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“The Mingled Dust of Both Armies”
Yale’s Civil War memorial remembers all who died. But it forgets what the war was about.
September/October 2011
by Ali Frick ’07, ’12JD
Ali Frick ’07, ’12JD, a third-year law student at Yale, wrote her senior essay on Yale’s Civil War memorial.
Almost every Yale student has passed through it, though probably few are aware of its original purpose. It adorns one of the most trafficked arteries on campus: the corridor that connects Woolsey Hall and Commons with the rotunda of Memorial Hall, and links the central campus to Science Hill. It is Yale’s Civil War Memorial, dedicated in 1915, 50 years after Grant and Lee shook hands at Appomattox.
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Today the memorial is surrounded by lists of Yale alumni killed in other wars. |
Filling the two walls of the short hallway, the monument lists the names of Yale men who died during the war, with their army rankings and the place and year of each man’s death. The walls are framed by four high-relief statues, signifying Courage, Devotion, Memory, and Peace; on the floor are engraved a stanza of an elegiac poem and a dedication, consecrating the memorial to “the men of Yale who gave their lives in the Civil War.” It would be a fairly conventional memorial, except for one striking feature: it includes the names of both Confederate and Union dead.
Some four decades earlier, Yale’s peer institutions in New England had completed their own monuments, honoring only their Union dead: Brown in 1866, and Harvard in 1874. For their part, universities in the South memorialized fallen soldiers of the Confederacy; the 1885 marble tablets in the University of North Carolina’s Memorial Hall are inscribed with the school’s “Roll of Confederate Dead.”
Yale had considered creating a memorial to its Union soldiers in 1865, but the idea was soon forgotten or abandoned. By the time Yale finally acted, the national conception of the war had changed dramatically, and Yale’s memorial reflects the revised view of the conflict as a great struggle between two noble armies. By grouping Northern and Southern names together on Yale’s walls, the university aimed to pay tribute to the heroism of both sides.
Today the memorial is surrounded by much longer lists, added later, of Yale alumni killed in other wars, and its Civil War origins can scarcely be perceived. But the group of alumni who created it labored for six years over its design, its placement, and its purpose. They saw the monument as a message of national healing, both reflecting and promoting the renewed bonds between North and South. The committee’s papers, housed in the manuscripts and archives department at the Yale University Library, tell the story of how this monument came to be—how a Connecticut university, with an overwhelmingly Northern, pro-Lincoln, and anti-slavery student body in the 1860s, came to dedicate a memorial that, as its inscription reads, bestows “Love and tears for the Blue / Tears and love for the Gray.”
Students who attended Yale during the Civil War would likely have found the monument’s homage to both sides perplexing. At the time, few Southern students had ever attended Yale, and very few were there during the Civil War: the percentage of Southern students in the college had peaked at 12.78 percent during 1845–46, but dropped to 3.23 percent by 1860–61.
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More than a third of the Class of 1858 served in the US military during the war. |
Yale president Theodore Dwight Woolsey ’20, whose statue overlooks Old Campus today, was unabashedly anti-slavery; he hoped that secession and its consequences would prove “the greatest stab to slavery that could be received.” A campus poll conducted by the Yale Literary Magazine prior to the 1864 presidential election found 372 supporters of President Abraham Lincoln—who had by then issued the Emancipation Proclamation and was fighting a war to sustain it—and only 96 supporters of General George McClellan, the Democratic candidate. Poems and editorials in the magazine expressed abhorrence of slavery and praised students who had left their studies to “fight for freedom.”
Yale men answered the call to battle in great numbers. In all, at least 737 Yale men, from all schools and all class years, served in the US military during the war—including, for example, more than a third of the Class of 1858. At the 1865 commencement ceremonies, dedicated to celebrating the Union “heroes of Yale,” the principal speaker declared, “We owe it to the memory of our dead to extirpate and sweep away every vestige of slavery.”
But by the turn of the century, the nation was engaged in what Yale historian David Blight describes as an effort of reconciliationist memory, “disembodied from the causes and consequences of the war.” Racing toward national reunion, the two sides were forced to overlook the specific causes that had torn them apart in the first place. The memory of slavery and emancipation, Blight writes, “never fit well into a developing narrative in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism, and in which devotion alone made everyone right, and no one truly wrong, in the remembered Civil War.”
