Pandemic Walks: Assessing Boston's Civil War Narratives, Part III
by Kathleen Stone
July 1, 2021
The Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery | Photo by the author
After seeing the Civil War monuments in Forest Hills and on Boston Common, and reading about Martin Milmore, the sculptor behind both, there was one more I wanted to see: the Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery. On a winter afternoon my husband and I drove to Watertown, intending to walk in the cemetery, but found it closed. Not going places was part of the pandemic experience, as much as our leisurely walks around the city. When Mount Auburn reopened to visitors in the spring, we went back.
The Sphinx was conceived by one individual, Dr. Jacob Bigelow. He wanted to pay tribute to those who died fighting for the Union, with a memorial different from those that were sprouting up on town greens all over New England. He had in mind a timeless icon, with a message that would resonate across generations.
Bigelow was a physician, a botanist, and a Latinist. He taught courses in the "useful arts" at Harvard, a field he preferred to call technology. Long before the Civil War, he formed a voluntary association to purchase a bucolic site for burial. English gardens and the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris inspired him, and the Horticultural Society carried out the design, with native species of trees and flowers that melded rural and urban elements. Mount Auburn was the first cemetery of its kind in the country.
In 1865, Bigelow proposed using surplus cemetery funds for a memorial to the Union dead. The trustees agreed in principle, but they never settled on a design or an artist. The project stalled until Bigelow took matters into his own hands. He hired Milmore to sculpt what he wanted, and what he wanted was a sphinx.
The Sphinx is magnificent, but it left me puzzled. Its association with the ancient world was obvious, but what was its connection to the United States, poised for progress right after the Civil War?
The Sphinx from Bigelow’s 1872 book
Then I did a little reading. In a small book he wrote about it, Bigelow explained that a sphinx expresses qualities of "repose, strength, beauty and duration." And with a female face, which this sphinx has, it combined the "strength of the lion with the beauty and benignity of woman." Appropriate, he thought, for the American nation which had so recently achieved "the greatest moral and social results of modern times" and looked forward to "illuminate progress."
For Milmore, the sculpture was a triumph of logistical and technical prowess. He created a large plaster mold and had it transported by horse and carriage from his Boston studio to temporary quarters set up in the monument company across the street from the cemetery. A fifty ton block of granite was also delivered there from a quarry in Hallowell, Maine. As the quarry manager explained in a letter to the cemetery superintendent, transporting such a large piece of granite was unprecedented, and they had some difficulties. When it was finally in place, Milmore, together with his brother, a stonecutter, formed the granite sphinx to which they added an Egyptian lotus, American water lily, six-point military star, and American eagle.
In August of 1872, Bigelow presented the finished sculpture to the cemetery trustees. It was placed it on a pedestal into which these words were inscribed in both English and Latin:
American Union Preserved
African Slavery Destroyed
By the Uprising of a Great People
By the Blood of Fallen Heroes
The words seem to be a rousing endorsement of the Union's survival and emancipation. Yet they, too, are confusing. To what "uprising" do they refer – the Confederate rebellion that had just been put down? Not at all, as it turns out. Bigelow apparently borrowed a book title for the third line of his inscription. In 1861, The Uprising of a Great People, by Count Agénor de Gasparin, had been translated from the French and published in New York. It encouraged the "indignant protest of the Northern people to the slave power to which they had so long succumbed," said the North American Review. In other words, the Count flipped the script of rebellion. According to the Review, "We have as yet seen no American publication which can bear comparison with this French work in point of fervent zeal for the cause of freedom, order and progress as involved in our existing civil war."
With this inscription, Bigelow aligned himself with a broad, progressive view of what the war had accomplished. He was not an abolitionist before the war, and never fully embraced racial equality but, by 1872, he was celebrating the end of slavery. This leaves me to wonder if, had he lived longer (he died in 1879), his views would have evolved.
At the very least, Boston's progressive literary environment might have been an influence. In the early 1870s, several Bostonians wrote with pride about having met, or funded, John Brown; their essays appeared in The Atlantic Monthly where, in 1871, William Dean Howells had taken over as editor. Vice President Henry Wilson, former Senator from Massachusetts, published the first part of his History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America. Suffragist Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Brown Blackwell (brother of the first American woman to graduate from medical school) began publishing Women's Journal, a periodical aligned with the American Women Suffrage Association, the organization she had founded and headquartered in Boston. At the same time, Oliver Wendell Holmes, doctor, writer, and father of the future Supreme Court Justice, published The Poet at the Breakfast Table, one of his several books of poetry. Brahmin and progressive voices co-existed, sometimes within a single individual, in Boston's literary scene.
* * *
Martin Milmore’s handwriting
What do Milmore's three Civil War monuments say to us today? Aesthetic tastes have changed. People may not have as much truck with goddesses and sphinxes as they once did. The inscriptions, though eloquent, have proven insufficient to counter the Lost Cause narrative that surfaced soon after the war's end and took hold later in the 19th and into the 20th centuries. But the monuments remain relevant to us today, 150 years later. The Roxbury Soldiers' Monument in Forest Hills invites us to think of those who sacrificed as our neighbors, whether or not that is literally the case. The Soldiers and Sailors Monument on the Common urges us to reflect on the moral purpose for which the Civil War was fought and won. And the enigmatic Sphinx inspires us to act with moral purpose today. If we are entering a Third Reconstruction, as the Reverend William Barber II says we are, then we should remember that though the institution of slavery is gone, a great people should rise up against its remnants. Isn't it past time to prove there is truth in the adage that history is written by the victors?
Find Part I here.
Find Part II 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 Meg Winslow, curator of the Historical Collections and Archives of Mount Auburn Cemetery, for telling me about Mount Auburn's online platform and other resources.
Works consulted include:
Bigelow, Jacob, An Account of the Sphinx at Mount Auburn (Little Brown 1872), p. 8, 13-14
Giguere, Joy M., "The Americanized Sphinx," Civil War Commemoration, Jacob Bigelow, and the Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 3, Issue 1 (March 2013), p. 62-84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26062021?seq=1
Linden-Ward, Blanche, Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery (Ohio State University Press 1989)
Brown, Thomas J. The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration, A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins 2004)
Digital archives of The Atlantic
Digital archives of North American Review, including those maintained on JSTOR in collaboration with the University of Northern Iowa.
