Customer Reviews

Testament to Union: Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C.

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As a citizen working in the District of Columbia, and an avid walker, I have been fascinated with the vast array of statues present virtually everywhere in the city. I have been searching for a source of information that could help me with learning about the history of the pieces. While I was looking for something a little less specific - or I should say, more far reaching (there's a lot, a whole lot of statues in D.C.) than the subject of this book - what is here is fascinating and very informative. I have spoken with some tour guides that visit the statues with tourists, and some of the information that they share about the statues and sites differs slightly than what is written here - but I am so confident in the thoroughness of Ms. Jacobs' research - I am sure these guides are speaking the embellishment of popular myth. I would love to share some of this elaboration with the author to confirm this notion.

As a resident of Capitol Hill, I found this book useful and informative. I, for one, had no idea that the Congressional Cemetery just a few blocks from my home contained the first Civil War era monument erected. Nor did I know that the first major Lincoln Memorial was right here on the hill.

The book is fascinating and can provide either a brief, or detailed, look at the monuments.

The only thing the book is lacking is a MAP to help the unitiated into the world of DC's complicated streets.

This fascinating and valuable book describes the 41 Civil War monuments in the District of Colombia, nearby Maryland, and northern Virginia -- the equestrian statues on Washington's traffic circles, the "Emancipation" statue of Lincoln and a freed slave, Arlington Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, the "Arsenal Monument" to 21 women killed in 1864 while making cartridges for the Union Army, and many others. It's both a guidebook and a history.

In each chapter, author Katherine Allamong Jacob covers the event or individual honored, the movement to erect a monument, the selection of a sculptor, design and construction, and the dedication ceremony. She introduces artists once widely known and honored -- Daniel Chester French, Felix de Weldon, Gutzon Borglum, Henry Merwin Shrady, and Vinnie Ream Hoxie among them -- to a new generation.

Considered together, the 41 chapters add up to a long essay on historical memory. "Statues were, and are, more than the sum of their metal and stone parts," wrote Jacob in the introduction. "Public monuments yield cultural power. Each one carries a heavy load of invisible ideological baggage. Mundane as they may appear, ubiquitous as they may be, public monuments constitute serious cultural authority ... they impose a memory of an event or individual in the public landscape that orders our lives. These monuments confer a legitimacy upon the memory they embody.... And by imprinting one memory, they erase others."

The Civil War was a defining event, breaking American history into a "before" and "after." Every American needs to understand the war's origins in slavery, expressed in sectionalism, and the political, economic, legal, and social dimensions of how the Union and the founding ideals of the nation were challenged by secession. Studying these monuments provides a lens.

Every American needs to understand the course of the war -- its events from Fort Sumter to Gettysburg to Appomattox. It was noble and vile, the last of the old wars and the first of the new. It chewed up lives on a scale unprecedented in history. It bought out the best and worst in men. These monuments can help visitors know more of the conflict.

And all Americans need to understand the war's legacy -- the changes it worked in American history. This means Americans need to consider how the war has been remembered and interpreted. It is in this last area that this volume is so valuable. When most of the monuments were unveiled, for instance, the history of slavery, secession, and Jim Crow had been muted in a "lost cause" narrative. "Testament to Union" helps reveal the treatment of the war by subsequent generations.

In a book full of instructive stories, this reader's favorite comes from Jacobs' narrative of the dedication of the "Nuns of the Battlefield" monument, opposite St. Mathew's Cathedral, in 1924, close to 60 years after the war ended.

"One of the first speakers noted the poignancy of the fact that so many years had elapsed before the sisters were honored that not one who had nursed the Civil War soldiers remained to hear the tributes," she wrote. "From out of the crowd of hundreds of nuns seated in front of the platform arose a 'surviving nun of the battlefield,' who 'walked stooped and with head bowed up to the platform to thunderous applause.' After a hurried consultation, Archbishop Curley of Baltimore announced that the elderly nun was Sister Magdeline of the Sisters of Mercy. She received a long ovation."

Oh, to have been there!

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What a terrific book! The pictures and informations are great,
well-organized, and make the monuments easily accessible. Every
student of the Civil War living in the DC/Northern Virginia/Maryland area should have a copy of this book. The photos alone are really worth the cost of the book. Wonderful!