Part of the Civil War @ Charleston Website; 54th. Massachusetts Pages
Summary - This page gives an account of the dedication parade for the African American Civil War Memorial planned for Washington, DC in September 1996 by William Hamilton, an honorary member of the 54th. Massachusetts Reenactors and has an update on progress on the memorial since that time.
By William J. Hamilton, III (c) 1996
The 54th. Massachusetts Reenactors began their March to Washington in 1865. It is unfinished yet. We went to the Nation's Capital on a hot September Sunday to discover that the final march of history often toils on longer than expected. The long bus trip from the City where the Civil War started took us by interstate off ramps to most of the great battlefields of the war: Bentonville, Petersburg, Fredricksburg, Mannasas, Richmond and finally Washington, site of the dedication activities for the African American Civil War Memorial.
Sunday began humid and still in the shadow of the National Archives where we formed for the parade, two thin companies of black men and a few Anglo hangers on like myself. We were to march the last few blocks of the route of the Grand Review Victory parade of the Union Army at the end of the Civil War to begin the week long 1996 Memorial Dedication activities.
We arrived in D.C. before the monument we were to dedicate. The District Government is bankrupt. The African American Civil War memorial has had a major cost overrun. Work had not yet started on it. The organizers hoped that by sticking to the schedule for their parade they might bring themselves closer to building the monument. When the original parade was held down these same streets in 1865, General Sherman himself ordered that the black troops that had helped bolster a sagging war effort would not participate in the Federal Army's victory parade. Sherman may have been afraid the rabble of Washington, having been freed the daily ritual of reading the casualty lists at the War Department, would allow their Yankee racism to show, and reserve a hero's treatment for the white troops. Maybe he couldn't trust his own men to share the glory. Maybe he didn't want to.
It was an omission that didn't get corrected. It is even unmentioned in Foote's standard history of the war. Fifty years of popular movies showed us an all white Federal army, the saviour of grateful slaves. People forgot Wagner, Petersburg and Nashville.
The black soldiers who fought in the Civil War were middle aged when the Jim Crow laws were adopted across the United States. They rode to their veteran's reunions in the back sections of the streetcars. They were old men when their grandchildren fought in a segregated army during the First and Second World Wars. A few survived long enough to see President Truman desegregate the army, but they were beyond walking then. When they passed away, little more than the paper filed in the National Archives remembered their two hundred thousand names. In the end, most of their own descendants even forgot them as their great grandchildren rushed by their memory to adopt a fanciful African history with made up names. Nobody every gave them their parade.
Eventually political correctness, a deepening seriousness in African American studies and just plain boredom with hearing about Picket's charge again brought the public around to an interest in the black soldiers. There was a movie, some television documentaries and a flurry of publishing. Finally, realizing the omission, there was to be a monument and, to dedicate it, a parade down Sherman's old victory route.
It was for that parade that we formed up. Some members of the modern armed forces were in the lead. The reenactors of the 54th. Massachusetts and the other black reenactment units came second, with the Buffalo Soldiers and two thousand others behind.
It was not quite the grand parade with the cheering tens of thousands that Sherman orchestrated. Some men carried medals and insignia that had belonged to the original members of the 54th. Mass. At least one member something of the blood of one of those soldiers with him as he marched. Too few and too late, they shouldered their reproduction muskets for the parade that should have taken place so much earlier. Being a white private and no proper part of a black unit, I was assigned to escort the women who followed the men.
It is always amusing to watch the reaction of the public to black women in hoop skirts. It is even funnier to watch a white private try to get them to march in regular order. I did what I could as the parade moved out down Wisconsin Avenue.
The streets were sparse. Sunday morning is a poor time for a parade in D.C. Crowded tens of thousands had stood still and cheered for two full days when the Federal army had marched passed with its canons and bloody ambulance trains in 1864. A few hundred watched us. On one corner a black man sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the men marched by. The black troops took it up and the sound of it echoed against the empty stone buildings of the bureaucracy. The media videotaped furiously. It was the parade's Kodak moment.
We marched a mile to the White House and reviewed the rest of the Parade as it passed us marching towards the Lincoln Memorial. Sweating in the 90 degree heat and the blue wool uniforms, we saluted each passing unit until the sag wagon and Paramedic van had gone by.
There it was, a 131 year wait, a short parade, a small crowd and no monument. A noble effort made too late to reverse a historic injustice, no more comfort than the Pope issuing Joan of Ark a pardon. I was glad to be of Confederate heritage. The shoddiest Confederate Unit obtained better treatment from the survivors of its defeated cause than those black heros ever got from their victorious nation, powerful and rich though it became.
I and a member of the 54th. spent our last few hours in Washington sightseeing and learning a lesson from the City's other monuments.
