North and South: Winsted’s Union statue has Confederate brothers-in-zinc

There’s a statue on the Winsted Green, in East End Park, of a Civil War soldier who looks exactly like statues of Union soldiers in dozens of other northern towns. He also looks exactly like statues of Confederate soldiers guarding the town squares and courthouses in dozens of southern towns.

The mustachioed face is the same, the cap’s the same, the coat’s the same, the rifle’s the same. Only the belt buckle is different. The Winsted soldier’s buckle is inscribed “U.S.” for United States, and the southern buckles bear the letters “C.S.” for Confederate States. But the buckles, high up on their pedestals, can’t be seen.

The Washington Post first reported the existence of these statues in a story illustrated with photos of identical Union and Confederate statues in Windsor, North Carolina, and Westfield, New Jersey.

They also looked to this reader just like the one on the Green in Winsted and, upon further investigation, they turned out to be just that — three of a kind products of the Monumental Bronze Co. of Bridgeport, Conn.

Most of these monuments, made of zinc, not bronze, were erected around the turn of the 20th century. Veterans from both sides were passing middle age, and the two regions had recovered from the war. It was time, said the widows and orphans of those who gave their last full measure of devotion and the farm boys who survived, to honor, not only the generals, but the young men who never owned slaves and died in a war they didn’t make. 

The call for statues of the unsung heroes was quickly answered by the Bridgeport company and other New England monument makers. They became the last and most benevolent of the war profiteers, a long line that began with Sam Colt selling arms to the North and South from his gun factory in Hartford. The factory is the centerpiece of the soon to be opened Coltsville National Park.

The small southern towns weren’t thinking about trading with the former enemy. They were looking for affordable statuary. The fancy, bronze statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and others in Richmond, Charlottesville and Atlanta cost thousands, while the zinc enlisted men cost $450 for a life-size model and $850 for a larger-than-life eight-footer. 

It’s hard to tell, on its high pedestal, if Winsted went for the $450 or $850 model. (Some observant Southerners eventually questioned their statues’ peaked caps, so the manufacturers obligingly made Southern boys with slouch hats, but dozens of the statues with Union hats remain in the south, looking just like the Winsted soldier.) 

It should be noted that some of the endangered generals on horseback in the former Confederacy also had northern connections. The Lee statue at the center of all the violence in Charlottesville was the work of Henry Shrady of New York City, who was also the sculptor of General Grant on horseback on the west front of the U.S. Capitol.

If you think this is being written to make the battle over Civil War monuments seem less consequential than zealots on both sides are making it, you’re on to something. 

But let’s agree this has nothing to do with the courageous removal of an enemy flag, the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy, by Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina. The flag, which had long flown over the state capitol, was taken down and sent to a museum after a white supremacist massacred black churchgoers. It should have been removed long ago. But statues aren’t enemy flags.

People have been destroying statues and images they didn’t like for thousands of years, and rarely, if ever, with positive results. The New York Times recalled last week how pharaohs defaced statues of their predecessors, Protestant Reformers ripped statues and other art works from Catholic churches in northern Europe, Nazis burned the works of “degenerate” modern artists who didn’t even have to be Jewish, although it helped.

More recently, we had Chairman Mao tearing China’s classics to shreds and the Taliban blowing up 5,000-year-old statues of Buddha and other cherished works of antiquity. 

And now, we have statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and even the enlisted men who were on the losing side in a war that ended 152 years ago facing destruction. 

Fighting over statues is an easy way to deal with the growing racial tensions in the nation and therefore of considerable appeal to demagogues on both sides who revel in this highly exploitable issue. And there are many more exploiters than statues.

The political purge of statues has come north. In Boston, they want to change the name of Faneuil Hall because Peter Faneuil (1700–43) owned slaves. In New York, the lightly regarded mayor has ordered a 90-day study to unearth and presumably remove “symbols of hate.” One councilwoman wants to tear down a statue of Christopher Columbus (c. 1451–1506) because he mistreated natives in the Caribbean on his voyage of discovery and another councilwoman defended the explorer, who never saw North America, as “the founder of our nation.” 

Maybe we should read about all these people before we go after their statues, but then, someone may find the books about them are harmful and want to destroy them too. 

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at rahles1@outlook.com.