A 2021 study of memorials in America counted 5,917 monuments that memorialize the Civil War. In that total, only 1 percent include the word slavery; Yale’s Civil War Memorial is not among that 1 percent.
The memorial stands in one of the busiest corridors on campus. Four bas-relief figures—symbolizing courage, devotion, peace, and memory—surround tablets bearing the names of Yale men who fought and died for both sides. Verses of a poem, “The Blue and the Gray,” are etched into the floor. The poem, first published in The Atlantic, is by the 1849 Yale graduate Francis Miles Finch. He wrote songs at Yale, including student favorites such as “Gather Ye Smiles” and “The Last Cigar,” and after graduation became a lawyer and a judge. As the story goes, Finch wrote “The Blue and the Gray” because he was deeply moved by an incident he read about in the spring of 1866, when white Southern women in Columbus, Mississippi, had gone to a Civil War cemetery and adorned with flowers the graves of both Confederate and Union dead buried there. The poem was a paeon to mutual valor and a symbol of the reconciliation of North and South.
No more shall the war-cry sever, Or the winding rivers be red; They banish our anger forever, When they laurel the graves of our dead! Under the sod and the dew, Waiting the judgment day;— Love and tears for the Blue; Tears and love for the Gray.
The inscriptions, worn by foot traffic, are today hidden beneath industrial-strength carpets. But when they were carved in 1915, at the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, those words perfectly encapsulated the culture of reconciliation that had come to dominate American society. A close reading of the monument and its creation shows that it is not just a memorial to soldiers’ sacrifices; it is a memorial to the deliberate forgetting of the deepest meanings of the war.
In 1895, the Yale Daily News had run editorials calling on the university to create a memorial to the “heroes” of both the American Revolution and the Civil War. The student paper provided a list of Yale alumni among the dead on its front page and announced it “humiliating” that these men had not been properly commemorated, as their comrades had been at other universities. The paper made frequent reference to the huge Memorial Hall at Harvard, constructed in the 1870s to honor its Union dead. Such memorialization, said the editors, should be created as “inspiration to student life.”