Memorials

It’s hard for a New Yorker to see how many memorials of the Civil War fill and shape this city—to really take in the many things we pass by every day that were made to the memory of bloody battles that began down south, exactly a hundred and fifty years ago. Hard because they mostly slide right by our notice into the amnesia bin of a busy city long since occupied by immigrants and the children of immigrants, most of them indifferent to that war’s ghosts and glories. Though the right to house Grant’s Tomb in this city was dearly won, an informal office poll showed that not one in ten New Yorkers has actually visited it. Though the space across from the Fifth Avenue Apple Store contains the second-best big statue in the city—Saint-Gaudens’s Sherman with the angel of victory—only half knew what that space is called (Grand Army Plaza) and only one which Army was so grand (Grant’s, of the Potomac). Meanwhile, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument to Union veterans—it’s the white temple over at Eighty-ninth and Riverside—is regularly confused with Grant’s Tomb, up at 122nd Street, while nobody in our poll seemed to know where you could find a statue of the guy who designed the U.S.S. Monitor, with him holding a model of the first ironclad in his hand. (In Battery Park, as it happens.) And Union Square is confidently identified as being named for the Union cause when in fact its name long predates the war.

Fair enough. For a long time, the North built its statues and then left the strident exercise of memory to the losing side. As a result, right up until the nineteen-sixties the war was still being taught, even in Northern public schools, as a tragic battle between two noble sides, each with its own unfortunate extremists. The war was parsed and prettified until it became the gallant saga of the Blue and the Gray, with one great and vile movie (“The Birth of a Nation”) and one less great but less noxious one (“Gone with the Wind”) to reinforce the myth. As late as 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called for freedom to ring out from Georgia’s Stone Mountain, it was the site of a colossal bas-relief monument, still in progress, to the heroes of the Confederacy—and thus a regular meeting place for the Klan.

One legacy of the civil-rights movement that took hold around the time of the Civil War’s centenary is that it has become harder and harder for untruths to be told uncurbed. The war was fought over slavery. The Southern states seceded because Abraham Lincoln had been elected President, and he was what we now call a single-issue candidate, who had been nominated by a single-issue party, and that issue was to prevent slavery from spreading and, ultimately, to make it extinct. As John Stuart Mill wrote from London in 1862, in “The Contest in America”:

The world knows what the question between the North and South has been for many years, and still is. Slavery alone was thought of, alone talked of. Slavery was battled for and against on the floor of Congress and in the plains of Kansas; on the Slavery question exclusively was the party constituted which now rules the United States; on slavery Fremont was rejected, on slavery Lincoln was elected; the South separated on slavery, and proclaimed slavery as the one cause of separation. 
 

Lincoln’s Republican Party was divided between hard-liners, who thought that slavery had to end soon, and moderates, who thought that it would fall on its own sooner or later. But all understood that, as Mill added, with the succinct clarity of distance, “the day when slavery can no longer extend itself is the day of its doom. The slave-owners know this, and it is the cause of their fury.”

Insularity is the chronic American illness. To get even a whiff of what it felt like to watch the Civil War from abroad, we have to recall our own fascination with the events of 1989, when the impossible—liberal rebellions toppling totalitarian states—took place. What got Mill (and Darwin, and a million others in Britain) so worked up was that the whole concept of democratic rule and the rights of man was on the line, much the way that it is now in those nations where it is just taking hold. What Mill gazed at in worry, and wonder, was the image of democracy, for almost the first time since antiquity, protecting itself from collapse into anarchy or tyranny. (He knew that the democracy was, in truth, a very undemocratic one, with more than half its citizens unable to vote, but that did not weaken the wonder.) The world saw the Union cause as a promissory note, to use Dr. King’s image, of a republican movement yet to be fully cashed. It let freedom ring, or at least whisper hopefully, from the slums of Paris and the looms of Manchester. The British reform bill of 1867, which turned Parliament from an oligarchy with a complaint box into something closer to a real democratic institution, happened in significant part under the pressure of the Union victory. That’s one reason that a statue of Lincoln looks directly at the Houses of Parliament.

So maybe it would be a good idea now to look abroad again, to the magnificently named French abolitionist Édouard René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye, who wrote relentlessly on behalf of the Union cause, knowing that taking a stand against slavery was also a way of fighting the petty tyranny of Napoleon III, Bonaparte’s nephew. Laboulaye had the quixotic dream, in April of 1865, that, if government by the people was ever reëstablished in France, it might be nice for the two nations to build a statue to their shared ideals—maybe a female figure of freedom with a slave’s broken shackles at her feet. Though all those immigrant eyes have made her their own, and though that amnesia, some of it induced, has worked to airbrush out the broken slave shackle that still lies at her feet—though we may not recognize it sufficiently or say so often enough—the biggest Civil War memorial of all is still the best big statue in the city. And she’s hard to miss. ♦