Walter Standish, Killed at Gettysburg

I usually walk right by the 19th-century monuments in old graveyards, but this one caught my eye.

Corporal Walter Standish of the 14th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, age 23, was killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. He died on the third day, probably near the Bliss Barn.

The 14th Connecticut monument at Gettysburg stands on Hancock Avenue between the Angle and the Brian Barn.

The Suffering of Amos Humiston

The New York Times is running a five-part feature on Sgt. Amos Humiston, a New York soldier who was killed at Gettysburg. Humiston's remains were identified after several newspapers circulated details about an ambrotype of his three young children that was found among his possessions.

Errol Morris is investigating the Humiston case with an eye to both history and memory:

There were two separate searches more than a century apart, an initial search to identify the fallen soldier, and then a subsequent search to discover something about the man. There is also a series of implicit questions. The first question is: What is his name? The second question: Who is he? Tell me something about Amos Humiston. And then, there is a third question: “Who is he to us? What does he mean to us?” 

I'm especially interested in that third question. I wonder if Morris will recognize the Humiston monument as part of a reconciliationist narrative in the monumental landscape at Gettysburg.

Little-Known Facts

Most people don't know that General Philippe Régis de Trobriand was a yeti. These people have not yet played Yetisburg.

In other news, Titanic Games has produced one of the only modern Gettysburg-related products that is not under the thumb of the Shaara-Turner complex. The six Confederate generals included are standard fare (Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Hill, Ewell, Stuart), but the Union generals are not the standard Killer Angels characters: Meade, Hancock, Reynolds, Meredith (of the Iron Brigade), Wadsworth (commanded 1st Division, 1st Corps, comprising Cutler's Brigade and the Iron Brigade), and Col. de Trobriand (brigade commander in 1st Division, Third Corps). Nary a Chamberlain nor Buford in sight.

Either the game designers are in love with the First Corps, they picked the names randomly, or they are weary of the whole Killer Angels bit. Regardless, I was surprised.

I think William Barksdale would have made a good yeti.

Yetisburg

Pete and I play a lot of board/card games in the evenings when I'm not up to my eyeballs in work. When I'm done with my current crop of essays (soon, I hope!), I'm looking forward to purchasing this one:

The sequel features zombies and is called "Dismembering the Alamo."

Confederate Monumental Landscape: Placement

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).

Confederate Monumental Landscape: Literate Sources

The style and form of the Confederate monuments at Gettysburg speak eloquently to their role in advancing the mythology of the Lost Cause. Yet, many historians are uncomfortable with arguments that derive wholly from material evidence, preferring to privilege the words that people say and write over the objects that they design and build. Although words are not necessarily more reliable than other types of evidence, historians have built a profession around the study and interpretation of written records and are more likely to accept an argument based in material culture if it can be buttressed by evidence from other, more familiar, types of documents.

Luckily, in the case of the Confederate monuments at Gettysburg, two types of written records can testify to the meaning of the sculptural imagery: inscriptions and dedicatory addresses. Both types of sources offer explicit evidence that the monuments are meant to contribute to the neo-Confederate history that argues that Confederate soldiers were personally honorable and patriotic, that the Confederate cause was doomed but nonetheless worthy, and that the Civil War was not primarily about slavery.

The most accessible written sources dealing with the Confederate monuments’ meanings are their inscriptions. Unlike the inscriptions on Union regimental monuments, which are generally limited to descriptions of the regiment’s part in the battle and a brief summary of its service record (place of muster, date of discharge, etc.), many Confederate monuments’ inscriptions address the causes and meaning of the war. The South Carolina monument, erected during the centennial of the battle in July of 1963, employs the language of the Lost Cause to assure observers that South Carolinians fought for states’ rights, not slavery:

THAT MEN OF HONOR MIGHT FOREVER KNOW THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF FREEDOM DEDICATED SOUTH CAROLINIANS STOOD AND WERE COUNTED FOR THEIR HERITAGE AND CONVICTIONS. ABIDING FAITH IN THE SACREDNESS OF STATES’ RIGHTS PROVIDED THEIR CREED. HERE MANY EARNED ETERNAL GLORY.

Other Confederate monuments agree that the Southern cause was noble and righteous, untainted by the problematic legacy of slavery. Few are as blunt as Mississippi’s, which declares, “ON THIS GROUND OUR BRAVE SIRES FOUGHT FOR THEIR RIGHTEOUS CAUSE,” but many employ vague references to the “cause” without elaborating on its specific tenets. According to their state monuments, North Carolina’s soldiers “DISPLAYED HEROISM UNSURPASSED, SACRIFICING ALL IN SUPPORT OF THEIR CAUSE,” and Floridians “FOUGHT WITH COURAGE AND DEVOTION FOR THE IDEALS IN WHICH THEY BELIEVED.” The implicit argument is that modern visitors should not probe the underlying logic of Confederate beliefs; all that matters is that brave men can ennoble any cause by suffering for it.

The inscriptions of the Confederate state monuments often attempt to define Confederates and their cause as the quintessence of American courage. Some, like Florida’s, cast Confederate soldiers as model Americans who, “BY THEIR NOBLE EXAMPLE OF BRAVERY AND ENDURANCE, . . . ENABLE US TO MEET WITH CONFIDENCE ANY SACRIFICE WHICH CONFRONTS US AS AMERICANS.”

