Pandemic Walks: Assessing Boston Civil War Narratives, Part II
by Kathleen Stone
June 23, 2021
Soldiers and Sailors Monument | Photo by the author
About a month after our walk in the Forest Hills Cemetery, my husband and I went to Boston Common. We've walked through the Common hundreds of times and used to sled down Flagstaff Hill with our son. This day though, we had time to walk up the hill and inspect the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, walking around it and admiring the bronze panels. When I noticed Martin Milmore's name, I realized that I was once again in thrall to his artwork.
The Soldiers and Sailors Monument is far more elaborate than Milmore's lone soldier in the Forest Hills Cemetery. Around the base are four mezzo-relievo panels that show Bostonians preparing for war. Above them on elevated platforms stand a mash-up of figures – two allegorical (Peace and the Muse of History) and two realistic (a soldier and a sailor). Towering 75 feet above them is a column topped by a female figure (America) full of iconography: a crown with thirteen stars, a flag, a sword, plus a laurel wreath. The monument spins a grand story, but to find out what 19th century Bostonians really intended it to say, I headed to the city archives.
Boston's archives are housed in a sleek modern building on the edge of Jamaica Plain. Inside is a spacious room where the archivist had pulled files for me. Notes and letters in elaborate and sometimes hard to decipher handwriting revealed that the monument came with a three part narrative.
The first part of the story began in 1866 when city officials voted to honor the "fallen heroes who aided in putting down the Southern Rebellion, and in sustaining the Constitution of our Country and the Union of the States." Already this was more ambitious than the Forest Hills monument. Both monuments were commissioned to honor the dead, but this one would also have something to say about the Constitution and the Union.
Soldiers and Sailors Monument | Photo by the author
After a national design competition, the city chose a local artist, Hammett Billings, already known as the illustrator of Uncle Tom's Cabin, to execute the monument. Some time later, Billings and the city parted company when it became clear that his design would cost more than $100,000, the price originally agreed to. After a second competition, the city hired Milmore for $75,000.
In 1871, the cornerstone was laid, an event during which elected officials and military men marched through the Back Bay and the South End on their way to the Common. In the words of an official proclamation, the war had confirmed the integrity of the Republic and secured universal liberty throughout the land. Soon after that ceremony, Milmore left for Rome where he lived near other ex-pat artists, including his mentor, Thomas Ball.
Writing from Rome, Milmore proposed a design change. Instead of granite and white marble for the panels and some of the sculptures, he suggested bronze. Reassured by his offer to absorb any additional cost, the city agreed. By the spring of 1877, Milmore was back in Boston, promising the aldermen that the statues would arrive soon. When the various components were finally assembled, one could see a contrast between the allegorical statues, with their Baroque influence, and the more realistic elements. To Bostonians in 1877, many of the faces on the mezzo-relievo panels – Governor John Andrews, Senator Charles Sumner, Vice President Henry Wilson, and others – were well known. Even today, the figures project a strong sense of immediacy.
When the monument was dedicated on September 17, 1877, the narrative became more complicated. Not only was the monument about the deceased, the Constitution, the Union and, somewhat equivocally, about equality, but it spoke to Boston's role in American history. The dedication ceremony marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, where many Bostonians had died, and it also came 247 years after the Puritans founded their city on a hill.
Soldiers and Sailors Monument | Photo by the author
A parade, six miles long, snaked through the city; telegraph lines, installed for the occasion, kept citizens informed of its progress. Military men from all over the state marched, along with an array of associations: Knights Templar, Odd Fellows, Ancient Order of Hibernians, Masons, Order of Knights of Pythias, Portuguese Benevolent Society, Polish Kosciusko Society, and the Massachusetts Catholic Total Abstinence Union, among others.
On the Common, 3,200 spectators sat on a raised platform — and thousands more stood — to listen to speeches. Speakers talked about the Civil War, but they wrapped it into a larger historical narrative that gave Boston a starring role, going back to the city's founding 247 years earlier and continuing to the Revolutionary War. Just recently, Boston had increased its geographic size by filling in swamps and annexing nearby areas, and boosted its sense of civic pride by founding institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Children's Hospital, and Arnold Arboretum. The dedication ceremony must have seemed like a celebration of the city's destiny.
