Monuments and Memorials

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MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS

Historical monuments, particularly those erected publicly rather than on family plots in cemeteries, not only tell their manifest stories but also reveal something of the ideas dominant when they went up. In the new nation monuments went up slowly at first, revealing either an ideological bent against such memorials—Americans having toppled the statue of King George III in New York City during the Revolutionary War—or perhaps a shortage of sculptors. Fewer than twenty

public monuments built before 1830 appear in the Smithsonian Inventory of American Sculpture, admittedly an incomplete list.

remembering the revolutionary war

Americans were slow to commemorate the soldiers and sailors of the Revolution, compared to the dispatch with which they put up monuments after the War of 1812, the Civil War (Union side), the Spanish American or Philippines Wars, and World War I. On Beacon Hill in 1790, Bostonians erected a Doric column designed by Charles Bulfinch and topped by a golden (wooden) eagle, but they had to take it down twenty-one years later because they had removed too much of the hill as landfill. Joseph Warren, who fell at Bunker Hill, got a Tuscan pillar in 1794, but it too did not last. The Bunker Hill obelisk, 221 feet of granite, begun in 1823, was not dedicated until 1843.

The first monument to bear the names of ordinary enlisted men who fell was at Lexington, Massachusetts. During the war, two to four times as many men died on board twenty-two prison ships in New York harbor as died in battle throughout the conflict. In 1808 the Tammany Society finished a vault holding some of these remains, and a century later the Society of Old Brooklynites put up a monument to these victims of war in Fort Greene Park.

remembering the founders

More early monuments honor George Washington or the War of 1812. Probably the first statue of Washington was by William Sullivan in wood in 1792. Brightly painted, it stood in Bowling Green Square in lower Manhattan until 1843, adorned a barbershop for a while, and eventually moved to the Delaware Historical Society. In the 1820s statues of Washington appeared at the state capitols of Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Virginia, and atop the Washington Monument in Baltimore. Now they are everywhere, often put up by Masons. Perhaps the silliest Washington monument, at least to modern eyes, was Horatio Greenough's oversize 1830s sculpture showing Washington semi-nude and built like a Greek god. By 1908 it had become an embarrassment and was removed from the Capitol grounds to the basement of the National Museum of American History.

In 1792 a life-size marble statue of Benjamin Franklin went up in Philadelphia; around this time, the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi began a series of busts of other founders. A marble Italianate column commemorating America's naval war with Tripoli went up in Washington, D.C., in 1807, but wound up at the Naval Academy. In the 1820s other Italians sculpted classical statues of War, Peace, and The Genius of America for the Capitol. As the century wore on, American sculptors began to get more of these commissions, previously monopolized by Italians and other Europeans.

In the 1840s and 1850s more monuments were erected, honoring national founders including Virginia's Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and George Mason, but also local heroes such as the Palmetto Regiment in South Carolina and King Gambrinus, the Patron of Brewing, in of course Milwaukee. At about this time, ethnic groups began literally to make their appearance on the landscape, each choosing their hero from among Revolutionary War figures. Thus Casimir Pulaski, a Polish nobleman, is memorialized in Savannah, Georgia, where he died of wounds, by a monument whose cornerstone was laid by Lafayette during his triumphal 1824–1825 tour of America; in Washington, D.C., by a monument put up by Polish Americans; and in Buffalo, Philadelphia, and Meriden and Hartford, Connecticut—all with sizable Polish American populations. Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish Patriot, is on the landscape at West Point (1829) and Saratoga, where he served, and Chicago, the last surely owing to that city's Polish population. Baron von Steuben, a Prussian captain, made an appearance in 1870 in Utica, New York (where he died after the war), in Washington, D.C., at the site of the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey, where he played a major role, and at Valley Forge, where the National German American Alliance rather desperately tried to connect Americans and Germans in 1915.

Similarly, Irish Americans supported a monument to Commodore John Barry in Philadelphia and African Americans supported one to Crispus Attucks in Boston. Today we take for granted the glorification of Attucks as the "first casualty of the American Revolution." In 1888, however, when the black community of Boston after decades of struggle sparked the erection of the Boston Massacre monument, members of the Massachusetts Historical Society declared him "not a fit candidate for monumental honors." Attucks was a rebel, but more African Americans sided with the British, who offered them freedom; it seems nothing on the landscape tells their story.

