As the Civil War drew to a close, Americans revisited the concept of monuments and memorialization with a fresh perspective.
Cities and towns throughout Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area began constructing Civil War monuments. Many of these were statues depicting a kind of “citizen-soldier.” The Roxbury Soldier’s Monument, sculpted by Martin Milmore in 1867, was the first standing soldier monument of its kind. However, examples soon cropped up in the Heritage Area towns of Ashburnham, Townsend, and Fitchburg—the Fitchburg Civil War Memorial was also designed by Milmore.
Other monuments served a more practical purpose, such as Memorial Hall at the Lancaster Town Library (now Thayer Memorial Library) commemorating the town’s Civil War casualties. As the Soldiers’ Memorial Society in Boston put it, “Our monuments to our brothers who have served the country shall be in the hospitals, schools, and other beneficent institutions to which we can contribute in the region where they fought for us.”
The end of the Civil War also conjured a surge of monuments to the American Revolution and its participants. During this period, the last Revolutionary War veterans were dying. It’s likely that these monuments were an homage to this fading generation; however, revolutionary ideals were also a unifying salve for a war-torn and divided nation.
In his first inaugural address, a mere five weeks before the first battle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln stated: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and every patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” By the war’s end four years later, Americans seemed ready to embrace those patriotic ideals once again.
Monuments erected after the Civil War took a more holistic approach, often honoring veterans from multiple wars. Philosophical shifts also became apparent, honoring the dead of the “opposing force” as in the case of the Grave of British Soldiers near Concord’s North Bridge, or alluding sympathetically to the atrocities of war.
These monuments serve as a poignant reminder that although Reconstruction had begun, post-Civil War America would never be the same.