Boston Sphinx Memorializes the Union Dead of the Civil War & Slavery’s End

Mount Auburn Cemetery was one of the first “Rural Cemeteries” in the United States. Cemeteries before the 19th Century were adjoining churches or on available acreage near population centers. The Rural Cemeteries were on geographically diverse landscapes, with hills and ponds, streams, and trees. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is the most visited of the Rural Cemeteries in the United States, but it was preceded by Mount Auburn near Boston.

Mount Auburn is one of the most famous cemeteries in the United States. It became a model for the garden cemeteries that were built in major cities in the United States. It is also the final resting place of many prominent Bostonians. The cemetery is located at 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is open 8:00 am – 7:00 pm and is free to visit.

Cemeteries in Boston during the colonial era were simple church yard cemeteries in the middle of urban neighborhoods. The churches were running out of spaces for new graves by the 1820s. Doctors also thought that having so many dead bodies in the city meant that the water supply would get contaminated.

Mount Auburn is on the western edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts and it was opened in 1831. Jacob Bigelow, a prominent doctor, had proposed the idea of acquiring and landscaping Mount Auburn, and at the end of the Civil War he wanted to build a monument to the war dead. Bigelow proposed a Sphinx as the appropriate memorial to the men who died.

The statue is fifteen feet long and eight feet high, set on top of an imposing pedestal. The head of a woman is on top of the body of a lion. She is wearing an Egyptian headdress which is topped by an American Bald Eagle. The six-pointed star is designed as an American military medal. The flower is the American Water Lilly. At the other end is the Egyptian Lotus. The design mixed both African and American symbols.

This was the first monumental sculpture of a Sphinx created in the United States.

On this side, you see see the donor of this memorial was Jacob Bigelow. The doctor was born in 1787 and he would live until 1879, 91 years. He was a professor at Harvard’s Medical School and he also did important work studying the botany of New England. He authored the three-volume American Medical Botany. The book analyzed the chemical properties of native plants and their usefulness in treating illnesses.

Dr. Bigelow wanted a new cemetery to be situated out the city and he wanted it in a rural environment. The cemetery, instead of being on a smooth plain, would be set amid hills and bodies of water. He wanted the Auburn Cemetery to  be large, open to the public, and run by a non-profit organization. It would be a place of beauty and peace. He enlisted the Massachusetts Horticultural Society under Justice Joseph Story to help lead the movement towards a rural cemetery.

By the time of the Civil War, Auburn was a nationally known cemetery.

There are many graves of Civil War veterans in Mount Auburn, but the most visited Civil War monument is The Sphinx which was installed to honor all the men who fought and died to preserve the Union and end slavery. To reach it, enter at the Mount Auburn Street gate and follow Central Avenue past the Administrative Building (where there are restrooms) and past the Bigelow Chapel. Just south of the chapel is Cypress Drive, where the Sphinx is located.

Bigelow was one of the first American academics to use the term “technology” to describe what professors used to describe as “the useful arts.” While he advanced modern technology in the 19th Century, he also believed that in architecture, the ancient civilizations had discovered a superior way of building. He was particularly attracted to the work of the Egyptians. By the time of the Civil War, Bigelow’s promotion of Egyptian Revival architecture was so influential that English traditional tombstones were being replaced by obelisks and pyramid-shaped tombs.

Bigelow, who had served on the board of Mount Auburn Cemetery since its start, had made a proposal for a Civil War memorial for the Union dead in 1865, however, by 1866 no progress had been made. In 1870, Bigelow told the board of directors that he would donate a monument and in August 1871 he told the board that the statue would be a Sphinx. The next month, the Sphinx was placed on its pedestal at Mount Auburn.

Bigelow told the board that he did not want his name prominently displayed on the monument, since it was to honor the war dead, not himself. However, a less obtrusive acknowledgement is placed at the back of the memorial in Latin. In translation it says  “Jacob Bigelow made it and dedicated it.”

On the other side, the sculptor’s name is inscribed. Martin Milmore was a young sculptor born in 1844 in Sligo, Ireland. At the end of the Famine, Milmore’s family immigrated to the United States when the sculptor was only seven years old. When he was still a teenager, he began creating sculptures of Charles Sumner and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that attracted attention. By the way, both Sumner and Longfellow lie in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

While many Irish immigrants faced discrimination in Boston, Milmore’s family came from a middle-class Protestant segment in Sligo. His father died before his mother and siblings came to the United States, but they had some capital that they brought with them.

