At the center of Public Square, the historic downtown center of Cleveland, the most impressive structure isn’t the skyscrapers around its edge but the small building topped by a 125-foot column and statue—the city’s monument to its role in the Civil War.
Ohio was a strongly Union state; many of its earliest white settlers were from New England and several of its cities had shown strong Abolitionist sentiment. During the war, numbers of important generals were Ohioans, and the state sent by far the highest proportion of any state of its population to the army—over 9,000 from Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County alone.
No surprise, then that it became a stronghold of the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans’ organization that at its peak had over 400,000 members, and no surprise that after the end of Reconstruction and the return of white planter power in the South there was a desire for a monument that would preserve their history.
Proposed in 1879, approved in 1888 and completed in time for dedication on July 4, 1894, it was paid for by a county-wide property tax that raised $280,000, or about $10 million in today’s dollars. Aside from the column and statue, the exterior has four statuary groups, one on each side, representing artillery and infantry (above) and cavalry and naval forces (below).
Inside, the walls are inscribed with the names, dates, ranks and units of the 9,000 who served. An exhibit tells the story of a teacher and his high school Advanced Placement class whose research led to the addition in 2019 of 107 names of African-Americans from Ohio who had served as part of the United States Colored Troops.
Around the center of the building are four large relief sculptures illustrating aspects of the war and Ohio’s part. The first, just below, shows major Ohio figures in the war, including the three wartime governors and two Union generals who later became President: Rutherford B. Hayes and James A. Garfield.
The next shows Emancipation, with Lincoln surrounded by Ohio Abolitionists including Salmon Chase, a member of Lincoln’s cabinet and Benjamin Wade, the Union general who captured New Orleans. It’s the only known statue of Lincoln holding a weapon; he has removed the shackles of the newly-freed man and hands him the rifle. The man is modeled on Dan Field, born a slave in Louisiana. He escaped to Ohio, and later became caretaker of the memorial.
The next group is, in a way, historical fiction. It shows Lincoln meeting with Grant, Sherman and other generals in the last days of the war, planning the final campaign. Lincoln certainly met with Grant and Sherman, but there was never a gathering of the entire group.
Perhaps the most unusual of the groupings is the last. Unlike the all-male scenes of the important and powerful, this one depicts only women, and it is positioned as the first one seen on entering. They are the women who organized the Soldiers’ Aid Society and the Northern Ohio Sanitary Commission to provide aid and nursing help to the military and to raise funds for the work. They raised an amount that would be well over $21 million today.
Other exhibits and artifacts are in display cases around the outer walls. Aside from items from the wall itself, there are programs and items from conventions of the GAR, and an eerily-prescient story of a veteran suffering from what we would call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder these days; he was only to function normally when with his dog, who had accompanied him throughout the war.
While the monument preserves one set of historic memories, it disrupted another. The Civil War monument was built on the site that had been occupied since 1860 by a marble statue honoring Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie. Over the next century, it was moved several times, and eventually replaced by a bronze cast as the marble suffered weather damage.
Very interesting article.