Changing the Face of History

There is another aspect of the ruthless spirit of the day which holds nothing of the past sacred and secure. That is the modernization of Civil War memorials. Most of these erected thirty years ago, instead of showing the rugged, long-haired, bearded, loosely clad soldier of Civil War times represented the “Civil War” warrior to look like the trim National Guardsman of the Nineties, with short hair, curled mustache, and tight-fitting uniform. Those erected recently, take, for example, the Bucktail monument at Driftwood, and the Union League Club Regiment monument at Philadelphia, represent the Civil War soldier as short haired and clean shaven. The typical Civil War soldier was neither of these, even if a few shaved their whole faces once in six weeks. All let their hair stay long; that was part of the tradition of the war, while most of the boys allowed their beards to grow and have never shaved them off to this day. The short-haired, clean-shaved Civil War soldier never existed outside of the careless imagination of modern sculptors, and in only a single monument at Gettysburg Battlefield is the real soldier of the period depicted, that sole exception being in the bronze figure on the monument of the Fifth Minnesota Regiment. Even Violet Oakley has fallen into the popular error with her Lincoln and Meade murals in the Senate Chamber at Harrisburg, but she goes most artists one better by giving her clean-shaven soldier boys “Dutch cuts,” from which their locks were as free as their cheeks were of the razor. Why can’t real Civil War soldiers be put on these monuments, and not faces and costumes typical of 1915-1921—a crime in the eyes of historic exactitude. The Civil War soldier, South as well as North, was a Poilu, and the razor applied by sculptors half a century later has stripped him of one of his principal claims to individuality. As the noted French author, Maurice Barres, remarked, in speaking of the hairy French soldiers of the World War, “Their beards have been part of the war, and of our courage.” The bearded Civil War soldier bespoke his period, and told the story of camp and campaign, and any attempt to change him now makes the memorials historically ineffective. This is a phase of monument construction for our able State Art Commission to consider in co-operation with Dr. Donehoo’s Historical Commission. Clean-shaved Civil War soldiers are as historically out of place as if the typical American “Doughboy” of the World War were put on a pedestal with Lord Rocksavage side-whiskers or Lord Fauntleroy tresses. Let us be correct and exact in every detail, if we are to build for the ages to come!

H. W. S.