{"id":847,"date":"2011-08-18T11:00:46","date_gmt":"2011-08-18T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=847"},"modified":"2011-08-20T21:19:56","modified_gmt":"2011-08-21T01:19:56","slug":"continuing-the-civil-war-at-the-centennial-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2011\/08\/continuing-the-civil-war-at-the-centennial-exhibition\/","title":{"rendered":"Continuing the Civil War at the Centennial Exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\"Purchase <\/a> \"View <\/a>
\n“The American Soldier” at the Centennial Exhibition, Centennial Photographic Company, 1876.<\/span><\/div>\n

Our understanding of Philadelphia\u2019s Centennial Exhibition in 1876 suffers from an ironic condition. The first American world\u2019s fair was so thoroughly documented that the sheer amount of material keeps better understanding at bay. To come to terms with the significance of the event considered one of Philadelphia\u2019s shining moments, researchers too often drown themselves in information. There\u2019s just that <\/em>much of it. Consider what\u2019s online here<\/a> at the Free Library of Philadelphia and here <\/a>at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Offline, these and other institutions preserve even more. At the Historical Society of Pennsylvania there\u2019s 30 vintage volumes and as many boxes listed in this 17-page finding aid (see the .pdf<\/a>). Last year, PhillyHistory.org<\/a> added the Free Library\u2019s collection of 1,600 images, mostly all by the Centennial Photographic Company. These document the Centennial\u2019s hundreds of buildings and thousands of exhibits.<\/p>\n

With such multitudes of stuff, forays into this rich corner of the past tend to leave us out of balance, thrilled by discovery but still wanting discourse. And who could blame us from enjoying the simple sledding through the archival avalanche?<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more here than stuff. So how do we get at the deeper meaning? Let\u2019s parse the narrative of 1876, looking at less <\/em>to see more<\/em>. After all, here\u2019s a defining event in the life of the city and one that remade the idea of the nation after a devastating Civil War. Only a decade before, the nation and the American people were rent asunder; the war killed or wounded nearly one in thirty citizens. Since surrender at Appomattox, there hadn\u2019t been an event of national healing. Philadelphia and the celebration of the nation’s birth in 1876 finally offered a chance. Here and now, 10 million visitors would gather to see the new, post-Civil War America.<\/p>\n

So we have to ask: why was a colossal, granite figure of a Union soldier posted at the entrance of the Main Building? To the company that produced the monument (and others like it) this 21-foot tall, 30-ton statue titled \u201cThe American Soldier,\u201d \u201cThe Volunteer Soldier\u201d or sometimes \u201cThe Private Soldier Monument\u201d was about patriotism, but it was more about business. James G. Baterson<\/a> and his New England Granite Company were developing a lucrative niche in the Civil War monument market. Inside the Art Building, now known as Memorial Hall, Commissioners had forbidden references to the Civil War. In reality, that taboo had been violated several times in the American displays, especially with Peter F. Rothermel\u2019s huge depiction of Pickett\u2019s Charge at Gettysburg. But here, outdoors, stood a Union soldier for all to see. He stood at rest, but still he was armed.<\/p>\n

After the Centennial, Baterson shipped the American Soldier Monument to Sharpsburg, Maryland, where it stands at the center of the Antietam National Cemetery. It marks the bloodiest single-day battle in American history: 4,000 dead and 19,000 wounded. Physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. visited Antietam in the raw days after the battle to search for his wounded son, who had left Harvard to fight. \u201cThe slain of high condition, \u2018embalmed\u2019 and iron cased, were sliding off the railways to their far homes,\u201d wrote Holmes, \u201cthe dead of the rank and file were being gathered up and committed hastily to the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Holmes the younger, though shot through the neck, survived to return to Harvard and later served as a justice on the U. S. Supreme Court. But thousands of other families lost sons and couldn\u2019t afford to either find or return their bodies. They had only one option: burial at Antietam. And there, on September 17, 1880\u2013the 18th anniversary of the battle\u2014families that could travel gathered to dedicate<\/a> the “Private Soldier Monument.” But every last one of those families that showed up was from the North. Confederate causalities were banned from burial at Antietam National Cemetery.<\/p>\n

In the sorrowful days and weeks after the battle, the Union first took care of its own, identifying and burying. Meanwhile, as Alexander Gardner’s photographs<\/a> at the Library of Congress so graphically illustrate, the Sharpsburg landscape remained strewn with Confederate bodies. After quick and dirty burials<\/a> where they fell, these bodies were later dug up and carted a dozen miles away to a Confederate cemetery in Hagerstown, where nearly every soldier was laid to rest without name or monument.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The American Soldier” at the Centennial Exhibition, Centennial Photographic Company, 1876. Our understanding of Philadelphia\u2019s Centennial Exhibition in 1876 suffers from an ironic condition. The first American world\u2019s fair was so thoroughly documented that the sheer amount of material keeps better understanding at bay. To come to terms with the significance of the event considered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}