Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America

Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves is a history of race in America as seen through the depiction of slavery in sculptures and monuments. Kirk Savage, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Pittsburgh, shows that blacks were seldom depicted in sculpture until after the Civil War, at which time there was a nationwide impetus to commemorate the end of the war and emancipation. Savage considers these statues and monuments to be a lost opportunity: instead of representing a new sense of race in America, the statues featured old stereotypes, the "kneeling slaves" of the title. Far more common were statues featuring ordinary soldiers. The great irony, Savage argues in this thought-provoking book, is that black soldiers--who "were most clearly representative of a national purpose," the fight for equality--were seldom represented in celebratory monuments.