The Americans who can draw strength from Confederate soldiers’ example are undoubtedly white Americans. When the Arkansas monument declares that, “THE GRATEFUL PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ARKANSAS ERECT THIS MEMORIAL AS AN EXPRESSION OF THEIR PRIDE IN THE [CONFEDERATE] OFFICERS AND MEN,” there can be little doubt that the “grateful people” do not include most black residents of Arkansas. Erected in the summer of 1966, while Civil Rights activists marched across the South and anti-war protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., the Arkansas monument took a definite position on who constituted the true “people of the state of Arkansas”: those who were grateful for the sacrifices of Confederate soldiers.

Other inscriptions impart epic significance to Confederate soldiers’ experiences at Gettysburg. The Georgia state monument’s enigmatic epitaph may seem strange to 21st-century visitors, but would be easily recognized by any classicist:

WE SLEEP HERE IN OBEDIENCE TO LAW;
WHEN DUTY CALLED, WE CAME.
WHEN COUNTRY CALLED, WE DIED.

A similar poem, sometimes known as the Epitaph of Simonides, is carved on the stone that marks the spot where the last of the three hundred Spartans fell at Thermopylae in 480 BCE: “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here we lie obedient to their laws.” The Georgia monument argues that, like the immortal three hundred, the Georgian soldiers fought reluctantly but ferociously for an obscure cause. While the cause no longer matters, the soldiers’ unquestioning performance of their solemn duty places them in the company of history’s most venerable heroes.

This association with ancient and epic deeds was an important theme for both Union and Confederate commemorations because it allowed Americans to “raise their own sense of individual and national identity.” In the years following the battle, veterans of Gettysburg drew analogies to Waterloo, Balaclava, and Thermopylae in their memoirs, declaring, “[Gettysburg] will rank with the most celebrated battles of the world” (Desjardin, 47). The monumental landscape has perpetuated Gettysburg’s legendary status in the national imagination.

In addition to the inscriptions on the Confederate monuments, their dedicatory ceremonies and addresses were devoted to promoting the mythology of the Lost Cause and the narrative of reconciliation. While most of the dedication addresses take the valor of the common soldier as their main theme, common subtexts include the persecution of the South by the North, the futility of attempting to explain the war’s causes, and the renewed strength of a reunited America. When slavery is mentioned at all, it is described as a positive good, and when emancipation is addressed, it is portrayed as a weapon wielded by a sanctimonious North against an innocent South.

Few dedication speeches doubt that both Union and Confederate soldiers fought valiantly at Gettysburg or that the field is an important site for commemorating national unity. “The people of New York, of Pennsylvania, of Virginia and of North Carolina can now regard the field of Gettysburg as a joint and precious heritage,” declared former North Carolina Governor Angus McClean at the dedication of his state’s monument in 1929, “for it was here, that in the fiery furnace of war was fused into a new metal, the amalgam which symbolizes our American character and destiny.” Governor Henry Carter Stuart of Virginia agreed at his state’s dedication, telling the assembled crowd,

Out of the memories of this heroic struggle, out of the fiery ordeal which tested to the uttermost the mettle of the men North and South – aye, even out of the blood that was shed on this and many other fields, has come our life and strength as a nation; our unity in heart and purpose, our supreme devotion to the flag of a reunited country, which today floats above us.

The importance of reconciliation was so strong that some dedicatory addresses went so far as to insist that “the memory of this great battle awakens no feelings of anger within the heart of any one.” When the Virginia memorial was unveiled in 1917, the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee was draped in an enormous American flag.*

One of the reasons that Confederate memorialists accepted Gettysburg as an acceptable site for honoring bravery on both sides is that virtually all of the combatants were white. While several black regiments had been mustered into the Union army before July of 1863, most were stationed in the South, and none saw action at Gettysburg. Because the Union troops at Gettysburg were less racially diverse than they were at later battles, monuments on that field could be interpreted as memorials to an exclusively white conception of American virtue.

Oliver Max Gardner, governor of North Carolina, believed that monuments should be dedicated by and for whites, and made his views plain during the dedication of his state’s monument in 1929:

We rejoice today that the bitterness engendered by that terrible struggle between the North and South has been forgotten, but North Carolina can never forget that in obedience to her command 40,000 of her bravest and best young men marched to their death, and reverence for the quality of soul which sustained the men of both sides who fought in this struggle is a part of the common heritage of our race and is imperishable.

By focusing relentlessly on military valor and the political reunification of the country, Confederate monument-builders removed their structures from any context that acknowledged the causes of the war and the unresolved questions of freedom and equality that continued to plague the nation. After all, if the Civil War were nothing other than a military conflict, its problems were resolved as soon as the fighting stopped. By eschewing any mention of slavery in their speeches, Confederate memorialists erased both the troubling idea that the South might have been in the wrong and the messy reality of African-Americans’ continuing struggle against violent oppression.

