Pandemic Walks: Assessing Boston's Civil War Narratives, Part I
by Kathleen Stone
June 14, 2021
Roxbury Soldiers' Monument | Photo by the author
During the pandemic, my husband and I walked all over Boston, slowly and more attentively than before. We took time to notice what we had overlooked for years. On a walk through Forest Hills Cemetery, I saw the Roxbury Soldiers' Monument, not for the first time. I was transfixed.
A bronze soldier stands in the center of a small plot that measures 40 paces a side, by my rough estimate. Names of Civil War dead are inscribed on granite slabs that enclose the plot. The soldier, a rifle at his side, looks down, his face reflecting the grim knowledge that his comrades have fallen. His uniform is standard issue, but he is very much an individual, defined by a slightly cleft chin, high cheek bones, widespread nose, and a wave of hair under his cap. The details are so particular that I imagine the sculptor, Martin Milmore, asked a friend to pose.
Milmore's sculpture departs from the equestrian and Baroque-inspired styles more common in the era. His soldier stands alone, without any kind of flourish. He could be on the battlefield, gazing at fresh earthen mounds. Instead, I think he has come home to mourn the loss of neighbors. The grief on his face is as sharp today as it was then. Yet there is resignation too. Secession could not be allowed to stand; death was the necessary price.
The inscription on the plinth on which he stands echoes his resignation:
Erected by the City of Roxbury in honor of the soldiers who
died for their country in the Rebellion of 1861 – 1865.
When I came upon this monument in January 2021, I was mindful of the ongoing national conversation about the Civil War's legacy and its statuary. If it is true that victors write the history, what history does this monument tell?
After our walk, I arranged to look through files in the cemetery's office. There I saw notes of who is buried in the plot, nineteenth century records of local aldermen's activities, and more recent write-ups from art historians and art conservators. I learned that many of Roxbury's farmers, butchers, blacksmiths, and clerks fought with the 35th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment. On September 17, 1862, they found themselves in Sharpsburg, Maryland as Confederate troops prepared to cross Antietam Creek, on their way to Washington, DC, until stopped by Union soldiers. The battle's toll was heavy — twenty-two thousand dead — but it gave President Lincoln the political capital he needed to sign a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days after the battle, announcing his intention to free all who were enslaved in Confederate territory.
Within weeks of the battle, Roxbury's aldermen arranged for remains of local men to be brought home, and they commissioned Milmore, then a resident of Roxbury, to design a monument.
Milmore was born in Sligo, Ireland, a seaside region we know from the writings of William Butler Yeats and Kevin Barry. He emigrated to Boston as a young boy and showed an early aptitude for art. At 16, he convinced the sculptor Thomas Ball to take him on as an apprentice, and he helped Ball with the equestrian statue of George Washington that stands in the Public Garden. When Milmore created three granite goddesses for the Horticultural Society, he solidified his reputation. Working with his brothers who were skilled stonecutters and cabinetmakers, Milmore became a preeminent artist of Civil War memorials.
The monument in Forest Hills is eloquent in its spareness. It attempts no grand narrative of why events unfolded, or their import for the future. But was this typical of Boston at the time? To find out, I dug into literary history.
The Atlantic Monthly’s digital archive for 1867, the year Milmore completed the sculpture, includes an essay by Frederick Douglass advocating suffrage for black men. That idea would have been unthinkable without a Union victory, but Douglass is looking forward, not dwelling on the past. Also in The Atlantic that year, which was then published in Boston: Louis Agassiz wrote about glacial phenomena in Maine, Ralph Waldo Emerson contributed a poem, and C. M. Ellis analyzed the grounds for presidential impeachment, a year before the House of Representatives did, in fact, impeach Andrew Johnson.
"The Blue and the Gray” by Francis Miles Finch | The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1867
The Blue and the Gray, a poem by Francis Miles Finch in The Atlantic's September 1867 issue, was one of the few pieces with specific reference to the war. Finch wrote the poem after hearing reports that, in what may have been the first Memorial Day, women in Mississippi adorned graves of Union soldiers with flowers, while also decorating graves of their own. Finch lauds the idea of reconciliation.
