Half a year ago, I walked with my local community at the March for Our Lives movement in the middle of downtown Allentown. We wanted to show our local politicians that this issue matters to us, and that gun control must be implemented.

Yet where do we meet for such an important event? At the most pivotal monument of our town, at the very center, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

 

Built in 1889, Soldiers and Sailors stands to unify Americans by acknowledging the sacrifice of all veterans.

In 1861, the South fired on Fort Sumter and the bloodiest war in American history was on. Allentown was relatively industrialized at the time, and steel was becoming king. They were becoming rich! Who cares if the South wants to own human beings? We’re doing fine up here.

 

That’s why it took Allentown over thirty years to make any form of monument to the Civil War. They still felt bitter. Yet when they did make it, it displayed a kind of empathy that few monuments to war are able to capture.

 

A roundabout stands in the middle of the road, with a giant pillar going up easily two stories. Six soldiers flank the pillar. Yet two soldiers stand out. They stand holding an American flag, on the right a strong clearly Union soldier grips the base of the flag.

The other soldier holding up the flag is a Confederate. Yet the monument relies on pathos, depicting not the powerful general of Lee or Stonewall Jackson that many Northern Americans had grown to blame for the war, but a poor farmer. His clothes are shabby, and his hat is clearly meant to keep the sun out of the eyes, not to help him fire a gun. This man clearly fights because he has to, and he views it as defending his family. He is not a rich beneficiary of slavery, as those fat cats either sent a slave or paid a man, they never actually had to fight to keep the people they owned.

 

Above the two soldiers stand the words “One flag, one country.” Again the monument relies on pathos, calling on the viewer to remember that the nation exists as one people, and that the war did not change that.

 

Perhaps even more compelling is the fact that aside from the flag, there is no emphasis placed on the Confederate Soldier. He’s just another member of the company. Just as Southern Americans are simply Americans now. It’s a powerful message of reconciliation.

 

I have a large amount of family in Mississippi and North Carolina that I don’t get to see too much. I’ve grown up on the narrative of the North being good and fighting slavery while the South was awful.

 

I’d like to make it clear that the South was objectively terrible when they owned people and forced them to do labor. However, my local monument helps me understand why perhaps my cousins have a giant Confederate flag on their wall, or why many Southerners still call the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression”.

 

 

Image Credit: Me, TripAdvisor, and The Morning Call, Respectively