Though most orators chose to sidestep the issue of slavery altogether, one took on the topic with gusto. Leigh Robinson, a veteran of the Richmond Howitzers, devoted a considerable portion of his 15,000-word speech at the Virginia memorial’s dedication to an explanation of slavery and exoneration of the South. In Robinson’s view, all of the moral culpability for slavery rested with the New England merchants who transported slaves from Africa:

The noble way for one race to conquer another is by the development of higher modes of existence in that other. So the South conquered the Africans, shipped by Old England and by New England. Southern slavery will hold up the noblest melioration of an inferior race, of which history can take note — the government of a race incapable of self-government, for a greater benefit to the governed than to the governors . . . The white man by his works had said to the black man at his back: "Brought to me by others as you have been, it is my part to afford the discipline, which, of yourselves, you are unable to acquire. The universe abandons you. I will protect and direct." Southern master gave to Southern slave more than slave gave to master; and the slave realized it. Better basis for the uplift of inadequacy can no man lay than is laid in this. This slavery was the school to redeem from the sloth of centuries. A continent of mortal idleness had been exchanged for a continent of vital work. The constraint of discipline was a first step from the degeneration of indiscipline. From "the hell of the unfit" the negro had been lifted and put in the way of fitness. Freedom, which merely means freedom from work, is freedom to rot--not a thing for which to shed blood or tears. It is the way to parity with the beast. The graduation of lower into higher order is not the work of a day.

In this version of history, the war was “the crucifixion of Virginia by New England, with the approbation of Old England, for the sin of slavery.” Robinson draws multiple analogies between the South and a suffering Christ, including his affirmation of reverence for “the cause we served, which pierced with wounds for us is sacred; and crowned with thorns for us is holy.” It is impossible to say how many of Robinson’s audience of 2,000 agreed with his characterization of their “peculiar institution,” but news reports of their “mighty round of applause” and periods of “deep reverence” during the hours-long ceremony suggest that they did not object.*

The dedications of Confederate monuments were national events and boasted impressive guest lists. In 1973, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, president pro-tempore of the senate, delivered the dedicatory address for the Mississippi monument at a ceremony that was also attended by four of Mississippi’s five congressmen, the state’s lieutenant governor, and the United States Army Band.** In 1933, Justice Hugo Black, then a senator from Alabama, delivered the address at the unveiling of his state’s monument at Gettysburg. Many Confederate monuments were dedicated by governors of states, and their unveilings attended by high-ranking federal officials. William Ingraham, the Assistant Secretary of War, took the time to travel to Gettysburg for the dedication of the Virginia memorial on June 8, 1917, the very day that General Pershing and the first American troops arrived in Europe to fight World War I.***

In many ways, the inscriptions and dedication speeches are superfluous in the presence of the sculptures that they describe. A visitor to the Maryland monument does not need to be told that the men atop its plinth are “brothers again” because the imagery is so ingenuous. Still, it is wise to muster all available evidence to expose the subtle manipulation of pro-Confederate ideology, and there can be little doubt about the goals of monument builders who proclaim that “The South did not desert the Union, the Union deserted the South.”**** In the words that they carved on their monuments’ bases and spoke at their unveilings, Confederate memorialists made their veneration of the Lost Cause explicit.

*Source: “Virginia Shaft is Dedicated,” Adams County News, June 9, 1917, A1 (subscription).
**Source: “Sen. Eastland to Dedicate New Mississippi Memorial Here on Friday,” Gettysburg Times, October 18, 1973, A1, A5. The congressmen present were G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery, Jamie L. Whitten, David Bowen, and William “Thad” Cochran. Montgomery is erroneously identified as a senator in the article. As of 2008, Cochran is serving as the senior senator from Mississippi.
***That's ok. Secretary of War Baker probably had it totally under control.
****Leigh Robinson again. Charming man.

Confederate Monumental Landscape: Style

While Union veterans in attendance at the 1913 reunion could retrace their regiments’ steps by visiting the granite and bronze monuments that they themselves had erected, Confederate veterans encountered a very different monumental landscape. Fifty years after the battle, the Confederate position was marked primarily by several dozen bronze plaques and mounted cannon that had been placed by the War Department in the decade leading up to the reunion. These plaques, which are “written in precise, elevated language using military terminology removed from the immediacy of emotion,” note details such as the type of guns in each battery, the total number of rounds expended, and the number of men killed, but they are informational markers, not monuments. The Southerners who visited the battlefield in 1913 understood that bald facts could never tell the history of the battle in the way they wanted to tell it, and in the years following the great reunion, they set out to construct their own monumental landscape.

In contrast with the “chaste” Union monuments, the Confederate monuments at Gettysburg are visceral, heroic, and emotional. Whereas the bronze statues that adorn Union memorials depict impeccably dressed officers and men with calm, composed countenances, the ragged, suffering titans of the Confederacy are alternately grim and enraged. The style and form of these monuments tend to emphasize three main points: the heroism of ordinary soldiers, their profound physical suffering, and the nobility of their cause.

