a part of the life cycle for most young men and women” during the period of demographic growth and economic strain (1580-1640) (Games, 16). Although she mentions women’s mobility briefly, most of her subsequent discussion focuses on migrants who “tended to be young and male, menacing in their poverty and freedom from masters” (Games, 17). The great strength of Games’ work is in her meticulous collection of data, which allows her to give precise statistics for migrants by age, sex, and destination. Using records from overseas voyages originating in London in 1635, Games can compare groups of migrants who traveled to Virginia with those who traveled to Barbados, New England, and continental Europe. In all cases, male migrants far outnumbered their female counterparts (Barbados, 94:6; New England, 60.9:39.1; continental Europe, 73:27) (Games, 24, 47). Although Games discusses gender imbalance as a defining characteristic of transatlantic migration, she does not explain why men and women seem to have responded differently to the potent forces of population increase and unemployment.
I have never seen a better example of this than the Sampson Waters stone (1693) at Copp's Hill. Of the 16 words on this stone, six include shared uprights. The Sampson Waters stone is a fairly small stone with very wide borders and a reduced space for the inscription. I don't know for sure, but this suggests that sharing vertical lines was mostly a matter of conserving space.
Several other stones at Copp's Hill use the shared upright trick. As far as I can tell, they are not all carved by the same person, but most seem to have been carved before 1720 or so.
Even so, I found a few interesting things. My favorite discovery was a little slate stone under a big tree in the front, right-hand section of the graveyard. The pictures aren't great because it was shady, but you can click on the picture to blow it up to a readable size. This stone is dedicated to two little boys, Theodore James (1813) and Francis Edward (1815), both of whom died around the age of two. The stone has an unremarkable urn-and-willow design and does not stand out in a graveyard so full of remarkable and beautiful stones.
Much of the identifying information (names, dates) has been cut away, but if you rotate the previous photo, some details emerge.
The older stone, which must have been much larger than the newer, seems to have memorialized four young children. One partial line of the epitaph reads, "Four infant roses budding . . ." It is also possible to make out two ages: 10 and 12 months.
I have written about breast/fig/gourd motifs before, but the Marblehead examples are not the most literal depictions of vessels of the "divine milk."
The Jane Dickson stone (1689) features two styles of breasts/figs/gourds, both under finial faces. These are particularly interesting because, instead of the ministerial cravats of the John Wattson stone, these heads wear collars of leaves, evocative of contemporary representations of Native Americans. The pendulous ovals hanging down from the collars look very like breasts, as do the circles below them. The bumpy shapes near the bottom look more like gourds to me.
The most elaborate example of this trend is the James Russell Lowell/Maria White/Frances Dunlap stone (1891), which copies images from several different colonial-era stones. 
The faces on the finials resemble faces that appear on several Cambridge stones, including the Elizabeth Hastings stone (1702). The jowls, almond-shaped eyes, flowing hair, and thin nose all match. The death's head on the lunette is simplified, but is similar to the lunette design on the Jonathan Wyeth stone (1743). 
While the flowers on the Wyeth stone are
The crossed bones and hourglass are also common, and are often combined in Cambridge stones, such as the Susanna Staesy stone (1702).
One of these is the Henry Howard Brown/Hannah Bangs Thayer stone (1941). The double mermaid appears on at least three stones in the Copp's Hill Burying Ground — the Michael Martyn stone (1682), the William Greenough stone (1693), and the John Briggs stone (c. 1690) — though none of these has the winged hourglass above the urn. There are also two double mermaid stones — Jacob Eliott (1693) and Benjamin Hill (1683) — at the Granary Burying Ground in Boston. The bulls-eye design on the urn is very similar to the concentric circles on the William Greenough stone. Ludwig attributes the 17th-century stones to the unnamed carver, "J.N." (Ludwig, 299). He calls the creatures Dagons and Nereids, but is unable to explain how they ended up on Puritan gravestones. I don't have any better guesses than he did.
The other elaborate gravestone is the Thomas Earle White stone (1916), which features a winged hourglass. The winged hourglass isn't a very common design for a full lunette - it's usually a smaller design element, but there are some examples of larger hourglasses. The William Field stone (1772) in Providence has a full winged hourglass, but it is more primitive than the White stone. I'll have to keep my eyes open for a similar stone in Boston.
In honor of Memorial Day, I am posting a few pictures of Mount Auburn Cemetery's Civil War memorial. Designed by Martin Milmore, the "American Sphinx" was dedicated in 1872, making it one of the earlier Civil War monuments.
The English version of this inscription, which appears on the other side of the monument's base, reads:
The most recent Confederate monuments reflect the enduring resonance of both the Pickett’s Charge mythology and the reconciliation narrative. Two, the General Longstreet equestrian statue (1998, image at right via justmecpb) and the 11th Mississippi monument (2000), are located on Seminary Ridge among the Confederate state monuments. Two others, the Maryland state monument (1994) and the “Friend to Friend” memorial (1993) are removed from the most active parts of the battlefield; the former stands in a small plaza near the old visitor’s center parking lot, the latter is the centerpiece of the WWII annex of the Gettysburg National Cemetery.
Other monuments that contribute to this reconciliationist landscape are the Elizabeth Thorn Memorial (2002, image at left via), which honors the women of Gettysburg, and the Amos Humiston monument (1993), dedicated to a Union soldier whose mangled body was identified when a burial detail found a picture of his children in his hand and published it in newspapers across the North.*** By shifting their attention from military valor to the trauma that soldiers and civilians shared, the growing 21st-century monumental landscape characterizes the battle as a national calamity similar to September 11th or a massive natural disaster, in which Americans banded together to overcome a tragedy that they seemingly had no hand in causing. In the coming years, we might expect to see new monuments erected at ostensibly neutral sites, such as the locations of field hospitals, in and around Gettysburg.
