Memorials and Monuments

The Early Republic

The contrast between monuments from the Seven Years' War and those commemorating the American Revolution illustrate this tension. After repeal of the Stamp Act refreshed colonists' eagerness to celebrate the ascendant British Empire, in 1770 the New York legislature installed a [Page 485]gilded equestrian monument of George III atop a marble pedestal in New York City, an echo of the Roman practice that marked the provinces with equestrian statues of the emperor, the only person who could be thus memorialized. Patriots rejected that tradition by toppling the New York statue soon after issuance of the Declaration of Independence and melting it down to make ammunition. Monuments to George Washington demonstrated the struggle to imagine an alternative iconography. A 1783 congressional resolution to place an equestrian statue of the commander of the Continental Army in the new capital was soon disregarded. The cornerstone for what became the Washington Monument was not laid until 1848, and the structure was not completed until 1884. For years the most prominent tribute to Washington was Horatio Greenough's colossal portrait statue outside the U.S. Capitol (1840), controversial for its use of classical dress but thoroughly conventional in depict-ing the general surrendering his sword after the success of the Revolution, highlighting the surrender of military authority to civil authority.

When equestrian monuments began to appear in the United States in the 1850s, Americans remained wary of their ideological connotations. Thomas Crawford's design for a monument to Washington in Richmond (1858) adapted from the Berlin monument to Frederick the Great the format of a mounted military leader surrounded by representative fig-ures of his era, but the sculptor was careful to explain that he depicted Washington pointing forward not as an act of com-mand but as an exhortation to his soldiers. The same demo-cratic emphasis was even more evident in monuments to the other American war hero honored by antebellum equestrian monuments, Andrew Jackson, most notably in Clark Mills's statue (1853) in Washington, D.C., depicting Jackson as an embodiment of nature rather than military discipline.

The United States took more readily to another European commemorative trend, the emergence during the wars of the French Revolution of monuments to citizen–sol-diers who sacrificed their lives for the nation. Early examples included the obelisk dedicated in 1799 to residents of Lexington, Massachusetts, who died in the opening engage-ment of the American Revolution; the monument placed in Washington in 1806 honoring six naval officers who died on the Barbary Coast; and the memorial installed in New York in 1808 to Revolutionary martyrs who died on prison ships in New York Harbor. By 1860, about 50 Revolutionary War bat-tlefields featured monuments that marked the historic sites for visitors and honored the dead. The most important of these was the Bunker Hill Monument at Charlestown, Massachusetts, the site of spectacular ceremonies featuring widely circulated speeches by Daniel Webster at both the laying of the cornerstone in 1825 and the dedication in 1843. Here, too, the selection of a funereal obelisk for the design partly reflected a determination to avoid the imperial associ-ations of a column.

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