By sculpting Confederate soldiers in heroic proportions and with allusions to classical ideal body types, monument designers elevated them to the status of demigods or, at least classical heroes. By emphasizing the physicality of the Confederates’ naked and injured bodies, sculptors appealed to visitors’ empathy and made the story about soldiers’ suffering rather than slaves’. By portraying Confederate soldiers as blameless, suffering heroes, these monuments implicitly characterize the Confederate cause itself as worthy and sympathetic. Over the course of the 20th century, Confederate memorial sculpture at Gettysburg elaborated on these themes, presenting an emotional case for the Lost Cause to millions of Gettysburg visitors.

That Confederate state memorials would be stylistically different from Union monuments was apparent as soon as the Virginia monument was unveiled in 1917. Although it rivals the New York and Pennsylvania monuments in sheer size, the Virginia monument inverts some of those structures’ most important imagery (image at right via SOUTHERN HEART). Instead of crowning the memorial with an allegorical female figure, the Virginia monument commission chose to place an equestrian statue of Lee at the apex. Around the base of the shaft, where Pennsylvania honors eight eminent political and military leaders, Virginia chose to memorialize six ordinary soldiers and a single officer, all in various states of action and distress. According to the plaque that accompanies the sculpture, these figures are meant to represent the types of men who fought for the South: “a professional man, a mechanic, an artist, a boy, a business man, a farmer, [and] a youth” (image below via A Spiritual Oddity).
These men, whose open shirts reveal glimpses of bare chests and whose battered hats or bare heads enhance their rumpled aura, defend the state flag the center of the tableau with drawn pistols, swinging rifle butts, and determined scowls. The officer who carries the flag looks placid enough, but his horse’s open mouth and terrified, rolling eyes attest to the battle that is no doubt raging around them. All of the figures stand atop the ruins of a demolished caisson, and their pedestal is littered with the debris of war, including a cannon, hats, canteens, and splintered branches. In contrast to the remote and overwhelming authority of the Pennsylvania monument, the Virginia monument brings the images of suffering, striving soldiers down to the visitor’s eye-level; there are even steps leading up to the statues so that observers can come face-to-face with the soldiers. Only Lee remains elevated, inaccessible, and idolized. This iteration highlights the heroism of ordinary soldiers, but the heroic themes are muted by the soldiers’ lifelike appearances and lack of injuries.

Subsequent Confederate memorialists continued to elaborate on the themes that were first expressed in the Virginia monument. In 1929, North Carolina veterans dedicated their own monument, designed by the eminent sculptor Gutzon Borglum. Borglum had recently completed his work on Stone Mountain in Georgia and had taken time out of his work at Mount Rushmore to cast the North Carolina monument. The five colossal soldiers of the North Carolina monument are exaggerated versions of their Virginia counterparts (image above left via justmecpb). While the Virginia soldiers show a few inches of bare chest, one North Carolinian’s garment is torn away completely, revealing the rippling muscles of his chest and upper arm, while his comrades’ rolled-up sleeves lay bare bulging veins and tense forearms. No steps are needed to bring the visitor into close contact with the soldiers’ pained visages because the sculpture’s plinth is less than a foot high.

Similarly, the Alabama monument (1933) features two bedraggled soldiers kneeling on a very low plinth (image at right via justmecpb). The half-naked younger man appears to be wounded, and is handing his cartridge box to a comrade while a female allegorical figure holds the former back and urges on the latter. In both the North Carolina and Alabama monuments, the sculptural soldiers’ obvious suffering and partial nudity suggest their heroic qualities.

The Confederate tragic/heroic style reached its pinnacle in the Louisiana and Mississippi monuments, which were dedicated in 1972 and 1973, respectively. Like the earlier state monuments, these sculptures encourage close physical contact between the viewer and the figure, but they transform the Virginian, North Carolinian, and Alabamian allusions to classical tragedy into full-blown pathos. The Louisiana monument features a handsome, clean-shaven youth who lies dead at the feet of a female allegory who is variously identified as the “Spirit of the Confederacy” and St. Barbara, patron saint of artillery (image below via ChrisOD). The young soldier’s elongated feet protrude from his worn and tattered shoes and he clutches the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag to his body with both hands: one clasped over his heart and the other stretched protectively over his groin.
The sculptural portion of the Mississippi monument also depicts a fallen soldier draped in the battle flag and protected by a second figure, in this case, the man’s snarling, rifle butt–wielding comrade (image below via SchumiCampione). Barefoot and bareheaded as his cap falls away, the second Mississippian defends both his fellow’s body and the colors with his clubbed rifle, the bursting sinews of his arm, and a still-sheathed bowie knife. As in the Louisiana sculpture, the focus is on the soldiers’ physicality: the Mississippian’s gossamer trousers display every ripple of muscle in his massive thighs, the dead Louisianan’s face is at the visitor’s eye-level, and all three subjects’ oversized hands and feet are terribly exposed and vulnerable. While the stylistic emphasis on their physical pain and bravery leave little doubt that these Confederates were heroes, the Mississippi monument’s inscription makes the nobility of their cause explicit, declaring, “ON THIS GROUND OUR BRAVE SIRES FOUGHT FOR THEIR RIGHTEOUS CAUSE.”
Since 1993, four additional statues of Confederate soldiers have been dedicated at Gettysburg: the “Friend to Friend” monument dedicated to both Union and Confederate Freemasons (1993 - image below right via Sixty4Graphics), the Maryland state memorial (1994), an equestrian statue of General James Longstreet (1998), and the 11th Mississippi regimental monument (2000).

