Whats Your Opinion of Battlefield Monuments?

[samgrant]

I'm with you JMan. Leave the battlefields alone, or at least tone down the monuments, like to markers set into the ground(?).

But put more statues and such in other places.

I'm particularly fond of the Grant on a Horse statue in Lincon Park in Chicago.







Well that's just the top, statue part, and not from the best side. Check out this photo of the whole monument:

http://www.city-data.com/picfilesv/picv11085.php

The monument was financed by public subscriptions for 10 cents a piece. I'd say they got their 2 nickles worth.

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[hoosier]

I can remember visiting Gettysburg for the first time.

I knew, of course, from my history lessons in school that there had been a big Civil War battle there.

But when I came over Herr's Ridge west of town and suddenly saw monument after monument stretching away to the left and right, it really brought it home to me that something very, very significant had happened there.

I could have read a thousand books on the subject and none of them would ever have had the impact on me that the sight of all those monuments did.

I agree with ewc. I'm all in favor of the monuments.

[Freddy]

Here is Colonel Robert Gould Shaw with the 54th MA in front of the MA statehouse. Click on thumbnail.
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[matthew mckeon]

For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell(1964)

"Reliqunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are broaded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. Once morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead,
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
The old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion, frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
drow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns...

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "n-rs."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows HIroshima boiling

Over a Mosler safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

[samgrant]

Matt, that's a fine monument that takes up no physical space.

[J_Man0507]

Amen to that sam. Matt, I think you are right that Gettysburg is special as a place that they chose to memorialized their cause. I agree one hundred and ten percent. But like I said, nothing ostentacious. A statue, a small marker is fine by me, nothing too ginormous. I like a field like Antietam; quiet and peaceful.

[larry_cockerham]

Originally Posted by Dred

Sounds like an excellent idea... I would help but I'm nowhere near anywhere I could get some good pictures. Let me know if this ever pans out

If you'all take plastic, we have a strange vinyl depiction of General Nathan Bedford Forrest here in Nashville.

[larry_cockerham]

Gentlemen, I invite you to Shiloh here in Tennessee. Monuments, yes, but a place of peace. Many of the battlefields are managed as they were in 1862, not so many interruptions and a feel for the landscape of death.

Chickamauga is a bit more cluttered. The highway down the middle isn't much help either, though I heard a rumor that the highway might be moving.

At Franklin, they built a Hardees and a Tractor Supply. The Pizza Hut is gone, now a tiny monument to the death site of General Patrick Cleburne. A start.

[Ozark Iron John]

I know this is off track, but in downtown Lexington, Kentucky on the grounds of the Fayette County Courthouse stands an equestrian stature of Gen. John H. Morgan.

[Ozark Iron John]

In Richmond, Virginia there's two. Gen. Robert E. Lee; and



Gen. J.E.B. Stuart.