Monument Circle and the Common Soldier

At the center of Alexander Ralston's Mile Square, in the circle he drew for a governor's house that was never built, stands the largest outdoor memorial to Civil War soldiers in the United States. Construction on the Soldiers and Sailors Monument began in eighteen eighty-eight, about twenty-three years after the war ended, and was dedicated on the fifteenth of May, nineteen oh two.

The dedication was an event. It began at eight in the morning with a parade of veterans: men who had survived the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War. The ceremony lasted all day and ended with fireworks. The master of ceremonies was Lew Wallace, the Indianapolis lawyer and military officer who had written Ben Hur. The Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley recited a poem he had written for the occasion. John Philip Sousa attended and performed. Sousa also set Riley's poem to music on the spot.

What distinguished this monument from most American war memorials of the period was its stated purpose. It was designed to honor the common soldier, not the generals. The sculpture at the top depicts Victory, a female figure holding a torch and a sword, but the friezes and bas-reliefs around the base are filled with ordinary infantrymen, ordinary sailors, ordinary families watching them march away. The idea that a monument's primary subject should be the people who fought, rather than the commanders who directed them, was not the prevailing convention.

The monument cost five hundred ninety-eight thousand three hundred eighteen dollars. It is two hundred eighty-four feet tall. Ralston's circle, intended as the symbolic center of a new democracy's capital, ended up holding exactly that: a monument to the people who died for it.