The speakers also addressed other issues, including reconciliation. "When the South looks to the North, it sees the fraternal hand grasping the olive branch of reconciliation and friendship, not the sword of victory," one speaker proclaimed. The city had invited prominent Southerners to attend the dedication, and the archive files contain several polite letters declining the invitation. One came from the Southern Historical Society of Richmond, Virginia, an organization formed by Confederate soldiers right after the war to propagate a Southern narrative of events. The Boston-centric version they would have heard, had they come, would have been anathema.
Equality was another issue mentioned, in laudatory but vague terms. Soldiers had died, one speaker said, "that the government they had lived under might be preserved, that the just and equal rights of all men might be maintained." Cherishing the idea of just and equal rights was a step in the right direction, but his phrasing seems tortured, suggesting, as it does, that justice and equality were maintained, when they had not existed in the first place.
Soldiers and Sailors Monument | Photo by the author
When the monument was dedicated, Boston's literary world said little about equality, slavery, or reconciliation. In 1877, The Atlantic Monthly featured poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an essay by Mark Twain, commentary on Charles Dickens, a review of Walt Whitman's poetry, and an article by then-Congressman James Garfield reflecting on Congress at its one-hundred-year mark. A South Carolinian wrote anonymously about the war's legacy in his state: carpet baggers, violence, dishonesty, and illiterate voters. North American Review covered contemporary literature: a biography of Titian, Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology, a monograph on Charlotte Bronte. In the book publishing world, Henry James's The American was released, where the protagonist, having served in the Union army, now lived in Europe. Only Henry Wilson, then Vice President and formerly a Senator from Massachusetts, in the third volume of his The Rise and Fall of Slave Power in America takes on slavery directly.
Except the inscription on the monument does mention slavery. And here we see the third part of the narrative associated with the monument. Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, was asked to supply the wording. Before he agreed, he had some questions. How many inscriptions would there be? Where would his be placed? Was there a word limit? Eliot also met with Milmore to go over the design plan. Nothing in the file indicates that anyone other than Eliot supplied the wording, but Milmore probably agreed with it, given that he had already sculpted figures of leading abolitionists such as Senator Charles Sumner and he would have been the one to memorialize the 54th Regiment, had he not died at age thirty-eight.
The inscribed words stand out in gold against the gray granite.
To the Men of Boston
Who Died for their Country
On Land and Sea in the War
Which Kept the Union Whole
Destroyed Slavery
And Maintained the Constitution
The Grateful City
Has Built this Monument
That their Example May Speak
To Coming Generations
By adding the destruction of slavery as a rationale for the war, the inscription elevates the war to one with a moral cause. It also adds an aspirational challenge for future generations. Alone, these words were not enough to beat back the Lost Cause narrative that took hold in the South, and they are not enough today. But they do point in a direction that at least some 19th century Bostonians wanted to go, and where we should want to go today.
Find Part III here.
Find Part I here.
Kathleen Stone lives in Boston’s South End. She holds graduate degrees from the Bennington Writing Seminars and Boston University School of Law and her work has been published in Arts Fuse and Ploughshares, among other places. They Called Us Girls, her collective biography of women with unconventional ambition in the mid-twentieth century, will be published by Cynren Press in March 2022. You can find out more and sign up for a monthly newsletter about women’s history at her website, www.kathleencstone.com.
Works Consulted:
Thank you to Marta Crilly, archivist at Boston City Archives, for help in retrieving files which included, among other documents, Records of the City Council and Board of Aldermen; Proclamation of the Committee on the Execution of the Monument issued September 18, 1871 in connection with laying the cornerstone; Letter from Martin Milmore to Francis Thompson, Chairman of the Committee on the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, dated May 10, 1877; Letters from Charles W. Eliot to Francis Thompson, Chairman, dated June 1, June 8 and July 17, 1877; Letter from Southern Historical Society to Francis Thompson and others dated September 7, 1877; Program for the dedication ceremony, September 17, 1877; Transcripts of speeches delivered at the dedication ceremony, September 17, 1877.
Other works consulted include:
Brown, Thomas J., The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins 2004).
Brown, Thomas J., Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (University of North Carolina Press 2019).
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin (John P. Jewett and Company, 1853) with illustrations by Hammett Billings, Smithsonian Libraries, https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/uncletomsc00stow
