The Forgotten Lincoln Memorial
In the summer of 1890 a widow by the name of Mrs. Margaret McEwan walked in to the offices of the American Consulate in Edinburgh. She was there to ask for assistance in securing her recently deceased husband’s army pension. While there she spoke to the then United State’s Consul: a Mr. Wallace Bruce. Bruce had arrived in Edinburgh the previous year, a well-respected poet and orator with a passionate appreciation of Scottish culture (as his name perhaps foretold). Upon hearing Mrs. McEwan’s story, Bruce was to set in motion a series of events that led to the erection of the only monument to the American Civil War in the world that doesn’t sit on American soil: The Lincoln memorial of Edinburgh.
Sergeant Major John McEwan fought in Company H of the 65th Regiment of the Illinois Infantry, also known the ‘Scotch Regiment’ due to the fact it was made up, at its inception, almost entirely of Scotsman or their descendants. He first enlisted as a Private on the 1st of May, 1862. By the time he mustered out as a Sergeant, in July 1865, the war was over. Writing to Wallace Bruce in 1893 a former soldier of McEwan’s company described him as such: ‘He was a good soldier — we had none better — always sober, and always ready for duty. If he knew what fear was, he never showed it’.
Mrs. McEwan told Bruce that John had first wooed her on the grounds of the mill where she had once worked in Galashiels. Dressed in the blue Union coat with brass buttons, people would gather around John on their breaks from work and listen to him tell stories of his time in America. Such stories, it seemed, were part of what endeared Mrs. McEwan to her soon-to-be husband. She had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She knew the ideals for which John had fought.
After marrying and having children, the family moved to Edinburgh, where John became ill. Out of work and denied his pension for being unable to prove the connection between his sickness and his time in battle, Mrs. McEwan and her children worked for five shillings a week to keep John from the poorhouse. On one of his doctor’s last visits, with no money left to pay him, John had offered the doctor his old sword. The doctor, as Mrs. McEwan recounted, had declined the offer with the words: ‘it is my business to save life, not to take it’.
John was proud to have fought for the Union, she said. So proud that he died clutching the pistol that had protected him throughout those years close to his heart. And yet after his death Mrs. McEwan had been too poor to mark the legacy of this fearless soldier with the dignity of a gravestone. He ended up in an unmarked grave, where Mrs. McEwan had returned with her children the Sunday after his burial to find that another mourning group was in the same spot — another body being buried in the same grave.
Bruce was able to secure John’s pension for his grieving wife. However, it seemed Mrs. McEwan’s story had imprinted in him an idea for a more permanent memorial to his service. A physical embodiment to the memory of all the men who had crossed the Atlantic and put their lives at risk for the ideals at stake in a foreign war. Bruce was enormously well respected in the social circles of Victorian Edinburgh and so with relative ease was able to convince the Lord Provost to grant a plot of land in Old Calton cemetery for a memorial to Scots-American soldiers. Three years later, on a blustery August afternoon, an unveiling ceremony was held to celebrate the inauguration of the memorial in the Scottish capital.
Bruce had raised $6,300 from an array of wealthy Americans, particularly those with Scots ancestry. Andrew Carnegie. J. Pierpont Morgan. William Rockefeller. However, unlike most memorials to the Civil War, Bruce’s vision called not for a simple statue of a Union soldier. He had in mind something grander, more dramatic. Something that he felt would convey the moral conviction he saw in John McEwan and the other Scots-American soldiers’ sacrifice.
The day of the unveiling was predictably marked by inclement Scottish weather. Despite this, however, hundreds still crowded in and around the cemetery to catch a glimpse of Edinburgh’s latest memorial. The occasion was marked by a great deal of ceremony. A band of 250 pipers, musicians and soldiers from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders marched from Edinburgh Castle to the cemetery. Speeches were given and grand things said about the meaning of the monument that stood draped in the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes before them. Finally, Miss Clara Bruce, Wallace’s daughter, in the white dress and golden hair band of Columbia, drew a cord and revealed the centrepiece of the event.
