SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (AP) — After the Civil War ended in April 1865, statues depicting Union and Confederate soldiers went up across the country, from New England squares to Southern courthouses. A century and a half later, these weathered “Silent Sentinels” still stand guard, rifles at the ready, gazing off in the distance.
For a war that pitted brother against brother, many of them bear a strong family resemblance.
Most of the statues were mass-produced by a handful of Northern companies that found a steady market selling to communities — North and South — eager to honor their fallen soldiers and surviving veterans.
“They’re not meant to represent one person or another,” said Sarah Beetham, an art historian who teaches at the University of Delaware and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. “This way, people could go and see in them their sons or fathers who had fought in the war.”
Known as the “Silent Sentinel,” ”Single Soldier” or similar names, he tops many of the thousands of Civil War monuments to be found in more than 30 states. Today, 150 years after the guns fell silent to end the nation’s bloodiest conflict, the ranks of the more than 3 million citizen soldiers who fought on both sides are represented by some of our most ubiquitous yet often overlooked public symbols.
“Before the Civil War, you would never have had an image of the common soldier to memorialize. You would have a general or a biblical figure,” said Earle Shettleworth, head historian for the state of Maine. “After the war, there was more of a democratic way of memorializing those who had participated.”
With untold thousands of war dead buried in graves on or near battlefields and encampments far from their homes, some communities in the North and South erected hometown monuments to the fallen even as the fighting raged. Most were stone obelisks placed in local cemeteries.
Within a couple of years after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, more elaborate monuments were being commissioned from sculptors. By 1867, monuments featuring sculpted or cast metal soldier statues were dedicated in cemeteries in Cincinnati and Boston. The version depicting a single soldier at “parade rest” — hands gripping a musket at the end of the barrel, the stock resting on the ground — became the most popular way to honor the more than 2 million men who fought for the Union.
But commissioning a monument made of Italian marble or northern New England granite could cost tens of thousands of dollars, much too expensive for most small towns. Many turned to the northern foundries specializing in cast bronze or zinc statuary used to decorate cemetery markers. Firms such as the Monumental Bronze Co. of Bridgeport, Connecticut, did a brisk business selling soldier statues. A life-size parade rest model was listed in its sales catalog for $450, while the 8-foot-6-inch version sold for $750.
“It’s like going to Wal-Mart. It’s less expensive,” said Timothy S. Sedore, author of “An Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments.”
Because they had lost the war and were economically shattered, Southerners got a later start erecting monuments. By the time the 20th century arrived, they were making up for lost time, with hundreds of soldier statues installed across the South, typically outside county courthouses.
But old animosities died hard, and folks in the South didn’t usually publicize who was supplying the statues: mostly companies in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Ohio.
“The Southerners didn’t talk about that, buying from Yankees,” Beetham said.
Versions of the Silent Sentinel statue can be found from Amarillo, Texas, to Kennebunk, Maine. The Northern version features a Union soldier wearing a kepi and caped greatcoat, while his Southern counterpart typically wears the iconic slouch hat and bedroll strapped diagonally across his chest.
An accurate number of Civil War monuments is difficult to pin down. Beetham, who wrote her dissertation on post-Civil War citizen soldier monuments, estimates there are some 2,500 across the Northern states, with the Silent Sentinel version believed to account for as many as half of them. Estimates of Confederate monuments range between 500 and 1,000, including hundreds of the rebel version of the solitary soldier.
“In Georgia, there must be one in practically every county in every town square and cemetery, and it’s facing north, by the way,” said Ben Jones, a former Georgia congressman who played the role of Cooter on “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
Jones, the chief of heritage operations for the Sons of Confederate Veterans of the Civil War, said his group doesn’t have a definitive number. In Virginia, where Jones now lives, there are at least 360 Confederate monuments by Sedore’s count, including about 100 Silent Sentinels.
All those soldier monuments — North and South — are a collective symbol of the losses felt in virtually every community, Jones said.
“It represents the humanity, the family” and, he said, “the people who didn’t come back or who did come back worse for the wear.”
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We should never forget, or allow our friends in the South to forget, that every single one of the Confederate silent sentinel monuments, is a monument to amnesty, total, blanket amnesty, for treason.
Every single soldier who took up arms for the Confederacy was a traitor, and would have hung were it not for several successive blanket amnesties issued by executive action, or passed into law by Congress.
Next time one of the usual suspect blowhards stands on high principle to denounce the obvious and categorical evil of granting one bit of amnesty to people who have merely violated our immigration laws, ask him or her how they feel about blanket amnesty for treason, for taking up arms to kill their fellow countrymen. If they do claim to be agin’ the Demon Amnesty when this question is put to them, ask them to support efforts to have all these Confederate monuments taken down, and, more importantly, to have all those statues of traitors who served in the govt or armed forces of the Confederacy removed from the Capitol and dumped in the Anacostia.
Well of course, the Union won. So it is only fitting for the winner to expound on it’s win, and pay homage to the winning heroes.
However, you never see the loser in any war be able to erect statues to their loss. Ever see statues of hitler? Or king george? Or any other loser?
Only the south pays homage to their losing icons.
Meh…they still think the war is raging. Never admitting defeat. However, their’s was an unconditional surrender. Because they were traitors!!
Never been to Germany or Austria and seen all the memorials to the dead of World War I, have we? Or the Vietnam Memorial?
And there are plenty of statues of people who lost wars all across the world in nations fair and foul. Crazy Horse and George III, Napoleon I and Karl Mannerheim, Boudica and Vercingetorix, Kim Il Sung and Gamel Nassar.
You can’t hate a place or a people into thinking and acting the way you want them to. And with the possible exception of the Spartans, people who lost a family member in a war have never spit on the ground and said “good riddance” because they died on the losing side.
The need to believe that a loved one’s death in a war wasn’t in vain is powerful. Few can resist the compulsion. The consequences of the survivors’ compulsion to impose meaning on the deaths can range from the palliative to the poisonous, but which it is has little to do with whether the war was won or lost.
On a lecture tour of zinc statues, the lecturer explained that the zinc statues had sections that could be unscrewed and replaced with a different version. This was true of soldier statues and also of Native Americasn. You bought a generic zinc Indian and then added stuff to make them a particular tribe.
With malice toward none and charity toward all, eh?