Above: Shelby, North Carolina's Confederate Soldier Memorial (1906-07), Marble and Granite Works, Builder; Charles M. Walsh, Builder; American Bronze Company, Foundry. The statue and pedestal cost $2500. A copy is in Beaufort, North Carolina; it was erected in 1898. They were manufactured by American Bronze Co, the Chicago branch of Monumental Bronze Company (1875-1912). They altered the uniform details and sold them as "Infantrymen" in the North.
...the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017
...A large share of Confederate statues are of nameless, generic soldiers, like the one the protesters took down in Durham. Towns erected them in the early 20th century, decades after the Civil War, because their Confederate mythologies helped to justify Jim Crow laws in the South that oppressed black citizens, Taber Andrew Bain, a librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University, pointed out on Twitter.
The statues are often called the “Silent Sentinel,” “Single Soldier,” or something similar, and depict a regular soldier in Confederate uniform staring solemnly into the distance, at ease, with feet spread—a stance called “parade rest,” according to art historian Lola Arellano-Fryer, who wrote about the statues for Hyperallergic. The statutes proliferated specifically because they were cheap.
To sculpt a statue in marble would have been time-consuming and prohibitively expensive for small towns in the early 1900s. But northern foundries that worked in cast bronze or zinc could churn them out quickly and sell them at much lower costs.
One of the leading manufacturers was the Monumental Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, which specialized in a cast zinc it called “white bronze” (a light gray or pale blue color). In 2015, the Associated Press dug into the company’s history: It sold life-size statues for just $450 and larger eight-and-a-half foot versions for $750. Commissioning marble or granite statues, meanwhile, would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s like going to Wal-Mart,” Timothy S. Sedore, who wrote An Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments, told the news wire. “It’s less expensive.”
Sarah Beetham, an art historian at the University of Delaware and an expert on soldier monuments, explained to the AP that as many as half of these citizen-solider statues were in the “Silent Sentinel” style. Southern citizens felt personally connected to them; they commemorated all Confederate soldiers, including their family members who may have fought for the Confederacy.
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