The Single Soldier Monument | Civil War Memorial

In small towns throughout New England stand statues of a Civil War soldier, memorials to the nation’s deadliest conflict, which ended 150 years ago this April. We see them everywhere, yet they are nearly invisible. On hundreds of village greens across new england, in hundreds of city parks, before hundreds of libraries and town halls, stands a figure known by all but hardly thought of, hardly seen perhaps, except on occasions calling for official reminiscence. It’s not surprising that this individual would be widely overlooked. He doesn’t have a lot to say, and with the passing of time—time measured in generations—he becomes, so to speak, lighter, thinner, nearly invisible. Still, quiet though his life has been, this year he’ll be busy. It was 150 years ago this April 9, in a house at a dusty crossroads in rural Virginia, that the Civil War ended. Even all these decades later, that struggle remains, for better and for worse, the sovereign event in American history. Recent research has concluded that the death toll in the Civil War has long been undercounted. In fact, it far exceeded the number who have died in all other American conflicts put together, from the Revolutionary War of 1775–83, through both World Wars and the Vietnam War, to the latest campaigns in the Middle East. As many as 800,000, on both sides, died in the war of 1861–65. The federal union of the states ordained by the Constitution was upheld, and chattel slavery in the Southern states was abolished, but at an overwhelming, unbearable cost in suffering and loss. After 150 years, what remains of that climactic ordeal? In human terms, nothing. The last reliably authenticated veteran of the Civil War died in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1956, age 109. The children of the soldiers and sailors who did the fighting are long gone, and their grandchildren are precious few. Nor are more recent successors ageless. I am a Civil War great-grandson on both sides, and I can testify that even the fourth generation, though still numerous, is getting more than a little gray at the muzzle. Of course it is. Flesh and bone and mind—whatever undergoes experience and remembers—eventually dwindle, fade, and disappear. What does not, what endures, are iron and bronze, marble and granite. Hence, the unfailing presence all over our region of memorials to local men who served in the war, in particular the ubiquitous “Single Soldier,” a freestanding figure of a Civil War infantryman cast in stone or bronze, equipped with the familiar kepi-style cap, a coat or cape, a cartridge box and bayonet on his belt, and a rifle. If you live in New England, then at least one of these soldiers is your neighbor. I have long been a keen student, a kind of collector, of these memorial military men. Driving around, I keep an eye out for them, and when I find one, I try to stop and pay my respects. It turns out that there’s quite a lot to learn about our ancient veterans. This silent army is like its living original in that the soldiers look very much the same from one to another, but aren’t, though the differences among them are subtle. All were modeled on a famous figure carved in granite as a war memorial by a Hartford, Connecticut, company and placed in the 1870s on the Antietam battlefield. Most are life-size, perhaps a little less by the physical standard of men today, who are on average taller than they were in the mid-19th century. These memorial soldiers are placed in at least half a dozen different attitudes, but all strike a stance that is some variation of what the Civil War armies’ drill-field manuals called “parade rest.” In this position, the soldier often faces squarely front, his weight evenly on both feet, his boots a couple of feet apart. He holds his rifle, which comes about to his throat, aligned with the vertical center of his body, its butt stock grounded between his boots. He grasps the rifle in both hands somewhere along the forward quarter of the barrel’s length; sometimes the right hand is uppermost, sometimes the left. So placed, the soldier gazes resolutely before him.

In another, better, version of the Single Soldier, he stands a little differently, with his left foot advanced a few inches, the knee bent, his weight on the other foot. His rifle’s butt rests not in front of his body but off to his right; the rifle is at an angle to the soldier, who holds it with both hands near the barrel’s end, left hand on top, and seems to rest against it or lean on it somewhat. These more-relaxed soldiers show far more life than the others. The comparatively rigid frontal figures have little feeling or vitality. They have an archaic presence; they might be on the Acropolis. The slightly oblique soldier, however, bears a real expression. He’s not looking straight ahead, but a little to his left. He looks thoughtful, and he looks tired. Also in this variation, the Single Soldier seems to wear a stiff, trimmed beard (it can be hard to see). The beard, and his somber attitude, make the soldier, in what was probably not a chance resemblance, look a little like a shorter Abraham Lincoln. Single Soldiers were carved in granite, marble, or brownstone and cast in bronze or zinc. Many of them were put up in the 1880s and ’90s. Some were commissioned as original works, but most were mass-produced, off-the-rack items ordered from various stonecutters, metal foundries, and ceme­tery monument dealers in Vermont, Connecticut, Massa­chusetts, and New York. One supplier of Civil War memorial soldiers was the Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts, a venerable firm that began as a toolmaker in the 1790s and by about 1835 had become the first successful commercial bronze foundry in the country. Beginning in about 1835, Ames established itself as a supplier of bronze products of many kinds, for many uses. During the war, the company was well placed for prosperity. Ames made the church bells to summon the volunteers to service. Then, when the fighting was well under way, Ames made the cannons that did the killing. At last, when the war was over, Ames made the memorials to the fallen. You could say that Ames had the action pretty well sewn up. Perhaps it’s some such thought that makes the Single Soldier look so pensive as he stands his silent guard. Or perhaps his thoughts are elsewhere. Perhaps he’s pondering not the value of his Ames shares, but his own invisibility—or, as you might say, the mortality of his immortality in Ames’s bronze. In the park, on the green, in front of the courthouse, is the soldier remembered? Hardly—he’s part of the background. The village squirrels chase up and down the length of his rifle, the village sparrows perch on his shoulder, the village dogs visit. His boot anchors one end of the rope that holds up the tent that keeps the rain off the church bake sale. The soldier is ever-present but ever-unseen, ever-ignored. After all, war memorials don’t work, do they? Memorials in general don’t work. Can’t be helped, the soldier might reflect. “Old men forget,” Shakespeare’s youthful captain-king, Henry V, tells his followers, “yet all shall be forgot.” Be it so. In the meantime, to each his post of duty.