Gardens and Guns: Central Park and the War Between the States
Central Park does not quickly come to mind with thoughts of America’s Civil War. The pre-dawn bombardment in Charleston Harbor, after all, was 700 miles from the vast public project under construction in the center of Manhattan, with the nearest battlefield more than 200 miles away at Gettysburg. Yet to those terrible four years the emerging park rendered its finest minds, its muscle and blood. Eventually a grateful city would dedicate a most graceful plaza at the park’s southeast entrance—at the time the most frequented, the ‘principal entrance’—to those Grand Armies of the Republic that freed millions of slaves more than a half-century before.
Immediately after that April morning in 1861 when Fort Sumter fell, President Lincoln requested 75,000 volunteers for three months to quell this “insurrection” in the South. Within days a rally to raise passion and volunteers occurred in New York City’s Union Square named for a ‘union’ of two connecting roads. But the sacred Union was now the Cause, and to this New Yorkers swore loyalty and vengeance on the aggressors.
Rally in Union Square
Bands played “The Star-Spangled Banner” throughout the day as the American flag—with all thirty-four stars—hung from lampposts and a thousand windows, the tattered flag from Sumter waving from the statue of George Washington. Perhaps a quarter-million New Yorkers gathered for “the largest meeting,” declared The New York Times, “ever held on this continent, and the most enthusiastic.” By year’s end the city placed over 12,000 volunteers in the field, sixty-six regiments—one entirely of men named Smith—from a city Lincoln lost by thirty-thousand votes in the 1860 election and would lose again in his re-election four years later, and eager to prove themselves in this vigorous, national conflict were the two most renown regiments of the New York Militia.
New York’s 7th. Regiment was known as “The Silk Stocking” or “The Blue Blood” Brigade with many members from the city’s elite. In fresh, gray uniforms under sky-blue coats, carrying sharp, swift swords, Springfield rifles, banners flying and sandwiches from Delmonico’s, the 7th marched to war down Broadway, the glorious parade preserved by Thomas Nast’s painting The Departure of the New York Seventh Regiment still hanging in its armory on Park Avenue.
The other distinguished regiment was the 69th, the Irish Brigade.
In this city of immigrants, many were ardently loyal to the country of their adoption.
Here they had sought sanctuary from armies or anarchy, poverty and prejudice, and though America never welcomed anyone despite the maternal greeting that would stand at the golden door, in New York the new arrivals were grudgingly tolerated, found homes and jobs, worshiped as they chose, and survived. In gratitude, thousands volunteered as regiments formed along ethnicity: the German Volunteers, the First Foreign Riflemen (Hungarians and Swiss), the Italian Legion, the Highlander Regiment (Scots), but no people volunteered in such numbers as the Irish, the 69th swelling to fifteen-hundred men, largest to enlist. As the song “Irish Volunteers” declares,
Now if the traitors of the South should ever cross our roads,
We’ll drive them to the devil as Saint Patrick did the toads.
Many of those Irishmen had been laborers working on a public park of more than six hundred acres in the center of Manhattan. They cleared acres of poison ivy, lugged chunks of shattered schist, dug great pits that one day would become lakes and ponds. Soon several men crucial to that project’s success joined these patriots, resigning their commissions before they too were off to war.
Chief Engineer during the creation of Central Park was a twenty-eight-year-old from Waterford, a village along the Hudson River in upstate New York. Educated at West Point, Egbert Ludovicus Viele was a captain in the Engineer Corps of the 7th New York Militia when given a commission as Brigadier General of the U.S. Volunteer Army. By November he was part of the large assault along the South Carolina coast which for the remainder of the war closed the Savannah River as a Confederate port.
Before commanding the 4th Missouri Cavalry, George Waring from Pound Ridge fifty miles north of the city had the crucial task of water engineer for the emerging park. He headed a team of 400 men who drained the fetid land to create streams of circulating water above and below the sculpted landscape. But that summer of 1861, Waring too resigned, riding his horse Vixen not across the developing acres as they had done together for years but off to war.
Central Park’s rustic boat-landings and wooden shelters were designed in the Brooklyn workshop of Anton Gerster, once a Hungarian lieutenant in his country’s 1848 revolution before he fled the impossible defense against the huge, invading armies of Russia for sanctuary in the United States; in gratitude, he too resigned from his work on the park, enlisting as a military engineer. He soon formed the Gerster’s Independent Company and Pioneers that would give support to the Army of the West during the Chattanooga Campaign in the autumn of ’63.
