University Times

Fort Mill, S.C., is the kind of place neighboring Charlotte, N.C. and its National Football League Carolina Panthers probably would like to forget. Even the most savvy public relations machine would find it difficult to put a positive spin on the "faithful slave" monument that stands in the town's park.

Erected by the local cotton mill owner in the 1890s, the monument is an obelisk with carved panels near the base commemorating field slaves and "mammies" who stayed with their masters during the Civil War. It is one of a series of Confederate monuments in the town. Others honor the Confederate soldier, Confederate women and Indians who fought for the Confederacy. Kirk Savage, assistant professor in Pitt's history of art and architecture department, was intrigued when he first saw the "faithful slave" monument in the 1980s. He was studying Civil War monuments at the time and had traveled throughout southern Virginia and the Carolinas south to Georgia without encountering anything like it.

"There was a lot of discussion about the faithful slave in the South in the late 19th century, but only this one monument was erected," Savage says. "There was a genuine sentiment there that this was tapping into, but a monument could only be erected in this rather marginal location." Dedication of the "faithful slave" monument was widely covered by the Southern press and attracted several thousand people to tiny Fort Mill. Even given such support, Savage does not think the monument could have been erected in a major city because former Confederates were working hard to distance their cause from slavery and depict it as a states' rights issue.

But the "faithful slave" monument is startling only for its honesty. As Savage notes in "Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves," his study of how the history of slavery was told in public spaces after the Civil War (the book will be published by Princeton University Press in November) racial attitudes prevalent before the war did not disappear after it. Efforts in the 1860s to erect monuments to emancipation succumbed to a general belief on the part of whites in both the South and the North in white superiority.

"Ultimately, the reason that sculptors and monument committees failed to be able to commemorate or represent emancipation in a really meaningful way was because the racial system that supported slavery still survived," Savage says. "Those racial attitudes ultimately blocked any meaningful attempt to include African Americans in public spaces and to include them in the common history of the nation." Public monuments tap into the deepest cultural values of a people, Savage notes. The passage of an amendment to the constitution ending slavery is one thing, a piece of paper that can be hidden away in books. Showing the end of slavery in a monument in a park is another thing entirely.

"Representing African Americans and whites together in a public sculpture is much more difficult to do than write a law and get it enacted because that takes a real sea change in cultural attitudes," Savage explains. "It's visible in a very dramatic way and really challenges people's preconceptions." According to Savage, African Americans did not appear at all in sculpture, public or private, before the Civil War. Sculpture was a white medium.

"Simply to represent them in a sculpture was in a sense to heroize them, to create a heroic African American body," he says. "That was very, very difficult for white monument committees. Public spaces were controlled by whites because they were the majority and the people who put up monuments wanted to commemorate the majority." Still, there were attempts in the late 1860s, when the war and the reasons it was fought were still fresh in people's minds, to commemorate the idea of emancipation. The original idea for a monument to Abraham Lincoln was to represent the Reconstruction ideal of racial equality. That was even included in the charter for the monument, according to Savage. But the Lincoln monument that eventually was built was very different.

"In fact, it represented African Americans as abject slaves," Savage says. "It represented them in a subordinate position, so used older ideas about African American representation." The Emancipation Monument, as that first Lincoln monument was labeled, was built in 1876 in Washington, D.C. It shows Lincoln standing over a chained and kneeling semi-nude slave. The monument was supposed to depict the slave being elevated to citizenship, according to Savage. But what it actually did was encode the idea of racial subordination.

"People erecting the monument said it was about racial elevation, he [the slave] is in the process of getting up," Savage says. "But if you erect it as a public monument, he never does get up. He is frozen in that subordinate position." There were many emancipation monuments proposed for New York, Philadelphia and other cities around the country, but the only one built was in Washington. It was paid for entirely by African American contributions, but a white committee selected the design.

When it became clear that monuments to emancipation were not going to be built, monument committees began casting about for other ways to commemorate the war. Pushed in part by newly formed veterans' groups, they came up with the idea of the common soldier.

Although it is difficult to imagine today, when monuments are everywhere, before the Civil War there were very few public monuments, according to Savage. The tradition also was to honor great men, which in itself limited the number of monuments.

Then, too, there was the issue of cost. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, monuments were expensive and funds for them in short supply. Industrial mass production techniques, though, made monuments so common that they were sold through catalogs. That is why so many towns have the same Civil War monument.

Pressure from veterans groups was one reason that the common soldier became a subject for monuments. In addition, according to Savage, the Civil War was the first modern war in which destruction was directed not only against armies, but also against the civilian infrastructure and population, the common people.

"It was not just armies battling one another, but two societies battling one another," he points out.

The number of war dead was another reason to honor the common soldier, according to Savage. More Americans died in the Civil War than in any other war.

While researching "Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves," Savage also noticed the manner in which the common soldier is represented in monuments. Unlike in European countries where death and wounds are depicted, monuments erected by American cities and towns to honor veterans never show wounded, dying or threatening soldiers.

"He is always upright, intact, unwounded, usually in a vigilant pose," Savage notes. "He's usually at parade rest, which is not an attack pose, but a rest pose. And finally, he is always white." Although nearly 200,000 African American soldiers served in the Union Army during the Civil War, very few appear on monuments. The best known monument on which African American soldiers appear is Boston's Shaw Memorial honoring Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment, depicted in the movie "Glory." Created over a 15-year period by August Saint-Gaudens, one of the most famous sculptures of the late 19th century, the Shaw Memorial actually was supposed to honor Colonel Shaw, a white officer, when it was erected in 1897. But eventually it came to commemorate the African American troops who fought under him.

The Shaw Memorial, which gives individual faces to each soldier depicted on it, is one of Savage's favorite Civil War monuments. He says: "It's a really wonderful, beautiful work, an enduring and mysterious work in many ways." Another favorite of the Pitt professor is the Lee Monument in Richmond, Va., which depicts General Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveler. It is important, according to Savage, because it set the tone for the Confederate view of the war. It was the first important monument to disassociate the Confederate cause from slavery. Lee was chosen as the subject of the Richmond monument because he did not own slaves or have any investment in slavery, Savage says. The monument made Lee the counterpart of Lincoln.

Savage himself became interested in how wars are represented in monuments erected in public spaces because of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The debate surrounding the appropriateness of the design — some critics called it a "black wall of shame" — led Savage to begin thinking about how a design issue could become a political issue and divide the country.

"Anyone who gets into this even a little bit begins to see that political controversies are built into the very process of erecting public monuments," he says. "This really rich history opened up to me."

–Mike Sajna