I had not seen the Vietnam Memorial and we grew silent as we approached it. It is larger than you expect it to be. The names go on and on. When finally you are at the angle of that black stone chevron cut into the earth you begin to speak again, because you have to say something. Here was the war I grew up with as a child, a war we mostly tried to forget when I was a teenager and finally a pit of sacrifice we are learning to deal with whose heros we are now ready to know. The Vietnam veterans didn't get a parade either, but they do have their monument. Like the one planned for the black Civil War soldiers, it is covered with names.
Beside the Vietnam wall were the two statues, bigger than life, the way we ought to make our heros.
As a Confederate American I understand the Vietnam memorial naturally. The once heard objection that one doesn't build a monument to losers never made any sense to me. The South's loss in the Civil War taught her sons the severability of honor and victory. If all those court house monuments to Johnny Reb, up to and including Lee's mounted statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond, stand for anything, they stand for the nobility of human sacrifice at the nation's call regardless of the outcome. Though unrecognized then and still waiting for a monument now, the sacrifice of the black civil war soldiers was like that of Vietnam, generously presented to a nation not yet prepared to understand it.
Our stop at the Lincoln Memorial had its lesson too. I paused to read the words of his second Inaugural address, the one which included "with malice towards none." Being a loyal Southerner and an attorney, I had some problems with some of Lincoln's words between "And the war came." and that famous offer of forgiveness. It is hard to have two lawyers in the same room without an argument. It is harder to have an argument with a President made of marble. Since it was too late to win an argument with Lincoln, I studied his words. They have the prophetic ring of permanence. They had been written, read and chiseled into the stone of the monument with a clarity that assured that they could be understood a thousand years from now by someone no more capable of explaining the political structure of the United States than we are able to diagram the government of Rome without going to a book. If they still read English then, they will be able to understand it. History tells us that though the words appear obvious and inevitable to us today, Lincoln labored over them. If the story of the black civil war soldiers is yet untold, it is far more important that, when it finally is, it is made so clear and memorable that it will always be understood.
As we walked towards the bus, I received my last lesson from the City's most famous monument, the great granite obelisk that honors the father of our country. Halfway up the shaft, the shade of the stone changes. It is the place where the work halted due to the American Civil War. When it finally resumed years later, the color of the stone could not be matched. It was seen as a great disappointment when the monument was dedicated but most school children know the story and lesson of it today. It was the final lesson I needed to get over my disappointment with our little noticed parade to an unstarted monument. The nation struggles to remember, it commits errors, makes mistakes, falters and goes on. The Washington monument stalls. A nation pauses to sacrifice 630 thousand men in a Civil War. Finally, their sons join the new stone to the old to finish a monument to the hero of Valley Forge.
The concerns of the present jockey for the attention needed to answer the duties delegated us by history.
The black civil war reenactors will fight on, helping with fund raising, visiting schools, telling the story. People will remember. Pennies and grants will be collected and eventually the monument will be built. If we work on it, we will finish. Then their names will be remembered as were those of Vietnam with the enduring meaning of the marble speech which flanks Lincoln, delayed but completed like the Washington monument's varicolored stone.
About the Author- William Hamilton (hamilton@awod.com) is a Charleston Attorney and writer; unit legal counsel for the 54th. Massachusetts, Co. "I" Civil War Reenactors, a member of the 27th. SC Vol. Infantry Confederate reenactors and editor of the Civil War @ Charleston Internet web site.)Mr. Hamilton: I have already responded to BuffaloBen's inquiry, advising him to contact Mel Reid, a long standing member of Company B, who is most actively involved with the CWM and knows much about this activity, or knows who should be contacted on most any question. I would like to share with you my knowledge of the status of the actual construction of the memorial.
I have visited the studio of the sculptor Ed Hamilton in Louisville, Ky. Mr. Hamilton has formed most of the clay model of full-size figures. I have stood within the curvature with Mr. Hamilton and my wife (we have the appropriate snapshots to prove it). The female figures are about 5'-8" and the male figures are about 6-feet; the children are of course children size; the infant figure had not been constructed at the time. Mr. Hamilton has my Enfield musket which he has used as a model for purposes of determining its heft and balance as it would be in the hands of the soldier figures.
During our 2-hour visit with Mr. Hamilton, he informed us, using a slide presentation, on how memorials and statues are constructed at the foundry where they are cast from the sculptors clay model, including the approximation of time (4 or 5 months) for such work. The presentation he used was of his sculpture of Booker T. Washington for Hampton University, a 9 foot figure on a 6 foot base, and a large statue of Joe Louis for the City of Detroit. The point is, the construction of the memorial by the sculptor is in hand. The construction of the site on which it is to be set has been proceeding more slowly. Contracts were being let for its various aspects.
Fund raising continues to be troublesome. I would offer that we all should proceed, on faith, with the reality of the memorial, in the same manner as financial contibutors are being asked. General Colin Powell, who was the Chairman of the effort to establish the memorial to the Buffalo Soldiers at Ft. Leavenworth, KS, is also a contributor to the African-American Civil War Memorial.