It was in this national spirit of reconciliation that Yale revived the idea of building a memorial. When Judge Henry E. Howland ’54 proposed such a memorial in 1909, he admitted that, directly after the war, “it would have been ill-timed to have suggested that sons of the South should have been remembered in such a memorial. But now,” he continued, “when the passions of that time have died away … it seems an appropriate moment to bring before the alumni of Yale the propriety of commemorating the men of both sides who gave their lives in the great struggle.”
From the start, the memorial planning committee sought to appease Southern sensitivities. The committee originally adopted the South’s preferred appellation for the conflict, “the war between the states.” “The phrase ‘War of the Rebellion’ is in many ways accurate,” wrote Anson Phelps Stokes ’96, the University Secretary and a member of the planning committee, “but it is so distasteful to our Southern friends that it is out of the question.” Stokes suggested that “civil war” would be the most “unobjectionable,” and that was the title finally settled on.
Seeing the memorial as an aid to reconciliation, the committee was adamant that the memorial be centrally located. They agreed that the memorial should be “seen daily by the students” and “catch the eye of visitors.” The original 1865 proposal had called for a memorial chapel, but the committee settled on the corridor in the new “bicentennial buildings”—Commons, Woolsey Hall, and Memorial Hall—which had been constructed to commemorate Yale’s 200th anniversary in 1901.
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The memorial includes no mention of slavery or emancipation. |
The committee debated for months over how to list the Confederate names and struggled to think of ways to obscure Yale’s overwhelmingly Union affiliation. In the end, the 114 Union dead and 54 Confederate dead were intermingled, listed together chronologically by class year. One point of disagreement, ultimately settled in the Southerners’ favor, was whether to include the Confederate soldiers’ military ranks and titles. To committee member William Gordon, the question was a simple one: “The soldiers of the South … believed in their cause and died in defense of the faith that was in them. If this fact is to be ignored, their names upon a Yale memorial will be a mockery—if not an insult.” Yale’s memorial must not only list the Confederate dead, but also pay tribute to their military service. (Seven years later, Princeton, which had nearly equal numbers of Union and Confederate dead, dedicated a memorial that listed only the names of the fallen, without indicating the side on which they had fought.)
Yet the cause for which that service was rendered had to remain unspecified. As Gordon put it, the idea behind including Yale men from the North and South was to “embody and recognize the fact that each was true to his principles and each deserved equal tribute of praise and that Yale University wished to proclaim this fact to the world, that the mingled dust of both armies created a solid foundation for the future of the nation.” Therefore the memorial should note simply that each man died for what he believed in, Gordon argued, and keep silent on the content of those beliefs: “Anything intended or capable of being construed into recognition or endorsement of either Federal or Confederate beliefs will destroy the keynote of the whole affair.”
These arguments prevailed in the committee. The memorial includes no mention of slavery or emancipation; its dedication expresses only the hopes that the soldiers’ “high devotion” may live in all of Yale’s students, and that “the bonds which now unite the land may endure.” At a university whose motto is “Light and Truth,” the memorial shrouds the causes of the great war in darkness, giving way to the national determination to forget.
But forgetting can be dangerous. “I am not indifferent to the claims of a general forgetfulness,” said Frederick Douglass in 1894, “but whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery; between those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.” As he watched the two sides “shaking hands over the bloody chasm,” he despaired: “If this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?”
Douglass’s fears have, in some sense, come true. Today, 150 years after the start of the war, the nation continues to argue about its causes. Even as Yale’s memorial aided the spirit of reconciliation that was necessary for the country to move forward, it likewise promoted the tendency to forgetfulness that makes today’s political battles more contentious, that insists that both sides were righteous, that overlooks the central role played by the question of human bondage.
Indeed, the memorial itself—at least as a specific tribute to the Civil War—is largely forgotten; its anodyne character allowed the university to subsequently expand it by adding the names of Yale dead from every war America has fought, including the Revolution. The inscriptions the committee argued over for years have been worn down to near-illegibility, and they are often hidden altogether by floor mats. David Blight could have been writing about Yale’s own monument when he described the move toward national reconciliation as above all else “a story of how in American culture romance triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory.”  |
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