North American Review, also then published in Boston, carried lengthy commentaries on the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the mathematics of John Venn, father of the Venn diagram. That publication, too, had moved on from the war.
On the popular side, Charles Dickens appeared at Tremont Temple in December to read A Christmas Carol, part of his five-month reading tour of the country. In early 1868, the first installment of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was published. Alcott had nursed soldiers in South Carolina, but she makes the war a backdrop to her novel, not a major part. It seems, then, that the urge in Boston was to reconcile and move on. Naïve in retrospect, the urge failed to combat the desire on the part of some to maintain white supremacy, while it also failed to give voice to others' aspirations for a free and equal society.
One exception to the general impetus to move on was William Wells Brown and his book, The Negro in the American Rebellion. Brown was born into slavery in Kentucky, escaped to Ohio, lived in England, and eventually settled in Boston, where he was a writer and an activist. His book, published in 1867, covers more than a century of American history.
Brown relates that after the attack on Fort Sumter, a group of black Bostonians volunteered to serve in the army but, they were told, this is "a white man’s war." The men, however, believed sentiment would change and they "waited patiently for the coming time, pledging themselves to go at their country’s call."
Sentiment did change and Brown devotes Chapter XX to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. In May 1863, the regiment arrived at Boston Common for presentation of the colors, a ceremony at which the governor acknowledged that stamping out slavery was now a goal. The black soldiers would help "raise aloft their country’s flag – their country’s flag, now as well as ours – by striking down the foes which oppose it." And they would strike the last blow "needful to rend the last shackle which binds the limb of the bondman in the rebel States."
The elimination of slavery is not the story told by the Roxbury monument, at least not explicitly. While most Bostonians would have understood that slavery and rebellion were linked, that's a subtle point and, in any event, a contemporaneous counter-narrative arose that neither the Roxbury Soldiers' Monument nor Boston's literary world did much to refute. Edward Alfred Pollard of Virginia published The Lost Cause and The Lost Cause Regained, in 1866 and 1868 respectively. There he put forth a romantic version of slavery, secession, and a Southern way of life. His fellow Southerners embraced it, and it became the groundwork for erecting Confederate monuments and flying Confederate flags, even as Bostonians tried to put the war behind them.
But did Boston really move on? No, not entirely, as I learned on another pandemic walk.
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 Janice Stetz and Rayna Danis at the Forest Hills Cemetery for making files available to me. Other works consulted were:
Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/september-22/
Marchione, William P., "Martin Milmore: Boston's Great Civil War Sculptor" (August 1, 2017) https://wpmarchione.com/2017/08/01/martin-milmore-bostons-great-civil-war-sculptor/. Other examples of Milmore's work may be seen in the collection of the United States Senate, the Massachusetts State House and on many town greens throughout Massachusetts. It was expected that Milmore would sculpt a memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment but he died before work began. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was chosen to create the memorial that stands on Boston Common today. Milmore was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery where his friend and sculptor Daniel Chester French created a memorial to Milmore and his brother known as "Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor," as discussed in an entry by the Forest Hills Educational Trust. http://www.foresthillstrust.org/his_sculp/scholar/s_tour_milmore.html
Fallows, Deborah, "A Real Story of Memorial Day," The Atlantic (May 23, 2004), https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/05/a-real-story-of-memorial-day/371497/
Beetham, Sarah Denver, "Sculpting the Citizen Soldier: Reproduction and National Memory, 1865-1917," PhD Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of Delaware (2014) p. 25-26, citing David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), https://udspace.udel.edu/bitstream/handle/19716/13367/2014_Beetham_Sara_PhD.pdf?sequence=1
Brown, William Wells, The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (Lee & Shepard, 1867) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50130/50130-h/50130-h.htm
