Analysis Of Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves By Kirk Savage

Kirk Savage’s book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, focuses on the idea that monuments, especially those created post-Emancipation, are directly linked to the social construction of race and identity. He discusses how the medium of sculpture utilized and furthered the white supremacist attitude during a time of racial unrest. Savage chronicles select statues created to represent slavery, emancipation, freedmen, General Lee, and common soldiers from the 1860’s to the 1890’s. Additionally, he discusses the way that sculptures were imagined, designed, funded, and placed all had racial overtones. For example, Savage notes that when blacks attempted to create a commemorative monument “the sponsors made clear that it was ‘the friends of the freedman’

The example of Freedman’s Memorial depicts a man who “can never rise and stand, never come to consciousness of his own power. The narrative remains frozen in place, the monument perpetuating its image of racial difference for eternity” (Savage 117). Savage rightfully claims that “Ball’s design was a failure to imagine emancipation at the most fundamental level, in the language of the human body and its interaction with other bodies” (Savage 119). This example showcased how an attempt was made to right a wrong, in public art form, but that attempt failed. The sculptures did not commemorate the black men that they depicted, instead they further belittled them. In showcasing the shackled freedmen as hunched over, smaller, and below a great white man took away any sense of commemoration. However, Savage does note that “simply to represent black slaves in sculpture was in a sense to emancipate them” (16). It would have been a terrible error to completely erase African Americans from the narrative after the Civil War, but the way white Americans transformed the meaning of the monuments was nearly as

This idea closely resembles Kearin’s prime example in her article entitled The Many Lives of Chief Kisco. Kearin uses the statue, colloquially named Chief Kisco, as evidence of how sculpture can be produced for one purpose but come to mean something else entirely. According to Kearin, Chief Kisco was originally “constructed as an emblem of the temperance movement”, but shifted to become “the emblem of a white nativist movement” (48, 42). This example of “a Native American figure as the emissary of an inherently middle-class, Protestant, Euro-American, and overwhelmingly white message” highlights the way that the art form of sculpture has been used to alter one’s meaning to conform to contemporary society’s way of thinking. (49) Savage and Kearin both explored the idea that commemorative sculpture was used as a vessel for Americans to fill with their own notion of what it means to be American, whether white versus black, white versus native americans, or an American who has been in America for