In the late 19th century, there was a rush to memorialize the American Civil War. There were still a lot of living Civil War veterans around, but enough time had passed that the emotional trauma of that awful war was being scarred over by sentiment. There was a national desire–maybe even a national need–to attempt to ennoble the killing and the dying, to transform the horrific mass slaughter into something virtuous.
Communities did this by erecting monuments and memorials to the fallen soldiers. It’s important to distinguish between these commonplace memorials and the statues of the leaders of the armies. The statues of Civil War generals–Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, William T. Sherman–were created to celebrate both the individuals and the cause they fought for. Every statue of a Confederate general is also a statue defending a war to protect slavery; every statue of Union general is a statue defending the notion of a united nation.
But the vast majority of Civil War memorials and monuments–the ones you’ll find in parks and standing in front of courthouses in small towns–are dedicated to the people who did most of the fighting and dying. They’re actually memorials to the grunts, the men who went where they were told to go, who shot at the people they were told to shoot at, and who died because that’s what grunts do. Grunts don’t die for vaguely defined moral or political concepts; they die because somebody in a suit decided those concepts were worth somebody–somebody else–dying for.
For small towns that wanted to memorialize the common soldiers who died in the Civil War, the cost of marble or granite statues was prohibitive. However, there were a small number of New England monument companies that specialized in casting bronze or zinc cemetery statues. The Monumental Bronze Co. of Bridgeport, Connecticut produced a model known as the Silent Sentinel. It was a life-size statue of a generic soldier standing at parade rest and sold for an affordable US$450 (an 8-foot-6-inch version could be had for $750). For Northern markets, the belt buckle of the Silent Sentinel was stamped with US; for Southern markets, it was stamped with CS. Other than that, the statues were exactly the same. The same longcoat, the same rifle, the same knapsack, the same forage cap.
Eventually, Southern markets caught on to the fact that they were paying Yankee industrialists for statues of Yankee soldiers passing as Confederate soldiers. They began to insist on changes to their statues–a shorter jacket, a bedroll instead of a knapsack, a different style forage cap. But the fact remains, that many of the Civil War memorials you’ll find in town squares from New England to the Midwest to the Deep South depict the same generic soldier.
That’s appropriate, especially on Memorial Day, when we’re meant to honor the troops who died in military service to their nation. The leaders–the generals, the politicians, the industrialists who profit from the weapons of war–fuck those guys. But all those poor indistinguishable bastards who put on a uniform and went to war because they were told there was a good reason for them to risk death and kill strangers, those people deserve our compassion. They earned those memorials.
gregfallis.com 