Confederate Soldiers & Sailors
Baltimore, Maryland
Confederate Soldiers & Sailors, Baltimore, Maryland, 1903 with red paint from 2017
Frederick W. Ruckstuhl
Bronze
158 x 66 x 75 in. (401.3 x 167.6 x 190.5 cm)
City of Baltimore, Maryland
Filed Under:
Confederate Soldiers & Sailors
Sponsor: Maryland Daughters of the Confederacy
Dedicated: 1903
Removed: 2017
Though Maryland never seceded from the Union, slavery was legal, and the state’s mixed agrarian-industrial economy relied on enslaved labor; in the 1860 census, 12.7% of its population was enslaved. As in other border states, soldiers joined both the Federal and Confederate armies. According to the National Park Service Index, 6,059 fought for the Confederacy, and 53,517 fought in the Union Army.
Initial efforts to build a Confederate monument in Baltimore in 1880 failed. In 1898, however, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) successfully petitioned the city council and raised $16,000 for a statue dedicated to soldiers and sailors. After seeing a plaster model of Frederick Wellington Ruckstull’s Spirit of the Confederacy in the July 1902 issue of Outlook Magazine, the UDC commissioned a cast, exchanging the soldier’s broken gun in the original design for a furled Confederate battle flag.
As a major proponent of the Lost Cause, Ruckstull was dedicated to creating a visual identity for this version of the past, telling a fellow sculptor that “history would throw its crown of consolation towards the south and someday I will make a monument that will express the verdict of history.” Rendered in a style reminiscent of classical statuary, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument is paradigmatic of Lost Cause iconography. Glory is depicted as a youthful and strong woman holding a laurel wreath, a Greco-Roman symbol of victory, toward the sky. She supports a weary Confederate youth, modeled after a photograph of a sixteen-year-old soldier printed in a 1902 issue of Confederate Veteran magazine. Inscriptions on the red Missouri granite base both mourn and exalt the Confederacy. Though the war was lost, the Confederate cause will be vindicated (“Deo Vindice”), and its soldiers remain glorious even in death (“Gloria Victis”).
The monument was erected in 1903 as Jim Crow laws were taking hold across the country. Sited at the then-entrance to the de facto segregated Druid Hill Park, Confederate Soldiers and Sailors could be read as an implicit injunction as to who was and was not welcome in this public space. (A Union monument would not be added to the park until 1909.)
After the Unite the Right rally in 2017, protesters splashed red paint on the statue. Several days later, it was removed along with Baltimore’s other Confederate monuments.
Confederate Soldiers & Sailors, Baltimore, Maryland, 1903 with red paint from 2017
Frederick W. Ruckstuhl
Bronze
158 x 66 x 75 in. (401.3 x 167.6 x 190.5 cm)
City of Baltimore, Maryland
Confederate Soldiers & Sailors, Baltimore, Maryland (detail)
Photo by Frederik Nilsen
Confederate Soldiers & Sailors, Baltimore, Maryland (detail)
Photo by Frederik Nilsen
Confederate Soldiers & Sailors, Baltimore, Maryland (detail)
Photo by Frederik Nilsen
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Bronze
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Josephus Daniels
János Farkas
1985
Bronze
Daniels Family Charitable Foundation, Raleigh, North Carolina
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1887
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1948
Bronze
City of Baltimore, Maryland
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Frederick William Sievers
1929
Bronze
Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia
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Edward V. Valentine
1907
Bronze
The Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia
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Paul Pujol
1890
Granite
Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia
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Confederate Soldiers & Sailors
Frederick W. Ruckstuhl
1903
Bronze
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Bronze
City of Baltimore, Maryland
Number 363
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2023
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