And less than two months after the Union Square rally and only three years into the enormous project that would take a dozen more to complete, the park’s superintendent—who with architect Calvert Vaux had worked months designing Central Park with practicality and inspiration—Frederick Law Olmsted also resigned and volunteered.
A carriage accident the year before had left one of his legs an inch shorter than the other, excluding him from serving as a combatant. Instead, he gave his intellect and administrative skills to a most necessary task: Executive Secretary to the newly-formed United States Sanitation Committee, and after the Union army’s disastrous defeat at the first battle at Bull Run, July of ’61, it was clear how desperately needed this organization was. Although military leadership on the battlefield was outdated and incompetent, there was barely a plan to set up field hospitals or an ambulance system to evacuate the wounded—nearly 3000, some laying on the battlefield for the next three days—and what to do with 500 dead.
Olmsted immediately established better sanitary conditions in camps, and though inexperienced in medical procedures, he distributed bulletins on how to purify contaminated drinking water, basic ways to prevent certain diseases, the treatment of wounds and the use of new medicines. When Federal troops suffered another stunning defeat attempting to capture Richmond during the Peninsula Campaign in spring of ‘62, he transformed a battered boat along the Potomac into a floating hospital with four surgeons, six medical students, perhaps twenty nurses, and four women volunteers. His efforts cared for over 8,000 wounded and sick, a quarter of them Confederate soldiers.
Lincoln’s call for soldiers that April in ’61 meant serving for only ninety days, but to the nation’s astonished horror, the war that each side expected victory in three months entered its third summer. So many were lost—in battle or, much more likely, from infection and disease—that in ’63 the United States passed the first Conscription Act; Confederate states had already done so. Ominous discontent with the first names pulled for the draft rose with New York City’s mid-July heat into an enraged mob and, with the militia fighting far to the west, easily overpowering the vastly outnumbered police force. The four days of our country’s worst urban violence also reached deep into the park with a mob’s intent to burn the military hospital there.
In the remote northern acres destined to become Central Park stood the Convent for the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul recently transformed into a hospital to aid, at the time, the unimaginable number of wounded. Although the mobs burned draft boards, Republican newspapers, police stations, homes of the wealthy, and the Colored Children’s Orphanage on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street, when the Sisters themselves appeared outside of the hospital the mob abandoned its intent, then sought a different target: the park’s squat, turreted arsenal on Fifth Avenue at 64th Street. But that storehouse of weapons was never seized because New York’s former superintendent of telegraph had died at Gettysburg two weeks before.
Samuel Zook had also resigned his position for the Cause, serving as a lieutenant-colonel in the 6th New York Infantry but dying from his wounds in the Wheatfield’s “harvest of death.” There was no Confederate counter-attack after Pickett’s disastrous charge nor any orders to pursue the battered Army of Northern Virginia, and so a military escort carried Zook’s body to New York City to lay in state in the Governor’s Room in City Hall, and the timely arrival of these troops kept secure the muskets and ammunition stored in Central Park.
When the draft resumed in August, ten thousand troops occupied New York City.
Just as Lincoln wanted repairs on the Capitol dome continued during the war as a symbol of a country restored, work on the park continued under the guidance of Calvert Vaux despite the loss of the park’s superintendent and co-designer, its chief engineer, its master woodworker, the manager of drainage and water, and half its work force from laborers to stonecutters now fighting at Shiloh, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. Vaux, an Englishman, never considered enlisting, and other laborers were also not American. Exempt too, those who were a family’s sole provider or else with injuries that kept them from service or younger than twenty or older than forty-five, the ages of conscripts. Soon young boys and old men of the Confederacy would take arms against General William Tecumsah Sherman’s enormous invading Army of the Tennessee, but the Union—its population almost three-times the South’s with nearly half that number slaves—could be generous with exemptions; while couples strolled the peaceful pathways of Central Park, there were no young men left in Atlanta.
Meanwhile walkways and carriage drives were laid, artful bridges and tunnels built, and chief horticulturist Ignaz Pilat resumed selecting and planting a quarter-million trees and shrubs with frequent letters from Olmsted concerning the most adaptable native species. That year “The Central Park” appeared, a seventy-five-page history and guide by Fred B. Perkins with W.H. Guild’s accompanying photographs so beautiful when viewed through a stereopticon that a series was sent to President Lincoln with hopes it gives calm and pleasure during our nation’s terrible ordeal. An additional sixty-five acres were added to the park, now extending to 110th Street, and in April ’64, a marble pedestal was unveiled along the promenade where some day would stand a statue of William Shakespeare, born three hundred years ago. A one-night-only performance of Julius Caesar–a benefit for “The Shakespeare Statue Fund”— was staged at the Winter Garden Theatre, the role of Marc Antony in this drama of betrayal and assassination played by John Wilkes Booth.
