As anyone who ever saw the Nathan Bedford Forrest memorial formerly displayed near Nashville alongside Interstate 65—with its triumphant portrayal of one of Reconstruction’s true villains—can attest, monument-making in the former Confederacy and the Union was very different. Forrest’s memorial is an example of the “autocratic model of private patronage” which dictated the form and shape of Confederate memorials, whereas Union monuments typically involved city governments, public forums, and the press (4–5). The building of Union monuments in New York City is the focus of Akela Reason’s book, Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York. Reason’s analysis not only shows how these monuments were created but also how politics, political ambitions, corruption, and infighting between public organizations dictated what got built—and where it got built—rather than the soldiers and sailors they commemorated. While Reason argues for the overwhelming role of politics and corruption in shaping most monument decisions, her most interesting passages for Civil War memory scholars reveal the tension between these forces and the more progressive (and laudatory) interpretations of individual artists.

Each chapter of this book focuses on a different monument in the city. Chapter one looks at the use of General William Jenkins Worth’s monument, built in 1857, as a de facto Civil War monument in the absence of any other post-Civil War. Chapter two explores the first monuments built in cemeteries: the standing soldier monuments in Calvary Cemetery and Green-Wood Cemetery. Chapter three examines the standing soldier’s transition from a standard cemetery memorial to an acceptable public sphere monument with the building of the Seventh Regiment memorial in Central Park and the Admiral John Farragut monument in Madison Square Park. Chapters four and five document the long process (nineteen years in total) of erecting the Brooklyn Soldiers and Sailors monument, while chapter six focuses on the creation of the New York Soldiers and Sailors monument.

Perhaps the most surprising part of Reason’s narrative is the outsized role that individual sculptors and architects played in deciding how the Union war effort should be commemorated and, effectively, what the public memory of the Civil War should be. While some designs were shaped by the public and politicians, many artists, such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick MacMonnies, operated independently of such influences. These artists were aware that public oversight of their designs would likely result in objections and the removal of depictions of Black soldiers and citizens in favor of more conservative images of white paternalism and childlike Black men. But for those able to single-handedly direct the “ideological vision” of the monuments, their remit allowed them to construct their monument in their own interpretation of the Union war effort (6).

One example of this influence is in the building of the Admiral Farragut monument by Saint-Gaudens in 1881. It included two relief figures that represented courage and loyalty: qualities which Saint-Gaudens believed were foundational to Farragut’s career and his decision, as a southerner, to serve the Union. As Reason points out, the inclusion of the loyalty relief “made a pointed statement, not always realized in Union monuments, about the South’s betrayal of the nation” (103). This theme was further emphasized at the monument’s unveiling when Joseph H. Choate, a prominent New York lawyer, contrasted Farragut’s loyalty with Robert E. Lee’s treason, praising the former for refusing to “betray his country” as Lee did (113). The monument, and the unveiling, indicated that even in 1881 many white northerners rejected the Lost Cause notion of equal honor in the Civil War.

Statues like those by Saint-Gaudens and others helped to embolden other artists to foreground emancipationist narratives of the war. Sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward and architect Richard Morris Hunt’s proposal for the Civil War monument in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, for example, depicted a freed African American in a proud, non-deferential position—a controversial break with the more conventional (and paternalistic) style of positioning freed people as subordinate to their white liberators. Ward also included a frieze dedicated to women’s work in the war, another uncommon element in Union monuments, which pushed the limits of tolerance. Ward’s design, initially accepted by the monument committee, was never realized, due to fundraising difficulties and the growing reticence of the committee, but its replacement, which was ultimately built, shared the original design’s boundary-pushing ethos. Sculptor Frederic MacMonnies’s monument featured a “crouching black soldier” who knelt “with a pistol in his hand” (188). MacMonnies’s ability to include an armed Black man reflected the advance work of ambitious sculptors like Ward and Saint-Gaudens, the latitude provided by the monument committee, and perhaps the inchoate support of the state’s new Republican legislature. Reason’s reconstruction of this context illuminates how Civil War memory in the North could take more progressive forms than those preferred by the majority of white audiences.

This ability of sculptors and architects to challenge mainstream acceptability in their designs in the face of a conservative public and politicians is the biggest revelation of Reason’s book. Corruption and political machinations, especially in New York City, are nothing new (although less well-known in the remit of Union monument building). In fact, some of the monuments covered in this volume took decades to build due to this corruption and political scheming. But it is the ability of the sculptors and architects to mold both public opinion and the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which is the most insightful part of Reason’s book.