All four of these monuments develop the themes of heroism and suffering, but amend earlier monuments’ endorsements of the Confederate cause, not by claiming that that cause was ignoble, but by arguing that it was irrelevant. These recent depictions of Confederates are primarily concerned with reconciliation, a theme that is most explicit in the Masonic and Maryland monuments, both of which feature unarmed soldiers from both armies giving aid and comfort to their enemies. None of the four monuments erected in the past fifteen years depicts an actively armed Confederate, preferring to memorialize flagbearers, wounded men, and generals, whose ceremonial weaponry remains sheathed. Not only are these soldiers not fighting to preserve slavery, they are not fighting at all. By erasing Confederate weapons, recent monuments preclude the possibility that there could have been any real difference between the Union and Confederate causes. In the most extreme act of erasure, the Maryland monument’s inscription proclaims,

MORE THAN 3,000 MARYLANDERS SERVED ON BOTH SIDES OF THE CONFLICT AT THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG . . . THIS MEMORIAL SYMBOLIZES THE AFTERMATH OF THAT BATTLE AND THE WAR. BROTHERS AGAIN. MARYLANDERS ALL. THE STATE OF MARYLAND PROUDLY HONORS ITS SONS WHO FOUGHT AT GETTYSBURG IN DEFENSE OF THE CAUSE THEY HELD SO DEAR.

In this telling, there is no difference between the causes because there is only one cause.

(Maryland Monument image via smokejmt.)

Every year, almost two million visitors, many of them children, experience the emotional appeal of the Confederate monuments at Gettysburg. The statues’ threefold focus on ordinary Confederate soldiers’ heroism, their wretched physical agony, and the worthiness of their cause presents a much more engaging and sympathetic argument than the aloof Victorian sculpture on the Union side. Although it is possible to trace the development of these stylistic elements over time, the permanence of monumental granite and bronze allows contemporary visitors to experience the full range of the pro-Confederate sculptural argument simultaneously. Without uttering a single word, the stylistic elements of these memorials influence visitors’ perceptions, encouraging them to identify with the human tragedy of the Southern soldier rather than the austere power of the Northern regiments whose formulaic monuments invite few emotional attachments.

Confederate Monumental Landscape: The 19th Century

By the time of the 1913 reunion, the Union half of the commemorative landscape at Gettysburg was already established in the form that exists to this day. While veterans and preservation societies erected a handful of memorials honoring Union soldiers during subsequent decades, the overwhelming majority of regimental, state, and individual markers were dedicated before the 50th anniversary of the battle. When the wizened veterans of the Army of the Potomac returned to the site of their youthful valor in 1913, over 1,000 monuments, interpretive tablets, and gravestones defined the geography of hills and fields in the vocabulary of regiments and headquarters.

Unlike the formulaic monuments that dominate town squares, the Union regimental monuments at Gettysburg vary widely in form and content. While many of these markers, such as the monument to the 110th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, resemble the conventional town memorials, most contain no sculptural representations of soldiers. The archetypical Union regimental monument at Gettysburg is an abstract geometric shape or modified obelisk which incorporates the regiment’s corps badge and text describing the regiment’s involvement in the battle and the war in general.*

The monument to the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry is a representative example of this type of memorial (image via). Dedicated in 1886, this monument is a geometric block decorated only with the Maltese cross of the Fifth Corps. Text on one face of the monument lists the names and companies of the men killed during the battle, while the inscription on another attests to the 20th MVI’s involvement more generally:

HERE THE 20TH MAINE REGIMENT COL. J.L. CHAMBERLAIN COMMANDING, FORMING THE EXTREME LEFT OF THE NATIONAL LINE OF BATTLE ON THE 2ND DAY OF JULY 1863, REPULSED THE ATTACK OF THE EXTREME RIGHT OF LONGSTREET’S CORPS AND CHARGED IN TURN, CAPTURING 308 PRISONERS. THE REGIMENT LOST 38 KILLED OR MORTALLY WOUNDED AND 93 WOUNDED OUT OF 358 ENGAGED.
THIS MONUMENT, ERECTED BY SURVIVORS OF THE REGIMENT, A.D. 1886, MARKS VERY NEARLY THE SPOT WHERE THE COLORS STOOD.

Like dozens of other Union regimental monuments, the 20th Maine monument’s form and content would not be out of place in a family burial plot at any garden cemetery in America. While many, like the monument to the 19th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, are slightly more elaborate in form, the majority of Union regimental monuments at Gettysburg are geometric granite blocks with minimal sculptural decoration.

Excluding statues of individual generals, fewer than thirty of the 1,000 Union monuments at Gettysburg incorporate a bronze or granite soldier atop a stone pedestal, and these few sculptural soldiers are markedly more dynamic than their town square counterparts. At Gettysburg, the lone infantryman is rarely relaxing at parade rest. Instead, he is running forward, loading his rifle, or swinging it by the barrel as if it were a club. In the case of the 73rd New York Volunteer Infantry, which was made up of New York firemen, the soldier is joined atop his pedestal by an embodiment of his civilian identity. Still, these soldiers are merely Savage’s young, white models of American manhood in motion, rather than in repose. Only on very rare occasions does death or suffering mar the Union infantryman’s stoic heroism, and in these cases, that death is depicted by life-size figures whose pristine uniforms are hardly wrinkled by their ordeal.