Finally after another year of war, after The Wilderness and Cold Harbor, once Petersburg fell and then Richmond, General Lee surrendered to General Grant despite the valiant Confederates’ desire to fight on. Over 625,000 Americans had died and countless more maimed, but this war between the States ended April 9, 1865, a Palm Sunday. As one of many gestures of reconciliation, Lincoln had the White House band play “Dixie”, the South’s unofficial national anthem despite written and first performed in black-face by Daniel Emmett in 1859 at the old Mechanics Theater on lower Broadway. On Good Friday, in the unified nation’s capital, President Lincoln and his wife were honored guests at a performance of an English comedy though the First Lady was not keen on attending. Lincoln told her, with the war now over, that “We both must work to be more cheerful,” and his massive memorial service in New York’s Union Square on April 25 was the last great rally of the Civil War.
Never was the supreme purpose of the emerging Central Park so necessary: to restore the spirit through communion with our fellow citizens in the curative setting of Nature. Soon New York’s 7th Regiment returned from rivers and towns before which few of them had ever heard. Home too was the devastated 69th , forever known after Fredericksburg as the Fighting 69th; it was they who led charge after unsuccesful charge up to the stone wall at Marye’s Heights where their “brilliant though hopeless assault on our lines,” wrote General Lee, “excited the hearty applause of our officers and soldiers” even as the Confederates slaughtered them.
In time Frederick Law Olmsted returned as park superintendent, and Egbert Viele was again chief engineer. Master carpenter Anton Gerster returned to work, and so did George Waring though without Vixen shot out from under him two years before. Returning too were the common laborers, each with his own nightmares and valor. Edward Kemeys had enlisted at seventeen in New York’s 65th Regiment and discharged as an artillery captain in ’66. He was six-feet tall, with clear, gray eyes, an enormous moustache drooping across his youthful face, and could handle an axe; for $2 a day he joined three-thousand other men at work on Central Park.
Often morning fog shrouded the work site where from within Kemeys heard the clatter of wagons pulling cumbersome loads, a blacksmith’s hammer, a foreman’s call carrying far in the chilly air. After a whistled warning, he watched through the mist the brief glow of an explosion moments before hearing it, and this reminded him of the battlefield where smoke from cannons and muskets mercifully shrouded the carnage within.
On mild days a whimsical sight drifted above the laborers; from his “Balloon Amphitheater” at Sixth Avenue/59th Street, Professor Thaddeus Lowe gave aerial tours of the park in his hydrogen-filled balloon City of New York. The professor had done reconnaissance high above battlefields in his Eagle, and now in peacetime terrified, then delighted passengers dazzled by the new water bodies, winding drives and meadows two hundred feet below. One afternoon Kemeys watched a laborer sculpt in wax the head of a wolf. Soon he tried the same with his own hands, then made a sketch of a mountain lion coiled for attack though twenty years would past before that vision was fully realized.
In the months after Appomattox, memorials to bravery and sacrifice were dedicated in town squares and city parks from Cumberland, Maine, to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and though a primary intention of Central Park was to exclude whatever might sadden or oppress visitors, here the city chose to show its gratitude to those soldiers who lost their lives for the Union. But often social position has more influence than duty and even death; three-quarters of the Irish laborers who left years before waving their green, unstained flag with its golden harp never again carried a shovel or mended a wagon in Central Park, yet on a summer afternoon in 1874, Civil War Memorial to the 7th Regiment was dedicated to the seventy-five young men who did not return after that distant, buoyant day in April ’61 when they marched to war with haversacks of gourmet sandwiches and belief in their own invincibility.
An immense crowd gathered in Central Park only steps north of the Sheepfold—years later to become Tavern on the Green— as the Regimental Band played and troops marching along the West Drive left “an impression of utter wonderment upon everyone who beheld it,” wrote the Herald.
