Symbol of Indiana: The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument and a State’s Memory of the Union

On the morning of May 15, 1902, Indianapolis gave its whole day to a monument. The dedication began at eight o’clock with a parade of flags and of veterans — old men who had soldiered in the war with Mexico, the far larger body of those who had served the Union from 1861 to 1865, and the most recent veterans, home only a few years from the war with Spain. The procession moved through a city that had set its ordinary business aside to watch. The day closed, that evening, with fireworks.

The master of ceremonies was General Lew Wallace — Hoosier soldier, the commander whose service at Shiloh and whose delaying stand at Monocacy this series has already taken up, and by 1902 the author of Ben-Hur and the most famous living Indianan. Wallace presided over the formal dedication of a structure that had been thirteen years in the building.

What the crowd had come to see rose 284 feet and 6 inches above the circular commons at the center of the city — a shaft of Indiana limestone carrying groups of statuary at its base and a single bronze figure at its peak. It was, and it remains, the largest outdoor memorial in the state. The streets of Indianapolis are measured outward from its base.

The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument was built to hold Indiana’s memory of the Civil War. This post is the first of a four-part Memorial Day weekend arc in the Hoosier Union History series — four posts on the monuments, the cemeteries, and the observances through which Indiana keeps faith with its Union dead. The arc begins with the largest of them, standing where the whole city can see it.

The decision to build

The monument began as an act of the legislature. In 1887 — a generation after Appomattox — the Indiana General Assembly appropriated $200,000 toward a state memorial to its soldiers and sailors and created a Monument Commission to see the work done. The timing was not accidental. The men who had served the Union were entering middle and old age; the Grand Army of the Republic, the great veterans’ organization of the Union, was near the height of its membership and its influence; and the conviction had settled across the North that the war’s generation should not be allowed to pass without a permanent monument to what it had done.

Indiana chose the most prominent ground it had. The site was the circular plot at the exact center of Indianapolis, ground the city’s original plan had set aside at its heart. To build the monument there was to place the memory of the war not at the edge of the capital but at its center, on the spot from which the city’s streets are measured.

Symbol of Indiana

The commission did not confine itself to a local design. It opened an international competition, and the winning entry came from Bruno Schmitz, an architect from Berlin who would later be associated with several of the great national monuments of imperial Germany. Schmitz submitted his design under the title Symbol of Indiana. It was the commission’s unanimous choice.

The cornerstone was laid on August 22, 1889. The structure then took more than a decade to complete — the dedication of 1902 came thirteen years after the cornerstone and fifteen years after the legislature’s first appropriation. The final cost of design and construction was $598,318, well above the original grant; the difference was met by further state appropriations across the years of the work.

The finished shaft stands 284 feet 6 inches tall. For a sense of the scale: that is roughly twenty feet shorter than the Statue of Liberty measured from the ground to the tip of the torch — a comparison Indianans have been making, with some civic pride, since the monument was new.

The figures in stone and bronze

A monument of that scale is not a bare shaft. The commission and Schmitz brought in Rudolph Schwarz, an Austrian-born sculptor, to give the base its statuary. Schwarz carved two large limestone groupings — known as War and Peace — and four heroic military figures, one each for the artillery, the cavalry, the infantry, and the navy. He also executed the monument’s bronze entrance doors. The figures are not portraits of generals. They are the branches of the service, rendered as the ordinary soldier and sailor who filled them.

At the peak of the shaft stands the figure that gives the monument its silhouette: a bronze statue thirty-eight feet tall, designed by the sculptor George Brewster. The figure is usually called Victory. Brewster gave her wings, in the classical manner, but he also gave her the attributes of an American Liberty — a sword for justice, a torch for what the period called the light of civilization, and an eagle. From the street far below, she reads as a single small bright shape at the top of the column.

What the monument was for

The monument honors, first, the Indiana veterans of the Civil War. It also honors the state’s veterans of the earlier and later wars within the reach of its 1902 dedication. But its scale, its date, and the generation that built it leave no doubt about its center of gravity. It is a Civil War monument. It was raised by the people who had lived through that war, and many of its veterans were still alive to stand in the crowd on dedication day.

What Indiana chose to memorialize was not a battle and not a general. The monument names no single field, and it crowns itself with no commander. Its statuary is the artilleryman, the cavalryman, the infantryman, the sailor — the citizen-soldier, the Hoosier who left a farm or a shop or a classroom and served. The state took that figure, multiplied it into stone and bronze, and set it at the precise center of its capital city.

The grandest of many

The Indianapolis monument was the largest expression of an impulse that was not confined to the capital. In the same decades, county after county across Indiana raised its own soldiers’ monument — most often on the courthouse square, the civic center of the county seat. These were smaller works: a granite shaft, frequently topped by the figure of a single standing infantryman at rest, his hands folded over the muzzle of his musket. The Grand Army of the Republic and local memorial associations drove the fundraising, and the dedications drew the veterans and their families the way the Indianapolis dedication drew the state.

Seen against that background, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument is the apex of a pyramid rather than a solitary gesture. Indiana did not build one monument to the Union. It built a great many, at every level of its civic life, and it set the largest of them where the largest number of Hoosiers would pass it. The courthouse-square monuments often name their counties’ dead on bronze tablets; the capital monument speaks for the whole. Together they form a single statewide act of memory, carried out across roughly forty years.

Stone, and what stone cannot hold

A monument of limestone and bronze does one thing very well: it does not forget. It will stand at the center of Indianapolis long after the last person who knew a Civil War veteran is gone. But a monument is also a general thing. It honors the artilleryman without naming the artilleryman. It holds the memory of the war as a whole, and it leaves the individual soldier — the specific Hoosier, the specific grave — to other forms of remembrance.

That is the work of the rest of this weekend’s arc. The Hoosier Union History series follows Indiana’s citizen-soldiers into the war and records what their service cost them. Over the next three posts it follows them home — to the regimental stones on the battlefields where they fought, to the national cemetery where the state’s Union dead were gathered, and to the first Decoration Day, when Indiana began the annual work of remembering its dead by name. The monument at the center of Indianapolis is where that memory is largest. It is not where it is most particular. The dead earn the page — and the next three posts are about the places that try to earn it grave by grave.

Sources

• Indiana War Memorials Commission — Soldiers and Sailors Monument: history, construction, and the history of the Victory sculpture, in.gov/iwm.
• Encyclopedia of Indianapolis — “Soldiers and Sailors Monument,” indyencyclopedia.org.
• Indiana War Memorials Foundation — Soldiers and Sailors Monument: design competition, cornerstone, cost, and 1902 dedication.
• Society of Architectural Historians, SAH Archipedia — Indiana State Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument.
• General Lew Wallace Study & Museum — Monument Circle and Lew Wallace’s role as master of ceremonies, 1902.
• This series, Posts 1 through 9, available at the blog index.