In 1887, the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association attempted to codify stylistic standards for Union monuments. Declaring that they “desire[d] that chaste, artistic structures, be erected, and to prevent the use of cheap materials,” the GBMA rejected the bronze monument proposed by the veterans of the 1st Minnesota, which depicted a Union soldier stabbing the serpent of secession with a bayonet (see These Honored Dead by Thomas Desjardin, 154-5). Instead, the 1st Minnesota erected a conventional memorial depicting a Union soldier running forward with bayonet charged. The GBMA continued to exert its influence through the end of the nineteenth century, ensuring that most Union monuments were aloof, restrained, and “chaste.”

Since most regiments were deployed to more than one location over the course of the battle, veterans had several options when considering where to place their regimental monument. The GBMA attempted to standardize monument placement by requiring that regiments place their monuments in line of battle, but some veterans groups ignored the guidelines. In 1891 over the objections of the GBMA, the 72nd Pennsylvania erected their monument in a place of honor at the Angle, even though other veterans maintained that the regiment had beat a hasty and dishonorable retreat from that position in the face of the enemy (Desjardin, 163). In general, survivors erected monuments either at the site of their most furious fighting or at the point of farthest forward advance, which were often the same place. For example, the 114th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry (Collis’ Zouaves) placed their monument near the Sherfy House on the Emmitsburg Road, more than a mile in front of the main Union line. Even though the regiment fought in many parts of the battle, including the repulse of Pickett’s Charge on July 3rd, the survivors chose to erect their monument near the site of the Sherfy family’s barn, where they had suffered their heaviest casualties, due in part to the barn’s catching fire and consuming wounded men who had taken shelter there.

In addition to the regimental monuments erected by veterans’ groups, two Northern states, New York and Pennsylvania, built larger monuments to commemorate their soldiers’ part in the battle. Both are deliberately constructed to instill awe in the visitor. The New York Monument (1893) towers over the New York section of the Gettysburg National Cemetery. From a height of 93 feet, the female embodiment of the state looks down upon her fallen sons. The Pennsylvania Memorial (1910) is even grander (see image at right via). The 110-foot tall granite cathedral is adorned with eight 12-foot bronze statues, four massive bas reliefs depicting the four branches of the service, bronze plaques listing each of the 34,530 Pennsylvanians who fought in the battle, and crowned with a 21-foot statue of Nike triumphant.

To behold these massive memorials is to stand in awe of the rich and powerful states that built them. Their grandeur reminds visitors that the states that built them are powerful military entities with resources sufficient to spend vast sums of money (over $180,000** in the case of the Pennsylvania monument) on memorializing their soldiers in addition to arming them.

The Union monuments at Gettysburg were just one part of a massive memorialization project that swept the North in the decades after the Civil War. In nearly every town square and village green, veterans and their children erected monuments to commemorate those who fought in the great struggle. In his book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Kirk Savage argues that these monuments performed a vast amount of cultural work, both modernizing the image of the citizen-soldier and reconciling North and South by erasing the causes for which soldiers on both sides fought. Like their town-square counterparts, the Union monuments at Gettysburg “deliberately avoided the question of moral imperative, or rather, elevated the concept of duty to a moral imperative of its own” (Savage, 178). By focusing on the military valor of the white soldiers who fought at Gettysburg, the Union monumental landscape effaced the causes of the war, thereby avoiding uncomfortable questions over what the war had failed to accomplish

*If you do an image search for "Gettysburg monument," you'll see a lot of fancy sculpture, but that's mostly because those monuments are the flashiest. Virtual Gettysburg has photos of all of the regimental monuments on the field and most of them are less exuberant.

**over $4,000,000 in 2007 dollars

Confederate Monumental Landscape: Argument

On a clear June day in 1917, Confederate veteran Leigh Robinson looked out across the fields of Gettysburg and addressed over 2,000 of his fellow veterans, government officials, and interested onlookers. They had gathered together to dedicate a new monument to the Virginians who fought on that field in 1863, the first of many monuments that would commemorate the valor of men from each of the eleven Confederate states. For over two hours, Robinson spoke on a wide range of topics, from the Constitution to the life of Robert E. Lee to the works of Plutarch. At every turn, Robinson defended the Confederate soldiers and their cause against imagined aspersions cast against them:

There is a voice which says: All this heroism was “ghastly error;” heroism for a cause which was intrinsically false — false to the rights of man. They who so speak think all too lightly of a cause hallowed by such sacrifice. In memorials, like the present, is felt the refutation of the charge. There are things too high, too deep, too appealing to the genuine grace of sympathy, for memory to be other than a shrine (source).