Milmore was approaching 18 when he became an apprentice to Thomas Ball, a sculptor well-known in Boston. In 1863, Millmore made a statue of “Devotion” for the 1863 Boston Sanitary Commission Fair. During the war, Milmore was between 18 and 21 years of age, but he never served in the army. After the war, Milmore became famous for sculpting Civil War-related sculptures. His most famous work was the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument for Flagstaff Hill, on Boston Common. He also sculpted the Roxbury Soldiers’ Monument on Jamaica Plain outside of Boston, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on the Boston Common, and a bust of Senator Charles Sumner displayed in the United States Senate. He also did smaller Civil War monuments unveiled in half a dozen places in the Northeast part of the United States. In his obituary, the Boston Globe said that he was a first cousin of Colonel Michael Corcoran, the commander of the 69th New York Irish Regiment.

Millmore died in 1883 at the age of 38 from a liver ailment. Daniel Chester French, creator of the Lincoln Memorial, made his Death and the Sculptor as his tribute to Millmore showing him creating the Sphinx.

When a formal dedication ceremony was held in 1872, it did not follow what would become the standard for Civil War monuments in New England with assembled troops, bands, veterans, and thousands of spectators. This was a small dedication presided over by the board of directors. Only Bigelow’s friends and family were invited. However, newspaper reporting spread the news about the statue throughout New England.

One one side of the statue there is this Latin inscription:

On the other side is this translation. Like many monuments in the North, it focuses on the two main goals of the Union forces, preserving the Union and ending slavery. It says:

American Union Preserved

African Slavery Destroyed

By the Uprising of a Great People

By the Blood of Fallen Heroes

On the rear of the pedestal is an Egyptian Lotus.

While the statue presents  a racially mixed American nation with a white head and an African Lion’s body, Professor Joy Giguere says that the head of an Anglo-American woman recognizes a racial hierarchy in which whites are equipped for thinking. She notes that Bigelow had not expressed himself an Abolitionist before the war erupted and that his views on African Americans were not that different from most New Englanders. While he was not a defender of slavery, it took the outbreak of war to make him an advocate for Emancipation. Some contemporary viewers of the Boston Sphinx saw the optimism of the combination of Africa and North America as a way of pointing towards an integrated nation going forward. They saw the saving of the Union as coming from the white and black parts of the population working together.

Bigelow wrote that while the form looked back at the ancient world, “The same ideal form which has looked backward on unmeasured antiquity now looks forward to unlimited progress.”

The Sphinx was considered a great and artistic monument in its day. Very few Americans had seen Egyptian inspired art and the people of Boston traveled across the river to look at it. The Vermont Christian Messenger had a review of The Sphinx on Sept 26, 1872 saying “It is an exquisite work of art and is the admiration of all visitors groups of whom are constantly collecting round and never seem tired of gazing at its beautiful face and fine proportions. It has added greatly to the already large monumental wealth of Mount Auburn…”

Across from the monument is the Mount Auburn Bigelow Chapel named after the doctor.

About a hundred feet away is the Colonel Robert Gould Shaw monument. I will write more on that at another time.

The monument was paid for by Dr. Bigelow. When he presented it to Mount Auburn’s directors in February 1872 he said that it was “a landmark of a state of things which the world has not seen before, a great, warlike and successful nation, in the plenitude and full consciousness of its power, suddenly reversing its energies and calling back its military veterans from bloodshed and victory to resume the still familiar arts of peace and goodwill to man.

An 1883 guide to Mount Auburn said that the Sphinx “is now one of the most noticeable features of the cemetery.” In the guide appeared this drawing on page 97:

Bigelow used Egyptian-inspired forms throughout the cemetery, including in the Egyptian Revival Gatehouse and the Bigelow Chapel. Below is a photograph of Bigelow Chapel in 1870. When the Sphinx was completed, Bigelow placed his hands on it because by then he was blind.

While The Sphinx was regarded as a Civil War memorial when it was erected just seven years after Appomattox, because of its design it gradually lost that significance. Because it does not reproduce the standard Civil War monument of a soldier at parade rest, by the 20th Century many people passing it by did not even know that it had anything to do with honoring the Union dead.

In 1893 Daniel Chester French, the artist behind the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, completed a memorial to Martin Milmore at his grave in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston.  “The Angel of Death and the Sculptor” by French shows the Angel of Death reaching out her hand to end Martin Milmore’s work. If you look at what Milmore is working on, it is The Sphinx. Milmore was 38 when he died.

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