Christians also latched onto the founders, sometimes distorting history in the process. The Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge, begun in 1903, is dominated by two matched sets of stainedglass windows—one depicting the life of Jesus Christ, the other the life of George Washington. In the central opening over the door, Washington kneels in prayer at Valley Forge. In the early twenty-first century some fundamentalist Christians claim the United States was founded as a Christian nation, whereas others acknowledge that Franklin, Jefferson, and some other founders were more Deist or Unitarian than Christian.

controversies

Monuments seem silent, consensual, and faithful—history written in stone. But some monuments commemorating early American figures or events, like their late-twentieth-century counterparts in eastern Europe, have been scenes of turbulence. In 1879 transatlantic-cable magnate Cyrus Field erected a monument to Major John André, a British spy in the Revolutionary War, in Tappan, New York, where he was executed, but angry patriots toppled it three times. An 1889 statue of an earlier founder, John Mason, adorned the site in Mystic, Connecticut, where he led British colonists in exterminating the major village of the Pequots, but in the 1990s remnants and supporters of the Pequots finally got it removed to a less offensive location near his original home site. A zinc obelisk to Tom Quick, erected because he killed perhaps ninety-nine Native Americans to avenge the 1756 death of his father, stood in Milford, Pennsylvania, until vandalized with a sledgehammer in 1997.

Other monuments of the early nation need some turbulence. On both sides of Lake Champlain, a standing Samuel de Champlain towers over a kneeling Native American. These monuments exemplify "hieratic art"—"hier" as in hierarchy—for Champlain is fully clothed with cloak and cape, while the Indian is almost naked. Depending on the weather on that spring day in 1609 when Native Americans showed him the lake he "discovered," either the Indian was shivering or Champlain was sweating. Of course, it never happened that way; the clothing is simply a way to contrast "primitive" (naked) and "civilized" (clothed).

A 1929 monument in Aurora, New York, commemorates Sullivan's Raid: "Routes of the armies of Gen. John Sullivan and James Clinton, 1779, An Expedition against the hostile Indian nations which checked the aggressions of the English and Indians on the frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania, extending westward the dominion of the United States." In reality, "the aggressions" were largely American. Washington instructed Sullivan "that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed…. You will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected." Afterward, Sullivan reported, "We have not left a single settlement or field of corn in the country of the [Iroquois] Five Nations." Perhaps New York might encourage Native Americans to erect a historical marker nearby, providing some of these details.

absences

Enormous gaps in the public history of America's early years remain. For example, up to 80 percent of the budget during Washington's presidency was consumed by Indian warfare, especially the Ohio wars, yet it is hard to glean an inkling of these campaigns from the landscape. Although Abigail Adams gets a cairn and statue in Quincy, Massachusetts, and Martha Washington gets on the landscape in several places, the roles women played in the forming of the nation are not well memorialized. In Zionsville, Indiana, for example, a state historical marker reads, "Patrick H. Sullivan, 1794–1879, was the first white settler in Boone County, 1823, and built the first log cabin." In reality, Sullivan entered what is now Boone County accompanied by his wife. Most assuredly, since the first thing a man needs when building a log cabin is someone on the other end of the log, they built the first log cabin. Such distortions make a difference: even in the postfeminist era, we still do not typically think of women as logcabin builders. Yet they were.

With the rise of organized labor in the late nineteenth century have come monuments and memorials put up by unions. By contrast, the working class in the early nation goes largely uncommemorated. Massachusetts has erected two monuments to Daniel Shays and his revolt, in Sheffield and Pelham.

Perhaps the hardest single thing for Americans to face in all their storied past is slavery. Everywhere monuments honor slave owners, but the s-word usually goes unwritten. Also nearly invisible is the role of the slave trade, domestic or international, including the triangular trade, which included New England. A small stone titled "Old Slave Block" in Fredericksburg, Virginia, is one of the few sites across America that recognizes a place where people were bought and sold. New Orleans marks no slave auction site, although in some years more people went on the block there than anywhere else in the United States. No memorial reminds Americans that until 1850, slaves were sold in several public areas in Washington, D.C., including at what is now Union Station. In Lower Manhattan a historical marker tells where the first stock market stood, but no marker mentions the first slave market, which stood just across the street. In downtown Philadelphia a historic marker does tell of the slave market at the London Coffee House. Charlottesville, Virginia, has a plaque indicating that an auction block had stood nearby, and a memorial in Charleston, South Carolina, marks the slave market.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, Congress did face slavery, banning it from the Northwest Territory, but that prohibition had loopholes and was not well enforced. Shortly after Illinois became a state, proponents of slavery tried to amend its constitution to allow slavery. Had they succeeded, American history might have been very different, for the free states would have been blocked from the West by slave states stretching from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico. Governor Edward Coles, a planter turned abolitionist, organized the opposition, defeating the referendum in 1824. A monument south of Edwardsville erected a century later commemorates Coles, "who by steadfastness and courage kept slavery out of the constitution of Illinois."

