Samuel Sewall's "Connecticut Stone Post"

I'm reading more of Samuel Sewall's diary today and came across this intriguing entry:

This day, [September] 16 [1721] I set up my Connecticut stone post in Elm pasture, in Remembrance of my loving Wife Mrs. Hannah Sewall.

I don't know what a "Connecticut stone post" is, but since it seems to be a material object dedicated to the memory of the dead, I am interested in finding out.

1775 or 1794?

In my recent post about the Daniel Malcom gravestone, I argued that I could conclusively date the stone to the autumn of 1769 based on a description that appeared in the Essex Gazette in November of that year. The implication was that other stones bearing pro-Whig sentiments may also have been erected shortly after the honorees' deaths. If so, stones dedicated to people who died in 1775 would have stood as public monuments throughout the war years.

I have since discovered a gravestone that might challenge this dating: the Charles Pratt Marston stone in Burlington.

Salem Witch Trial Memorial

I meant to post this on Tuesday, but it slipped my mind. I take comfort in the fact that the Gregorian shift makes any "anniversary" celebrations for events occurring before 1752 imprecise anyway.

On September 22, 1692, eight people (seven women and one man) were hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. These eight were the last of the accused to be executed in the crisis.

A few weeks ago, Pete and I found ourselves in Salem and decided to visit the burying ground. Despite having been born in Beverly and having visited Salem dozens of times over the past 25 years, I have never visited the Salem burying ground before. It feels indecent somehow.

"Died in the Army of ye United States"

I spend a substantial amount of time reading about the American Revolution, but until I visited the Bridge Street Cemetery in Northampton, I had never heard of Major Brigadier General Seth Pomeroy. The more I learn about him, the more surprised I am that he is not one of those remembered among the second tier of founding fathers.


Pomeroy's story has all the makings of a good folk hero tale — he was a frontier gunsmith who took part in the Louisbourg expedition, fought at Lake George during the Seven Years' War, and, at age 69, rode 100 miles in a night to help defend Bunker Hill. He kept journals — there's even a poem about him. Seth Pomeroy would be a good character for historical fiction — he was everywhere and he seems to have been a bit eccentric.

The sources indicate that Pomeroy is not actually buried in Northampton. He fell ill and died in Peekskill and was buried in an unmarked grave. I haven't been able to find any mention of his body being relocated, so I suppose the monument in Northampton is a cenotaph.

The stone, carved by Nathaniel Phelps, would be interesting even if the deceased were unknown. What caught my eye was the use of the term "united States." I wonder when the stone was actually carved — if it was erected before 1780 or so, it may be one of the first times those words were carved on a public monument.

The imagery is interesting, too. The "CSP" stands for "Colonel Seth Pomeroy," but I have no idea what the "BG" on the little flags might mean. Guesses?

Something to Brag About?

I happened across this fine monument while looking for the old cemetery in Hadley, MA. It stands in the front yard of a cute little house on a lovely little street.

I suppose if someone famous had been born in my house, I wouldn't mind a sign commemorating the event. But a 2-ton quartz boulder for Joseph Hooker? I didn't think anyone liked him that much.

Someone spent good money on this.

Hadley, MA

near corner of West St. and Cemetery Rd.

Strange Monuments of New England

As I approach the home stretch in my 101 Ways to Say Died project, I'm on the lookout for another long-term blog series.

As I've traveled around, I've come across some fairly strange monuments that aren't gravestones, and have found them intriguing. Therefore, I am considering a new project on Strange Monuments of New England. I can't promise 101 parts, but we'll see how it goes.

I don't want to turn this into a Weird New England knockoff — I'm not looking for vampires, ghosts, and other forced zaniness. Rather, I'm interested in monuments and historical markers that tell me something about how New Englanders have constructed a New England identity through memorialization of historical events. I guess I'm not really looking for "strange" so much as "head-scratcher."

First up: Pilgrim Monument
Location: Provincetown, MA
Erected: 1907
Strangeness: When I think of Pilgrims, I definitely think of gargoyles.

According to the Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum website, the tower is modeled after the Torre del Mangia in Siena, Italy. Whoever wrote the website seems to think that this requires no further comment, but I think it's bizarre. English separatists were not great lovers of anything Italian. The selection committee may have had a soft spot for Victorian Gothic Revival, but it has nothing to do with the Pilgrims. This is an excellent example of thoughtless architecture.

While I contemplated this strange monument, Pete managed to catch a great photo of my "skeptical face."