Harper's Weekly depicted the dedication, July 11, 1874
Since Central Park was created for the common New Yorker, sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward gave tribute to a volunteer or reluctant but patriotic conscript. A young soldier stands at ease, in kepi cap and long coat, leaning lightly on his musket, bayonet sheathed. Peaceful, reflective, he gazes across the rolling lawns of Sheep Meadow, originally named “The Green” and meant for military parades, but after four years of war no one wanted any more martial displays. On all four sides of the stately pedestal, a bronze shield across a dagger–“Pro Patria et Gloria” reads the inscription, “For Country and Glory.”
With his work as the park’s chief engineer complete, Egbert Viele became New York’s parks commissioner. He is entombed at West Point with a buzzer installed in his coffin on the slight chance he had been mistakenly buried alive. Contractors today still use his “Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York” known simply as the “Viele Map.”
George Waring eventually finished Central Park’s drainage and water systems, then was appointed commissioner of New York’s Department of Street Cleaning; the city’s death rate from disease soon plunged. Preferring to be addressed by his military rank rather than “Commissioner,” Colonel Waring died in 1898 from yellow fever caught in Cuba where he had established the island’s sanitation system.
Despite creating the park’s masterful wood shelters and boat landings and his aid in Sherman’s ravaging march through the South, Anton Gerster was best known in his day as Uncle Anton, his niece Etelka Gerster the celebrated cantatrice of the New York Opera.
Several years after the dedication of the 7th Regiment’s memorial, thieves stole all four shields from the pedestal; the thieves were apprehended, the shields returned and back in place. The model for Ward’s memorial was himself a member of the 7th during the war, rising to the rank of major. James Steele MacKaye turned to acting and was the first American to portray Hamlet on a London stage. Later he invented flame-proof curtains, folding theater seats, and established the Lyceum Theatre still on West 45th Street.
One spring day in 1883, along the wooded Ramble’s eastern edge another sculpture was unveiled, one of few sharing the park’s spirit of Nature. The sculptor attended, accompanied by a pretty woman beneath a parasol, along with Park Commissioner Salem Wales and several reporters. After a few words, Commissioner Wales removed the covering (to a startled “Oh my!” from the woman with the parasol) to reveal a life-size mountain lion coiled to pounce from a rock ledge on unsuspecting prey along the roadway fifteen feet below.
In the base of Still Hunt, the name ‘Edward Kemeys’ was written with a finger in the bronze; that sketch of a mountain done when not swinging an axe in Central Park began a journey that led him to became, self-taught, America’s finest animalier, his work appearing in parks and museums from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to his bronze lions guarding the entrance to The Art Institute of Chicago. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Frederick Law Olmsted designed other parks for New York City and became America’s most renowned landscape architect, his artful creations extending to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The United States Sanitation Commission ended its work soon after the war—the number of men saved incalculable—but beneath the caring, competent Clara Barton evolved into the Red Cross. After completing its own merciful task, the hospital deep in the park’s North Woods did not return to a convent but instead displayed Thomas Crawford sculptures; his twenty-foot-tall bronze Armed Freedom of a woman with a sheathed sword in one hand and a laurel wreath of victory in the other stands atop the completed Capitol dome of the reunited states.
Though opened ‘officially’ in 1874, Central Park had already enriched New Yorkers in the years before the Civil War: ice skating on the shallow pit that one day would be the Boating Lake, carriages trotting along the undulant drives, and simply lounging beneath a tree. When no longer exhibiting artwork, the buildings of Saint Vincent de Paul still were not returned to the Sisters but became a nightspot so notorious the city demolished it decades later, and soon Central Park visitors often saw the nation’s most renown living soldier riding his horse along its bridle paths.
With Grant elected President, William Tecumsah Sherman had become Commanding General of the United States Army, most of which he used to “make the plains safe for settlers” by “exterminating” any Native American who resisted confinement. After retiring from military service Sherman moved to New York City and took a fine house on West 71st Street right off the beautiful, new park. He enjoyed the theater, painted as a pastime, and became something of a celebrity, often reciting Shakespeare while a guest speaker at banquets and social gatherings. He despised politics slightly less than the press and refused all requests to run for president. Dying from asthma in 1891 soon after turning 71, and though not Catholic, he received a stately funeral at the magnificent, recently completed Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue; what would have mildly amazed the general, the papers spelled ‘Tecumsah’ correctly. The Chamber of Commerce wanted a grand memorial to this favored citizen, with the Sherman family emphatic that the general had wished Augustus Saint-Gaudens to be the sculptor.
