Beyond the Iconoclastic Republic

This introduction traces antebellum American skepticism about public monuments to the distrust of standing armies that was central to the ideology of the American Revolution. The popularity of Independence Day illustrates the iconoclasm of the early republic, which paralleled a widespread resistance to compulsory military service. Remembrance of the Civil War vastly increased the number of public monuments in the United States. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, these memorials became a vehicle for the militarization of American culture.

Models of Citizenship

This chapter describes new idealizations of soldiering in the period from the 1880s to the eve of American intervention in World War I. With the encouragement of veterans and their allies, memorials increasingly honored all local soldiers who had served the Union or the Confederacy rather than focusing on those who had died. Memorial halls became facilities for veterans rather than educational buildings. Soldier statues focused on new prototypes: bearers of the US flag, active combatants, and marching campaigners. These warriors embodied enthusiasm for physical culture and ideas about ethnicity and race in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century United States. Reconceptualization of military service as a form of education paralleled the expansion of college athletics and development of the Reserve Officers Training Corps. The Shaw Memorial in Boston, an important artistic depiction of African Americans, was an outstanding exception to this militarism. Monuments that commemorated women tended to narrow their participation in the Civil War into a celebration of motherhood as the ideal social role of women.

The Great War and Civil War Memory

This chapter examines the influence of Civil War commemoration on World War I commemoration and the impact of World War I on Civil War commemoration. The war limited recognition that the Lincoln Memorial climaxed development of the National Mall with less militarism than recent Lincoln statues suggested. Some sponsors of World War I monuments rejected Civil War precedents, such as those who projected useful memorials, but an army of doughboy statues built on Civil War precedents. The proliferation of male nudes was one example. The crisis of World War I caused some memorial promoters to treat the Civil War as a foreshadowing and some memorial promoters to treat the Civil War as a refuge from modernity. The Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain illustrated both tendencies and the displacement of public monuments by cinema in the 1930s.

Visions of Victory

This chapter situates northern and southern monuments to Civil War victory within longstanding traditions in art history. The triumphal arch came to the United States after the war. Proposals for arches framed debates about the future of antebellum landscapes like town commons and parade grounds, and arches also figured prominently in the shaping of public parks, largely a key feature of post-war urban planning. Increasingly sexualized statues of Nike, or Winged Victory, imagined Union triumph as a more comprehensive consummation than the most renowned successes of antiquity. Early attempts to represent peace incorporated a foundation in social or political change, but peace gradually converged with martial victory. The shift in Union memorials from regeneration to self-congratulation paralleled the rise of Confederate victory memorials. These works partly celebrated the overthrow of Reconstruction and consolidation of white supremacism but also illustrated a deepening national reluctance to engage in critical introspection.

Models of Leadership

This chapter situates monuments to Union and Confederate leaders within longstanding traditions in art history. Early tributes to Civil War commanders extended antebellum efforts to develop democratic variations on the equestrian statue, a form associated with imperial sovereigns. Monuments to orators illustrated the fading of the lyceum oratory that had shaped public culture during the Civil War era and the increasing emphasis on military commanders as exemplars of leadership. The equestrian statues that proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century offered allegories of public authority, gradually shifting from popular election of leaders to rank-and-file submission to review by captains of industry. Some monuments explored the possibilities of charismatic democratic leadership, but the prevailing models illustrated the growing influence of professionalization in art as well as in government. The US Army was an important site of professionalization, and the equestrian statue most informed by current military thinking celebrated the establishment of the army general staff as a landmark in American bureaucracy.

The Emergence of the Soldier Monument

This chapter connects the proliferation of public monuments after the Civil War to the number and circumstances of wartime deaths. Because the remains of many fallen soldiers did not return home, monuments served as cenotaphs, especially in Memorial Day rituals. Some communities and institutions chose to commission memorial halls rather than monuments. These buildings, often schools or public libraries, strengthened educational institutions that situated voluntary military service within a broader ideal of engaged and informed citizenship. The soldier statue nevertheless became the dominant memorial form. Many soldier statues reflected a sentimental culture that mourned private, familial losses rather than honoring public service, though some monuments instead illustrated the hardening of the class order in the Gilded Age.

Toward a New Iconoclasm

The epilogue sketches the influence of Civil War monuments on the most influential American war memorials during the period from the 1940s to the 1980s, when the public monument had declined dramatically from the prestige of the cultural form between the 1860s and 1930s. As memorials regained in popularity during the 1980s, the advances of the civil rights movement inspired many monuments to African American soldiers; white backlash led to fresh Confederate monuments. Racial violence and digital media placed Civil War monuments at the center of a return to iconoclasm in American memorial culture in the 2010s. The epilogue traces the “tagging” of monuments with graffiti and the coalescence of a movement to take down Confederate monuments in conjunction with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The emphasis on Civil War monuments in protests centered on the militarization of law enforcement recognized the extent to which these memorials had contributed to a racialized militarization of American culture.