For Robinson, as for millions of Americans who visit the Virginia monument every year, the Confederate memorial landscape at Gettysburg affirmed a belief that the Confederate cause was worthy because it was consecrated with the blood of courageous men. Over the course of the twentieth century, Southern states, memorial societies, and Civil War enthusiasts erected over a dozen additional monuments to Confederate valor at Gettysburg, enshrining the mythology of the Lost Cause at America’s most famous and most visited Civil War site.

Unlike the Union monuments at Gettysburg, which often commemorate a single regiment or individual, nearly all of the Confederate monuments are dedicated to the men of an entire state. Only four individual Confederate regiments have their own monuments at Gettysburg, and only one of those was erected prior to 1985.* Each of the eleven ex-Confederate states erected a monument at Gettysburg between 1917 and 1982, and several border states, including Kentucky and Maryland, dedicated their monuments to both Union and Confederate soldiers. These thirteen monuments, along with the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument and a handful of other, smaller markers, form a monumental landscape that is distinct from its Union counterpart in style, intention, and physical placement.

Whereas the Union monumental landscape was a project of the nineteenth century directed mostly by veterans, the Confederate landscape is a twentieth-century creation. By the time the Virginia monument was erected in 1917, few Confederate veterans were alive to attend its dedication, and fewer still survived until the second state monument was dedicated by North Carolina in 1929. While Union monuments on the field marked the position of Northern regiments, the monuments erected by the grandsons and granddaughters of the Confederacy were more concerned with shaping the memory and controlling the meaning of their ancestors’ actions. In their style and form, the Confederate monuments tell a tale of heroic valor, desperate suffering, and unsurpassed glory. In inscriptions and dedication speeches, the builders of these monuments made their intention to support a pro-Confederate history of the battle and of the war explicit. In their placement at Gettysburg, the monuments stand as “sentinels of stone,” protecting and promulgating the mythology of the Lost Cause.

“[T]he Lost Cause was expressly a rationalization, a cover-up,” writes historian Alan T. Nolan in his essay, “The Anatomy of the Myth.” In the years following the Civil War, Confederate veterans and their sympathizers attempted to justify the Confederacy’s actions by rewriting the history of the war. This revision involved several key tenets, including idealizing Southern soldiers as “heroic, indefatigable, gallant, and law-abiding,” vilifying the North as meddlesome, heartless, and immoral, and trivializing the role of slavery as a cause for sectional conflict. By the early twentieth century, the mythology of the Lost Cause had come to dominate the nation’s memory of the Civil War. In movies, children’s stories, and academic histories, Confederates were portrayed as chivalric defenders of a noble, but doomed, way of life.

Equally important is the narrative of reconciliation, which holds that the resolution of the military conflict put to rest all of the concerns that had originally sparked the war and that reunification reaffirmed the bonds that tied white, Christian, native-born Americans to one another and to their nation.

The Confederate monuments at Gettysburg support the claims of the Lost Cause mythology by presenting heroic, slave-free images of Confederate soldiers to the battlefield’s millions of visitors. Although most professional historians now recognize the Lost Cause as an egregious distortion of nineteenth-century history, the story presented by the Confederate monumental landscape continues to influence the public’s memory of the Civil War.

*The 2nd Maryland Volunteer Infantry (C.S.A.) erected a small granite monument on Culp’s Hill in 1886. Monuments honoring the 26th and 43rd North Carolina Infantry regiments were dedicated in 1985 and a monument to the 11th Mississippi went up in 2000. For more info on monuments, check out Virtual Gettysburg, which has a wonderful, free, searchable database (with pictures!).

Confederate Monumental Landscape

I recently finished a research paper on the Confederate monumental landscape at Gettysburg. I enjoyed writing it and my professor was encouraging, so I may try to turn it into something publishable.

My central argument was that the Confederate monuments at Gettysburg are specifically designed to preserve the mythology of the Lost Cause by presenting it to 20th and 21st century. I built this argument by examining three aspects of the Confederate monumental landscape: placement (where monuments are located), style/form (what monuments look like), and literate sources (inscriptions and dedication addresses).

In addition to the three major sections, I included an introductory section about the Union monumental landscape at Gettysburg so that I could compare the two at various points. One important difference between the Union and Confederate monuments at Gettysburg is that the vast majority of the former were erected by veterans during the 1880s and 1890s, while almost all of the later were built by veterans' descendants during the 20th century. While Union monuments generally commemorate the actions of Northern soldiers at the battle of Gettysburg, Confederate monuments attempt to offer commentary on the causes and meaning of the war.

I will post some modified sections of this paper here over the next few days. If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments. This project is in its infancy, and I know there are a lot of knowledgeable people out there, so any tips, counterarguments, or suggestions would be most welcome.

(Louisiana monument photo via)

UPDATE:
Here are the other posts:
Part I: Argument
Part II: Union Monuments
Part III: Style
Part IV: Literate Sources
Part V: Placement

The Humiston Children

I am generally a pretty cynical person, but there are some stories that are just so pathetic that you can't help but get drawn into the calculated, Victorian sob-fest.

Witness: The (adorable) Humiston Children.

On July 1, 1863, Sgt. Amos Humiston of the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry was killed as his regiment retreated through the streets of Gettysburg. By the time a burial detail recovered his remains after the battle, he was unrecognizable and had no identifying papers or markings. According to newspaper accounts, which are probably embellished for maximum tear-jerking, the only clue about his identity was a picture of three children that he clutched in his hand as he died.

Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper gives us this image of the scene. The vultures are an especially nice touch:
In an effort to identify the soldier, somebody had the bright idea that they should publish the photograph in newspapers because, hey, somebody's going to recognize those kids, right? And what an awesome way to let somebody know that her husband is dead.

On October 19, 1863, the Philadelphia Inquirer published (a description of) the photograph under the headline, “Whose Father Was He?” The story was reprinted in many newspapers, and Humiston’s wife, Philinda, eventually recognized her children: 4-year old Freddie, 6-year-old Alice, and 8-year-old Franklin.* 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. The Humiston photograph was reproduced on cards for sale at Sanitary Commission fairs and adorned the covers of sheet music.

Today, there is a monument to Humiston and his family near the spot where his body was found. I used this story in my monument paper as part of a discussion of how recent monuments at Gettysburg are trying to transform the battlefield to divert visitor's attention to the human tragedy rather than the fighting or the causes of the war. In the last 15 years, we have seen new monuments such as the "Friend-to-Friend" Masonic memorial and the Maryland state monument, both of which depict suffering, unarmed men helping their supposed enemies, as well as monuments such as the Humiston and Elizabeth Thorn memorials. All of these shift the conversation to mutual suffering, almost as if the battle were a natural disaster or some other sort of inevitable tragedy that Americans endured through no fault of their own. I'm not saying that we shouldn't honor Elizabeth Thorn or tell the story of Amos Humiston, but the trajectory of the memorial landscape does not get to the heart of the issues of freedom and equality that brought people to Gettysburg in the first place.

If you're interested in a straightforward account of the Humiston story without all the handwringing about memory and erasure, check out Mark Dunkelman's Gettysburg's Unknown Soldier: The Life, Death, and Celebrity of Amos Humiston (1999).

*Update (3/31/09): It seems that my initial discription was a little bit off — the original newspaper accounts apparently carried descriptions of the photo, but not reproductions of it. Philinda Humiston recognized a description of the photo and sent away for a copy to make certain that the dead man was her husband.

Confederate Commemoration and the Lost Cause

Yesterday, Professor O'Donovan spoke on the subject of memorialization in the decades after the Civil War with particular attention to public monuments in public places. Anyone who has driven through a little town in Northeast will recognize the archetypical Civil War monument: a young, white, lone infantryman with an immaculate uniform and a rifle (and sometimes a flag) stands sentinel at the top of an obelisk. These monuments commemorate a particular version of the war — one in which vigorous Anglo-Americans fought for high ideals but, according to the monuments, did not suffer, die, have legs amputated. There are no slaves, no African-American soldiers, no hint of the reasons behind the war. Instead, the town square monuments celebrate an ideal American who defended an abstract concept of America at a time when immigrants, ex-slaves, and union workers were threatening middle-class visions of national unity.

After class, I started wondering what messages monuments send in places that have both Union and Confederate monuments, such as the Gettysburg National Battlefield. At Gettysburg, most of the monuments commemorating Union regiments were erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and many of those with sculptural soldiers follow the same patterns as town square monuments. A few of the Union monuments are more dynamic, interesting, or impressive, but they are generally pretty staid.

In contrast, the Confederate monuments are arresting, tragic, and glorious. This is partially a function of the periodization of these monuments: most Union monuments went up in the 1880s and 1890s and reflect the sculptural conventions of that time. Although the Virginia monument was erected in 1917 and the North Carolina monument was dedicated in 1929, most of the Confederate monuments have been erected since the 1960s. It's not just their modernity that makes these monuments more compelling. Let's take a look at some examples:

Louisiana (via):

Mississippi (via):


North Carolina (via):

Alabama (via):

The difference is incredible. The Confederates are struggling, striving, and even dying. In contrast to the remoteness of the Union monuments, the Confederate monuments evoke a visceral reaction. Who can behold the Mississippi monument without feeling sympathy for the barefoot, desperate, suffering men who are clearly fighting for their lives? Even though Gutzon Borglum designed the North Carolina monument in the 1920s, to modern eyes, it recalls the flag raising at Iwo Jima. These Confederates are eminently sympathetic. They are not traitors or slaveholders. They are noble, suffering men, and the contrast between them and their Union counterparts could not be more stark.

One interesting case is the Maryland memorial, which is supposed to commemorate both Union and Confederate soldiers. The two men on the Maryland monument are brothers - they aren't even armed! There is no better example of the racist narrative of Civil War commemoration than this: in this representation, there is no hint that the war might have been about slavery - it is merely a story of mutually brotherly struggle and reconciliation.
Maybe I'll get into the disgusting rhetoric of the dedication speeches another day.

Just one more thing: many Union monuments are located at the point of that regiment's farthest advance (i.e. Peach Orchard, Wheat Field). The Confederate monuments are arrayed along the battle line they occupied immediately prior to Pickett's Charge. At Gettysburg, the monumental landscape is permanently frozen just before the disastrous assault that spelled doom for Lee's hopes of invading the North. Discuss.