"A Bud From Plymouth's Mayflower"

The Little Compton graveyard is the final resting place of many important New Englanders, including Elizabeth Alden Pabodie, daughter of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins.

When she died in 1717, Elizabeth's family erected an ordinary headstone similar to her husband's. Over a century and a half later, after her great-great-great-great-grandson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, made her parents famous in "The Courtship of Miles Standish," Elizabeth got an impressive obelisk. In 1717, she was merely "the wife of William Pabodie." In 1882, she was "the first white woman born in New England."

I'm becoming more interested in the ways in which gravestones were pressed into service in the creation of a distinctive New England identity in the 18th and 19th centuries — this is a great example of how commemoration changed over a century and a half.

Whoever erected the monument also composed a poem:

A bud from Plymouth's Mayflower sprung,

Transplanted here to live and bloom,

Her memory, ever sweet and young,

The Centuries Guard within this tomb.

Should President Obama Honor Confederate Soldiers?

Apparently, several historians have written a letter to President Obama asking him to discontinue the nearly century-old tradition of placing a wreath at the Confederate Memorial at Arlington on Memorial Day. Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin argues that the letter strikes the wrong tone and should be ignored.

I would be perfectly happy to see Obama's staff "forget" to order the wreath for this particular bit of Lost Cause nostalgia, but that's not really his style. It seems much more likely that President Obama could be persuaded to add an extra stop on that Memorial Day wreath-laying tour — I suggest a trip to the African American Civil War Memorial before the Arlington excursion.

Anyone can start a tradition. If Obama lays a wreath for secessionists, which I assume he will, let him also lay one for the freemen who fought for Union and liberty. Hopefully, his successors will continue to do so for the next century.

more photos via

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.

National Monument to the Forefathers

Cross-posted from American Creation. Reprinted here lest I be accused of being soft on New England's cherished mythologies.

I wanted to follow up on Lindsey's interesting post regarding the place of Plymouth in American memory.

In the video she posted, the commentators are sitting in front of the impressive monument known as the National Monument to the Forefathers (photo via Wikipedia). This memorial, which historian James O'Gorman called, "one of the more lugubrious deposits of mid-nineteenth-century American ideals," was erected by the Pilgrim Society in the 1880s (planning began in the 1850s, but things got off track during the Civil War). The monument features a 36-foot tall granite colossus titled, Faith, surrounded by smaller (15-foot) allegorical statues depicting Liberty, Education, Law, and Morality, as well as several relief panels.

This statue is important because it reminds us that much of what we "know" about the Plymouth colonists and their role in founding the country comes from 19th-century efforts to recapture a usable past, not from rigorous historical investigations into the early 17th century. In the mid 19th century, New Englanders were busy fighting a sectional conflict for supremacy over the meaning of America, and one of the best weapons they had in their arsenal was the argument that the Pilgrims founded America on Christian principles. By ignoring those sordid mercenaries in Jamestown and exalting the Pilgrims as beacons of both religious piety and democracy, they strengthened their claim to the legacy of the forefathers, at the same time denying the legitimacy of Southern claims that the spirit of '76 lived on in the South.

This statue is a concrete (granite, actually ;)) expression of 19th-century interpretations of 17th-century history. Imagine what a monumental history of New England would have looked like if authored by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This is it.

The Victorian interpretation of 17th-century American history is still very much with us (it's even on the citizenship exam). I'll bet the average American "knows" 10x more about Plymouth than about any other 17th-century colony and thinks that the Pilgrims profoundly influenced our nation's democratic and religious institutions when they did nothing of the sort. The Mayflower Compact was not a principled clarion call to democracy. The Pilgrims were not big fans of religious toleration (as the intro video at Plimoth Plantation helpfully points out) and held no appreciable influence over any of their contemporaries, they didn't even influence Massachusetts' Congregational practices. Christianity was a major factor in English colonization, but not in the way 19th-c New Englanders thought.

For more on this monument, I recommend O'Gorman's "The Colossus of Plymouth," in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (1995) and James Deetz' The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (2000).

Israel Putnam

Another interesting thing about the cemetery in Brooklyn is that it was the original resting place of General Israel Putnam. Although he is not well remembered today, Putnam was quite famous in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He never quite reached Daniel Boone or Johnny Appleseed status, but Putnam was a similar kind of folk hero: a bull-riding, wolf-slaying, escaped Indian captive who fought like a wildcat at Bunker Hill.

