The nameless figure, known to many as the Silent Sentinel, gazes over town squares and courthouse steps in dozens of Southern towns — but not just there.
Many of the South’s Silent Sentinels turn out to be identical to the statues of Union soldiers that decorate hundreds of public spaces across the North. Identical, but for one detail: On the soldier’s belt buckle, the “U.S.” is replaced by a “C.S.” for “Confederate States.”
It turns out that a campaign in the late 19th century to memorialize the Civil War by erecting monuments was not only an attempt to honor Southern soldiers or white supremacy. It was also a remarkably successful bit of marketing sleight of hand in which New England monument companies sold the same statues to towns and citizens groups on both sides of the Civil War divide.
It took some years before Southern customers caught on and sought to buy statues of soldiers who were more obviously Grays rather than Blues. Statue manufacturers eventually gave their Confederate models a slouch hat instead of the Union topper that looked more like a baseball cap, and a short shell jacket rather than the North’s greatcoat, and a bedroll to replace the Union man’s knapsack.
But dozens of statues North and South are all but precise copies.
“I’ve spent hours staring at the creases on their pants and, Yankee or Rebel, they’re often exactly the same,” said Sarah Beetham, an art historian at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts who has studied the mass production of Civil War monuments.
Indeed, the Union and Confederate versions of the soldier statue were probably constructed from the same prefabricated parts.
The meaning of a memorial is never set in stone. The people who commission it might have one message in mind, but those who view the monument in generations that follow may draw entirely different lessons. One generation’s hero becomes another generation’s symbol of inhumanity — one reason Americans eventually turned away from statues of great men on horses, instead choosing stones decorated with lists of those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
In the case of the Confederate statues that have turned into powerful and, to many, disturbing symbols more than 150 years after the war, the Southern women who paid for most of the statues between 1880 and 1920 said they wanted a place to honor their fallen husbands and fathers. But the communities that erected those statues were also looking for a way to assert their doctrine of white supremacy at a time when they were passing Jim Crow laws to codify the separation of the races.