The memorial depicts a life-size bronze statue of the 16th President of the United States, stood resolutely atop a plinth of red Aberdeen granite. In his hand he holds a scroll of the Emancipation Proclamation and at his feet a freed slave reaches towards him in gratitude. Etched in the granite is a quote from Lincoln himself: ‘To preserve the Jewel of Liberty in the Framework of Freedom’ and the names of the six Scots-American soldiers to whom the monument is dedicated, including John McEwan.
There’s poetry in this story. The official pamphlet of the day’s proceedings has Wallace’s literary stamp all over it. It describes everything: the driving Scottish wind, the spatters of rain, the stage fringed with heather and decorated with the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack and the Scottish Standard. The pipers braced against the weather. The crowds enduring just to get a glimpse of what Sir William Arrol described as a monument that will be ‘an object-lesson to all Scotland to come here and look honestly upon that honest face and that honest man — an honest statesman, who gave up his life for the freedom and integrity of his empire’.
Perhaps this perception of Lincoln isn’t strictly true. Perhaps, too, the depiction of Scots as universally in support of the Union cause is historically inaccurate. Indeed, ships built on the Clyde fuelled the Confederate Army for years and doubtless cost thousands of Union lives. And yet, there still remains something valuable about the monument and the story behind it.
The day of the monument’s unveiling also happened to be the last official duty of Wallace Bruce in his role as United State’s Consul. That evening a dinner was held in his honour and he was presented with a solid silver loving cup whose inscription thanked him for his ‘services to Scottish literature’. On his return to the United States Wallace would go on to create the largest Southern Chautauqua in American history (Chautauqua’s were enormous public lecture events — the TED talks of the late 19th century). This was a man who saw the value of a story, particularly the ones we tell ourselves about history.
Nobody really knows why John McEwan and other men like him decided to leave Scotland and fight for the Union. Neither do we know why Wallace decided upon Lincoln as the centrepiece of the memorial. However, if you stand in front of that memorial today — much neglected as it seems in the corner of the wind-beaten cemetery, with no sign to tell you the story of its inception — it becomes clear why Lincoln’s craggy visage is perfect for conveying the messages Wallace thought valuable in John McEwan’s story.
Lincoln’s is a face of conviction, as if carved by a particularly decisive sculptor. And it seems to me that his image conveys the absolute moral obligations his Presidency, at least in hindsight, represents. John McEwan may never have felt a moral duty to fight for the freedom of persecuted slaves. Indeed, there are many reasons why he might have made the journey to America. Perhaps he was escaping trouble at home, or was simply bored of Scotland and felt like seeing something else of the world. But in looking at the memorial it is easy to see the story Wallace wanted McEwan’s life to tell.
There should, it says, be no geographical barrier to the scope of your empathy. The lives of those outside your country’s borders matter just as much as the lives of those within it. It should, it says, be the duty of all of humanity to fight for the causes we know to be just, even at great personal expense. Make what you will of the reality of Lincoln’s leadership, or of Scotland’s contribution to the American Civil War. The memorial isn’t really about those things. As Wallace himself described it, it is a poem. A way of conveying a greater message through art.
As much as Bruce was respected in his time, his literary contributions are all but forgotten. However, in a poem he penned especially for the unveiling of Edinburgh’s Lincoln memorial there lies a few lines that I think deserve a little remembrance — even if they are a little hokey by today’s standards. They give you a sense of the man, his sincerity of feeling in trying to bolster what is good about humanity in order to wither what is bad. A message worth remembering, especially now:
‘To lift the world to larger life,
To loftier dreams and nobler deeds,
To broaden faith and narrow strife,
To plant the rose and crush the weeds,
Till jealousies forget their date –
The worn-out cerements of hate.’
The Lincoln memorial is an afterthought of Edinburgh’s guidebooks and tour routes. Many of the city’s residents are equally as unaware of its existence as the tourists. And yet it seems to me that it would be a small comfort to visiting Americans and native Scots alike to know that amidst all the medieval architectural pageantry of the city there sits a simply rendered reminder that citizens should at least attempt to hold themselves to a high moral standard. To ‘lift the world to larger life’… even if our current leaders fail to do so.
