| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kirk Savage. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1997. Pp. xiv, 270. $35.00.

In his brilliant study of public monuments to slavery, emancipation, and common soldiers, Kirk Savage captures the tragedy of the Civil War era. His central argument is that the effort to erect a monument to emancipation was a cultural enactment of the political tasks of Reconstruction. He concludes that the failure of Reconstruction was not simply political, but a cultural failure to give imaginative form to our best ideals. With the terrible finality of public sculpture, the Freedmen's Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Thomas Ball, 1876) entrapped the freed, kneeling beneath the commanding figure of Abraham Lincoln and passively receiving the gift of emancipation. A product of a series of competitions, the Freedman's Memorial belied the national commitment to racial equality. A haunting photograph that Savage reproduces, of a black youth staring up at the image of white dominance, captures the gulf between aspiration and commemoration. . . .

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