Akela Reason from the University of Georgia speaks about the building of Civil War monuments in New York City and Brooklyn. After Gettysburg, New York had more monuments than any city in the United States. Although my readers know a lot about Union monuments from my tours of nearly two hundred monuments, she says that we really have not devoted as much attention to the Union monuments as has been devoted to Confederate monuments in the South. She looks at how New York funded the monuments, the artistry behind them, as well as the corruption in stealing public funding for the monuments.
The professor is from my home region, Long Island in New York.
I did question her remarks concerning the two New York City monuments in Brooklyn in Greenwood Cemetery and Queens at Calvary Cemetery. I have taken visitors to those monuments and no one has complained about their poor quality. Now the Calvary Cemetery has not been properly maintained, but it was structurally good when it was built. The Greenwood monument is a popular tourist site for history enthusiasts.
During the war, New York sent more troops to the Union army than any other state, and New York sent more troops to the army than any other city. While there were disagreements about the war, and of course the Drafts Riots, after the war both Brooklyn and New York threw themselves into erecting monuments from Grant’s Tomb to one of the earliest outdoor Lincoln statues currently in Prospect Park. Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City at the start of the war, was very tied to the Confederacy. His Democratic organization, Mozart Hall, wanted the city to be declared a neutral zone. However, by the end of the war, the pro-war Tammany Hall had taken over much of city politics. While Tammany was corrupt, it was loyal.
In answer to one of the questions about monuments to ethnic troops, right next to the city’s Calvary monument, there is a monument to the Irish Brigade. While the Irish community was heavily divided during the war, the Irish Brigade veterans stuck together and made sure that they were not forgotten.
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