Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America by Thomas J. Brown (review)

In a thorough and well-researched book, Thomas J. Brown seeks "to reframe a rich recent literature on Civil War Memory" (9). Growth of this literature has paralleled increased interest in heritage-related memory studies and a growing pushback to Confederate symbolism, racism, and violent hate crimes. Much of this literature has focused on Southern monuments espousing in word and symbol the Lost Cause narrative or "useful history" of the Civil War. This history negated Southern defeat, extolled values supported by the Confederacy, and supported resurrection of the antebellum social contract between former master and former slave in a Jim Crow world. Brown's goal, clearly established in his introduction, is not to refute the existing literature but to make a very compelling argument that Civil War monuments, irrespective of their location in the former Confederacy or the loyal Northern states, also mirror or in fact had a role in the militarization of the United States.

In chapter 1, Brown considers emergence of the soldier monument in post–Civil War America after a decade or so of commemoration by stark and impersonal forms (such as the obelisk) generally placed in cemetery or square to acknowledge human loss in the absence of the body itself. An essential part of this chapter, though, is a review of the nation's earlier, post-Colonial rejection of honoring great leaders and military heroes, and the military state in general, that was not seen to befit the new republican form of government. He argues successfully that the rejection of the aristocratic model in our new nation is reflected on the antebellum landscape by a general lack of monuments to the common soldier or military leaders. Prior to the Civil War, the standing army was small, and concepts of citizenship, manhood, and leadership were vested in civilian, and usually agrarian, pursuits. The huge losses of the war, however, with so many soldiers buried on distant and usually unknown fields, inspired a substitute in the form of an obelisk or stone, which soon was supplanted by a sculpture of a nameless common soldier. Chapter 2 discusses how these sculpted portraits of soldiers on perpetual picket duty remained nameless but evolve to represent the soldier as a model of citizenship; a mantle previously held by the likes of the farmer or blacksmith.

Chapters 3 and 4 consider the broadening of the post–Civil War monumental landscape to include parallel themes of leadership and victory. Leadership monuments, which extolled the virtues and importance of Union and Confederate officers such as Lee and Grant and political leaders such as Lincoln and Davis, became more and more commonplace as the veterans, now in places of political and economic prominence, vied for a lasting place in the story of our nation's greatest conflict. Monuments extolling victory through grand arches and other forms long familiar throughout Europe were understandably more common in the north, but commemoration of victory (of perhaps a different sort) was no less sought out in the South—and to some degree, it was achieved there.

In chapter 5, Brown presents a useful discussion of the conflation of Civil War commemoration with that of World War I, which often receives little attention in most studies of monuments of the former. Brown concludes his book with an epilogue focusing on a new iconoclasm resulting from increasing opposition to existing Confederate monuments starting in the Jim Crow era but escalating rapidly with racially charged events of the current century. This resulted in "the most important season of American iconoclasm since the destruction of the equestrian statue of George III in 1776" (283).

Anyone interested in Civil War monuments as memory, especially those who think they have this figured out, need to read this impressive book. Brown's volume is at times tedious, and it dives deep into the art history aspects of monuments, but this is itself an oft-neglected value...