Martin Milmore's Masterpiece, the Soldiers & Sailors Monument on Boston Common

The Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Boston Common, unveiled on September 17, 1877, was the masterpiece of sculptor Martin Milmore, who emigrated from County Sligo in 1851 with his widowed mother Sarah (Hart) and four brothers, Charles, Patrick, Joseph and James.

Milmore was recognized as a gifted artist as a schoolboy when he attended the Brimmer School and Boston Latin School. He apprenticed to noted Boston sculptor Thomas Ball, famous for the George Washington Statue in the Boston Public Garden and the Daniel Webster statue in Central Park, New York. 

Shortly after Milmore received the commission to build the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial and the cornerstone was laid by city officials in September 1871, Milmore moved to Rome, Italy in 1872 where he spent the next four and a half years modeling his designs, inspired by classical Italian sculpture. 

The contract stipulated that the statues and the body of the monument be granite, and the bas-reliefs marble white. But upon arriving in Rome, Milmore realized he wanted to upgraded the project with bronze and more marble.  He wrote to the monument commission from Rome, asking and receiving their permission to substitute bronze for granite and marble in the statues and bas-reliefs, and offering to assume any additional expense. 

The unveiling itself was a major event in Boston, with more than 200,000 spectators lining the streets of Boston as 25,429 veterans marching along a 6 1/2 mile route through the city and up to Flagstaff Hill.

"All nationalities, all colors and conditions of men were represented," reported the New York Times. "The Irish, Scotch, English, Portuguese and others were out in large numbers and carried the blood-stained flags under which they fought. The colored men also turned out in large numbers and stepped as proudly to the strains of martial music as the men who had so enthusiastically take up the case which led to their freedom." 

According to the official program, the monument was initiated in 1866, a year after the war ended, as a memorial to "fallen heroes who...aided in putting down the Southern Rebellion and in sustaining the Constitution of our Country and the Union of the States.  The deeds of our heroes, whom we proposed to honor, caused the chain to fall from 4 million of the human race.... And not only did they aid in restoring to liberty those upon whom the brand of servitude had been stamped for years, but they emancipated our own Southern brethren from the customs of the past, and placed them in new relations to humanity and progress, where they will enjoy a freedom never before known to them." 

Part of Milmore's genius was to depict the figures of navy and army not as admirals and generals but as ordinary sailors and soldiers. This was an artistic perspective he had taken in his earlier Civil War works, including statues in Roxbury, Charlestown and Framingham, MA, Claremont, NH, Waterville, ME and Eire, PA. 

Specifications published in 1876 noted: "the shaft of the monument, made of white Maine granite, is seventy feet, and has the shape of a square fort with bastions, upon which stand four bronze figures, representing Peace, History, the Army, and the Navy.  Atop the column is a bronze statue, eleven feet in height, depicting the Genius of America, which "represents a woman, majestically proportioned, clad in a flowing robe...upon her head is a crown of 13 stars. The head is slightly bowed, and the eyes cast down. There is nothing of haughtiness nor defiance in attitude or expression. The figure does not symbolize America the conqueror, proud in her strength and defiant of her foes; but rather America the mourner, paying proud tribute to her loyal dead, whose bones lie upon every battlefield of the great South, toward which her face is turned." 

 Mayor Frederick O. Prince said, “If the commemorated dead could arise and speak to those they have met in battle, their words would not be words of anger, but of peace and good-will. Why then, should it not be otherwise with the living? 

“The genius of the artist has with great felicity placed the statue of Peace looking to the South,” Prince continued. “Let us hope that…it is an assurance that the past is forgotten; that there are to be no irritating or disturbing memories; that the South, when it looks to the North, shall see not the sword of victory, but the fraternal hand grasping the olive-branch of reconciliation and friendship.”

In a further sign of reconciliation, Confederate officers were invited to attend the ceremony, joining Union Generals Joseph Hooker and George B. McClellan. Charlestown native Charles Devens, a Union General and Massachusetts judge, was orator of the day. He also characterized the monument as a gesture of peace, not war. 

“The monument bears no words of boasting or unseemly exaltation, and the assertion of the justice of their cause, though firmly made, is yet not made in any harsh or controversial spirit,” Devens said. “Let us endeavor to lift ourselves to a higher level of patriotism which despises any narrow sectionalism, and rejoices in the nationality broad enough to embrace every section of the Union, and each one of its people, whether high or humble, rich or poor, black or white.”

The inscription on the front of the memorial, written by Harvard President Charles Elliot, echoes the sentiments of Bostonians:

To the men of Boston

Who died for their country

on land and sea in the way

which kept the union whole

Destroyed slavery

And maintained the Constitution

The Grateful City

has built this Monument

That their example may speak

to coming Generations

Milmore died six years later, in July 1883, but his work can be seen in dozens of cities and towns across New England and Pennsylvania.

The memorial is along Boston's Irish Heritage Trail. 

© BITA