The smirk-inducingly named Indian History for Young Folks (1885) summarizes Putnam's career in glowing terms:

Few men ever encountered such a variety of dangers, or faced death in so many different forms. From the fierce she-wolf in her den — a story with which all boys are familiar; the burning powder-magazine at Fort Edward; the fiery torture at the stake; the tomahawk and the bullet of the concealed savage whose forest haunts he invaded; close and bloody contests with Indians and Frenchmen in the Old French War; at the Havana, fighting at the same time the Spaniard and the pestilence, which proved fatal to so many of his companions; and lastly at Bunker Hill and on other Revolutionary fields — a conspicuous target for British bullets. With the exception of the singeing he got at Fort Edward, and the cruelties inflicted on him while a prisoner, he escaped, as by a miracle, from all these manifold perils without a wound.

Putnam died in Brooklyn, CT in 1790. In the years after his death, so many people visited the little cemetery in Brooklyn to touch his gravestone that they wore the corners off of the tablet. In 1888, an elaborate equestrian statue of Putnam (designed by Karl Gerhardt) was erected about half a mile down the road and Putnam's body was re-interred underneath it. The damaged stone was moved to the Connecticut State Capitol. A replica now stands at the site of the original grave, and the equestrian bears the original epitaph.

I guess I'm so used to the Putnam statue, which is a stone's throw from my aunt's house, that I never realized how strange it is that such an impressive statue stands in such an undistinguished location. The statue is in front of the diminutive Brooklyn Historical Society on the side of a quiet road in a sleepy little town. The only reason anyone ever sees Brooklyn, CT is that Rte. 6 runs through the center of town, but "town" is a generous description. I say this with love — I got my marriage license at the (adorable) Brooklyn Town Hall. If you're ever in the area, stop by to visit General Putnam — it's pretty amazing to see such a gigantic, impressive statue in such a bucolic setting.

To the memory
Of
Israel Putnam, Esquire,
Senior Major General in the Armies
Of
The United States of America
Who
Was born at Salem
In the Province of Massachusetts
On the seventh day of January
A.D. 1718:
And died
On the twenty ninth day of May
A.D. 1790:
Passenger
If thou art a Soldier
Drop a Tear over the dust of a Hero
Who
Ever attentive
To the lives and happiness of his Men
Dared to lead
Where any Dared to follow;

If a Patriot
Remember the distinguished and gallant services
Rendered thy Country
By the Patriot who sleeps beneath this Monument;
If thou art Honest, generous & worthy
Render a cheerful tribute of respect
To a Man
Whose generosity was singular
Whose honesty was proverbial
Who
Raised himself to universal esteem
And offices of Eminent distinction
By personal worth
And a
Useful life

This Republic of Suffering

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.

Many others have reviewed this book in recent months, and I won't rehash what they have said. I'll just say that I enjoyed this book well enough, though it wasn't life changing. I'm glad to see that a good book about 19th-century cultural history is so popular, even if that probably has more to do with Faust's position than her research skills and lucid writing.

I was also glad that the argument was Am-Civ friendly, by which I mean Faust used a lot of popular culture sources, particularly songs, rather than relying entirely on letters, speeches, and other staples of straight-up history. Professional historians are becoming more and more friendly to a wide range of sources all the time (though many of my fellow students over in the history dept are still skeptical of material culture). Sensible people in local historical societies, museums, and high schools have long understood that popular sources (songs, cartoons, advertisements) are both enlightening and engaging, but there's still a subtle prejudice against historians who devote themselves to studying women's magazines or photography as somehow being "soft." Hopefully, that attitude's on its way out, but there are still a lot of people who confuse "smart" with "abstruse."

I am happy to report that Drew Gilpin Faust is not one of those people. Her book will appeal to professional historians and interested amateurs alike. I wish she had gone a little more into memorialization, but her work is excellent background for anyone interested in Civil War memory.

Mount Auburn Civil War Memorial

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.

This monument is also noteworthy because it is one of the few that explicitly acknowledges slavery as an important factor in the war. In wealthy, abolitionist Cambridge, it was perfectly acceptable to count emancipation among the war's positive outcomes.
The English version of this inscription, which appears on the other side of the monument's base, reads:

AMERICAN UNION PRESERVED
AFRICAN SLAVERY DESTROYED
BY THE UPRISING OF A GREAT PEOPLE
BY THE BLOOD OF FALLEN HEROES

On this Memorial Day, let us not forget the men, black and white alike, who fought for line #2.

Obligatory disclaimer: Of course, I am not claiming that all Union soldiers were abolitionists. For many Northerners, line #1 was plenty of motivation. But for a large number, including the nearly 200,000 African-American soldiers, line #2 was pretty important.

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