Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves ─ Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America

The United States of America originated as a slave society, holding
millions of Africans and their descendants in bondage, and remained so
until a civil war took the lives of a half million soldiers, some once
slaves themselves. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves explores
how that history of slavery and its violent end was told in public
space--specifically in the sculptural monuments that increasingly came
to dominate streets, parks, and town squares in nineteenth-century
America. Here Kirk Savage shows how the greatest era of monument
building in American history arose amidst struggles over race, gender,
and collective memory. As men and women North and South fought to
define the war's legacy in monumental art, they reshaped the cultural
landscape of American nationalism.

At the same time that the
Civil War challenged the nation to reexamine the meaning of freedom,
Americans began to erect public monuments as never before. Savage
studies this extraordinary moment in American history when a new
interracial order seemed to be on the horizon, and when public
sculptors tried to bring that new order into concrete form. Looking at
monuments built and unbuilt, Savage shows how an old image of black
slavery was perpetuated while a new image of the common white soldier
was launched in public space. Faced with the challenge of
Reconstruction, the nation ultimately recast itself in the mold of the
ordinary white man.

Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves,
the first sustained investigation of monument building as a process of
national and racial definition, probes a host of fascinating
questions: How was slavery to be explained without exploding the myth
of a "united" people? How did notions of heroism become racialized?
And more generally, who is represented in and by monumental space? How
are particular visions of history constructed by public monuments?
Written in an engaging fashion, this book will appeal to a wide range
of readers interested in American culture, race relations, and public
art.