Some Americans think the founders banned the international slave trade in the Constitution; actually, they did just the reverse, guaranteeing it against abolition until 1808. In that year Congress did ban the trade, but for the next fifty-three years, to 1861, law enforcement officials in many parts of the country turned a blind eye. As with Prohibition or the later drug trade, the criminalization of slave importation, coupled with erratic enforcement, ensured that it would be profitable by increasing the price differential of slaves in the United States compared to West Africa or Cuba. Tucked away next to a vending machine in a side room at Fort Gaines, Alabama, is almost the only spot on the American landscape that acknowledges the illegal international trade: some timbers from the Clotilde, which entered Mobile Bay with an illicit cargo in July 1860. Except for these timbers, a mess kettle on display at Georgia's Jekyll Island State Park from the Wanderer (a slave ship that landed there in 1858), and increasing attention to Amistad in coastal Connecticut, monuments and memorials ignore this trade.

Slave revolts also go largely unremarked. Possibly the largest single revolt in United States history began on 8 January 1811, near Laplace, Louisiana, west of New Orleans. African Americans killed at least two whites and marched down the river road toward New Orleans, pillaging and killing as they went. At every plantation others joined until they numbered in the hundreds. Two days later, U.S. troops attacked with muskets and cannon, killing at least sixty-six resisters in the fighting or the aftermath. The event has no memorial, however, and Laplace refused to put up a historical marker mentioning it as suggested by the state.

slavery and public history

In 1848 construction began on America's tallest single monument to a person, the Washington Monument in the capital. Its scale implies the greatness of the nation. Work stalled in 1854, however, not to resume until the end of Reconstruction. The stoppage line, still visible, is emblematic of America's waning ability to unite behind major undertakings as the Civil War approached. A nearby landmark, "Freedom," the bronze woman atop the Capitol, also bears witness to the growing division. The sculptor's prototype wore a "Liberty Cap," worn by freed slaves in ancient Rome. As a slave owner, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the power behind the Buchanan administration, objected. He suggested stars overlaid by an eagle's head and feathers; most tourists infer she is a Plains Indian.

One of America's most famous monuments received its iconic name in the late 1830s. The bell that hung in the Pennsylvania State House when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence bore a Bible verse: "Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof." Delighted by the verse, abolitionists christened the bell the Liberty Bell. During the 1840s and 1850s they adopted the bell as a symbol, to the discomfort of those who wished the issue of slavery would go away. The movement for black freedom inspired America's other iconic monument, the Statue of Liberty. Its creation in 1886 stemmed from connections forged during the Civil War between American abolitionists and the French Anti-Slavery Society. Hence her name, and hence the broken chains at her feet.

The Jefferson Memorial, constructed during the presidency of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also shows distortion resulting from conflict over slavery. Its third panel of quotations, which the National Park Service describes as "devoted to his ideas on freedom of the body and to his beliefs in the necessity of educating the masses of the people," is a hodgepodge of quotations from widely different periods in Jefferson's life. The effect of this medley is to create the impression that Thomas Jefferson was very nearly an abolitionist. In their original contexts, the same quotations reveal a Jefferson conflicted about slavery—at times its critic, often its apologist. Neither the memorial's designers nor the Park Service in its videos and handouts seem willing to accurately present Jefferson's views on slavery.

continuity and change

After more than two centuries, Americans are still revising their views of the events and individuals that shaped the new nation. Voices of women, African Americans, and Native Americans, often not heard when early memorials were built, now vie for attention. Americans continue to change how they commemorate these events and individuals on the landscape. Von Steuben's monument at the Battle of Monmouth was dedicated in 2004, for example. Also in 2004, Milford, Pennsylvania, announced it would reerect its monument to Tom Quick. A National Slavery Museum is planned for 2007 near Fredericksburg, Virginia; it will perhaps fill some of the gaps in the treatment of the slave trade in the new nation. Controversies over the public history of the nation will not soon abate, and surely these debates make Americans better informed about their past.