We have had many discussions about taking down statues and monuments to the heroes of the confederacy.
My question is why didnt the people of the north make a huge mountain carving to Union heroes like Grant, Sherman, Meade, and Farrugut?
Yes, their are a few statues to union generals but not near as many as there are in the south to confederate.
Any ideas?
The Union itself is a monument to those who fought on the Union side. Besides, almost none of the Confederate statues were put up to honor Confederates, at least as the primary goal. They were put up to intimidate blacks and remind them that they are second class citizens in their own country, many years after the Civil War ended, when black rights started making progress. There wasn’t a similar ulterior motive for Union statues.
Two-thirds of the statues of Confederate heroes were erected between 1900 and 1940. This was just after the votes of African-Americans were sufficiently suppressed in the southern U.S. to allow cities and states to vote to do this. (After 1940, there was a sufficient civil rights movement to make it hard to do this. Besides, the U.S. was fighting a nation that was killing an ethnic group purely out of prejudice. It had become harder to defend the Confederacy as a wonderful thing.) The statues weren’t about fond memories of the Old South. They were about telling African-Americans in the southern U.S., “You thought the Confederacy lost the war. Well, guess what? We can still pass whatever laws we feel like.” On the other hand, why would the northern states want to erect statues to Union heroes? They had nothing to prove. They had won the war and now had no sentimental attachment to it.
There are statues of General Custer at West Point and his hometown of Monroe Michigan. And people are not happy about him being honored for being an Indian Fighter. Sherman was an Indian Fighter as well, a fairly brutal one IIRC.
Maybe they didn’t want to rub it in.
I’ve never been there, but Wikipedia lists a large number of monuments at Gettysburg, on both sides of the conflict.
You might be joking, but unfortunately there is a strong element of truth to this. The North neutered its own efforts at reconstruction in the South for exactly that reason, a mistake we are still dealing with today. Maybe “rubbing it in” with some statues of the victors all over the South would have helped matters; instead we ended up where we are now, with a South that seems convinced it did nothing wrong and was the victim in the war.
We could rectify this. Perhaps a large statue of Sherman in central Atlanta?
The Lincoln memorial in Washington, D.C., is a beautiful, awesome, poignant, powerful, and emotionally resonant structure. I don’t see a need to dilute its power by repeating it all over the place.
It’s fit that it’s not a soldier being commemmorated. I don’t like celebrating generals and soldiers. The use of violence and killing is abhorrent. The fact that it might sometimes necessary is unfortunate. It should not be celebrated. People in arms should never be the subject of monuments.
That’s a fantastic idea, though I would go with civil rights icons instead of union soldiers. Replace every Confederate statue with a civil rights statue.
The other thing is that many of the battles were on in the south and in my experience, many of the war memorials are at battlesites.
From what I have seen in many Ohio towns is either a statue of a local civil war hero, like Generals Custer or Grant or a general statue of a union soldier holding a rifle with a bayonet. Either in the center of town somewhere or in a cemetery in the veterans area.
In some ways the Union didn’t win anything, and they lost a lot. They didn’t win the war so much as just stopping the fire in their own house by the use of fire. The stopped the destruction of their home by destroying their home. Then ended up with far less and a broken burnt down country. Not exactly anything to celebrate, it was a very sad time were they had to kill their own citizens.
In some ways the Confederacy won something. The Confederacy, though lost it’s chance for independence, did show the extent which they were willing to go to get their way, and even in military defeat in rebellion, still were able to honor their cause and restrict the amount of freedoms that blacks had.
So who really won this ‘war’ the side that had their country burnt down and gained zero new land, or the side that was able to honor their war heros and preserve a aspect of their way of life by the use of force? It may depend on how it is phrased, such as the north won the civil war and preserved the union, but the south won the war of northern aggression preserving much of their way of life and core values that was under attack from the north.
Statues of slave owners will be removed from Illinois capitol grounds.
Is that north enough?
Confederate monuments where mostly erected in the 1900’s largely due to groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy, who were trying to use “Lost Cause” nonsense to prevent racism from being marginalized. Making celebrations of the Confederacy as noticeable and permanent as possible helped bring in large numbers of people to push back against a rethinking of race relations in America.
There was obviously no equivalent motive for the North, so there was less reason to build monuments to Union generals.
This is the answer.
And, in any case, there are statues of Union generals:
US Grant (this one got toppled, but it was there): San Francisco protesters topple statues of Ulysses Grant and other slave owners | San Francisco | The Guardian
George McClellan: Equestrian statue of George B. McClellan - Wikipedia
Nathaniel Banks:
Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks - Waltham, MA - U.S. Civil War General Statues on Waymarking.com
The North mostly named streets and schools after northern heroes, far as I can tell. There is a lot of that here in Portland; Burnside, Couch, Grant, Sherman, etc.
It could also be, just my opinion, that the guy who could carve a mountain, Borglund, after he finished Stone Mountain, got busy carving Mt. Rushmore. He was also asked to do the Crazy Horse monument but he died about that time.
Our city has both a Lee and Grant boulevard.