Six years before, in eighteen two-hour sessions, Sherman sat for a life-size bust by Saint-Gaudens already acclaimed for his Civil War sculptures; when Auguste Rodin viewed his bronze relief depicting Colonel Robert Gould Shaw on horseback leading the 54th Massachusetts—the first all-black volunteers—he bowed to it. Saint-Gaudens’ twelve-foot tall Standing Lincoln in Lincoln Park in Chicago is a most revered statue, with a replica at Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois, and a bust from it in the Oval Office. The life-mask Saint-Gaudens used was cast by Leonard Volk before Lincoln’s first inauguration, the procedure “anything but agreeable,” Lincoln said of it though the mask did resemble “the animal himself.”
For his twenty-four-feet-high equestrian statue, Saint-Gaudens dramatized a ceremonial moment that occurred in Washington, May of 1865; for two days General Grant stood beside the newly-sworn-in President Andrew Johnson reviewing 150,000 victorious troops, and as the regimental band played “Marching Through Georgia” the largest ovations were for General Sherman on horseback at the head of his ravaging, unstoppable army he had led to the sea.
Saint-Gaudens’ larger-than-life general rides a restless horse led by a goddess of victory; with another stride of her sandaled foot, she will step off the majestic pedestal. Her eyes are large and enlightened, wings open behind her: in her left hand a palm frond, her right raised in greeting. Just behind her, the great, gold horse, mane and tail blown back, nostrils flaring, the full sockets of its eyeballs alarmed.
But the anxious horse is gently, firmly reined in by its rider straight in the saddle. His eyes are focused and resolute, his face modeled from the bust Saint-Gaudens had done of him a few years before, with the same furrowed brow, scruffy beard, and a grim expression as if resigned to the brutal choices made to end the war. Coat buttoned, collar closed, a cloak over his shoulders draping behind, he rides confident, victorious, as he had done along Pennsylvania Avenue, leading his invisible troops forever.
With Saint-Gaudens’ tribute to Sherman complete, the city struggled where it might be displayed. Perhaps along the walkway leading from his old and faithful friend now entombed in the large mausoleum along Riverside Drive; but the Grant family feared the golden glory of Sherman/Gaudens might detract from their own general’s solemn grandeur. Central Park was considered where trees along the Promenade might be removed for more sunlight to shine on the general, but—to the relief of those who love the park—that idea too was abandoned. Another possibility, Longacre Square around West 42nd Street, but this northern edge of the Tenderloin still smoldered from race riots the year before. Two years had now passed since Saint-Gaudens’ Sherman received the prestigious Medal of Honor at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, but New York still could not find a place to put it.
During those late nights and long weekends in 1857 when Olmsted and Vaux created the remarkable design that became Central Park, they made a small adjustment for a most practical purpose. The park’s southeast corner at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street/Central Park South was referred to as ‘Principal Entrance’—the one most frequented by pedestrian visitors often entangled with carriages and equestrians entering the park down Fifth Avenue. When an entrance was cut at 60th Street into the low stone wall that surrounds the park, horse riders and phaetons and pennyfarthing could now enter here and loop north to follow the East Drive deeper into the park.
At this transition from city to park, architect Richard Morris Hunt envisioned a grandiose display of the City Beautiful: a 50-foot column with New York City’s official seal at its base, heroic monuments to Henry Hudson and Columbus on either side, and spouting fountains surrounded by muscular, allegorical figures. This aggrandizement would begin transforming the park into “one great open-air gallery of Art,” hoped The New York Post, “instead, as some dreamers fancy it, a silent stretch of a rural landscape within the raging tumult of a vast metropolis.”
But one of those “dreamers” was Calvert Vaux; Hunt’s proposal was “what we have been fighting against—Napoleon III in disguise all over,” then he doomed the scheme with one curt remark: his design is “not American and the Park is.”
And to emphasize that distinction, on the undeveloped land between that carriage entrance at 60th Street and a block downtown to 59th/Central Park South, Sherman at last found where to ride triumphant on a spring morning in 1903. Not a single tree was lost along the Promenade though a Times editorial bemoaned the several cut down to make room for the “hideous grandstands.” Before the dedication a subtle, substantial alteration had been made to the goddess guiding the general’s horse. The model for the goddess had been Harriette Anderson, an African American from South Carolina where succession began and upon which Sherman’s army was even more brutal than it was making Georgia howl. But New Yorkers, however progressive, could not abide having a beautiful black woman striding victoriously down Fifth Avenue. Though several women have been attributed as the Nike’s fair face, it is likely Saint-Gaudens’ muse and mistress for twenty years, Davida Johnson Clark.
Sherman dedication (before gilded with gold leaf)
