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SALUTES: March
Many sculptures in Manhattan are linked to important dates in U.S. or world history. Here are a few for March.
March 2004: Salute to the Current Bull
Market
* Charging Bull, by Arturo Di Modica. 1989. North end of Bowling Green, Broadway near Beaver St.
On the night of December 15, 1989, sculptor Arturo Di Modica and friends drove a flatbed to the 60-foot tall Christmas tree in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and unloaded a 7,000-pound gift. Workers arriving in the Financial District the next day were confronted by a sleek, 16-foot-long bronze bull, head down, nostrils flaring, poised to charge up Broad Street. In a flyer distributed that day, Di Modica stated that he created the sculpture after the stock market crash of 1987 as a symbol of the "strength, power and hope of the American people for the future."
Symbol or not, the New York Police Department reprimanded the Bull for obstructing traffic without a permit. New York Stock Exchange officials hired a truck to have it hauled away that very afternoon. But so great was the outcry that within a few days, Parks Department Commissioner Henry J. Stern arranged for the Bull to be given a temporary stomping ground at Bowling Green.
And there it remains, despite that fact that "temporary" installations of art in the City are not supposed to be on view for over a year. In 1993 Di Modica, hoping to recover some of the $300,000 cost of the sculpture (did you think that much bronze and that much design work came for free?), offered the sculpture for sale. The City refused to purchase it. Several large corporations and private donors failed to come up with funds. The only interested party was a Las Vegas hotel, but by then the sculpture was so popular that the campaign to keep it in New York was led by none other than Henry Stern, by that time no longer Parks Dept. Commissioner. As of late 2003, the Bull was still a “temporary” installation.
No one is certain where the terms “bull market” and “bear market,” for a rising and a falling market respectively, came from. The most popular theory is that the “bear market” originally referred to middlemen in the fur trade, who would buy and sell bearskins before the bears had been caught – a practice even more financially hazardous than counting your chickens before they’re hatched. A proverb about “bear-jobbers” was current as early as the seventeenth century. The term “bear” for stock buyers who expected prices to fall became common during the 1720s South Sea Bubble scandal in England.
A “bull” buys with the expectation of selling later at a higher price. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary gives no earlier usage of “bull” than in the combination “bears and bulls,” cited in a 1714 publication. Bulls may have been associated with bears because, from the sixteenth well into the nineteenth century, a popular entertainment in England was the “baiting” of bulls and bears, which involved putting one or the other in a pit and letting dogs loose on them, to see which animals survived. Thomas Nast, famed nineteenth-century cartoonist, popularized the image of bulls and bears in the American stock market.
On Charging Bull, see New York Times articles of 12/16/1989, 12/20/1989, 10/3/1993. New York Post article of 11/24/2003. SIRIS (Smithsonian American Art Museum Art Inventories Catalog) IAS NY000119. On bull and bear markets, see Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991. Most of the material on the Internet regarding the origins of bulls and bears is simply a rehash of the Oxford English Dictionary entries on those two words.
Copyright © 2004 Dianne L. Durante, all rights reserved. Essay 5 in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
March 7, 1850: Daniel
Webster Speaks in Favor of the Great Compromise
* Daniel Webster, by Thomas Ball, 1876. Central Park, West Drive near the West 72nd St. entrance.
Webster (1782-1852), who served for over twenty years in the House of Representatives and the Senate, was a famous orator at a time when oratory was a much more common skill. Among his speeches, the most famous is one given in 1850 in favor of a bill allowing each new U.S. territory to be given the right to decide whether or not slavery would be permitted within its borders.
The 1850 speech was regarded by many as a betrayal, since Webster was once a fervent abolitionist. In 1820 he thundered to an audience celebrating the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock:
I deem it my duty on this occasion to suggest, that the land is not yet wholly free from the contamination of a traffic, at which every feeling of humanity must for ever revolt, - I mean the African slave-trade. Neither public sentiment, nor the law, has hitherto been able entirely to put an end to this odious and abominable trade. At the moment when God in his mercy has blessed the Christian world with a universal peace, there is reason to fear, that, to the disgrace of the Christian name and character, new efforts are making for the extension of this trade by subjects and citizens of Christian states, in whose hearts there dwell no sentiments of humanity or of justice, and over whom neither the fear of God nor the fear of man exercises a control. In the sight of our law, the African slave-trader is a pirate and a felon; and in the sight of Heaven, an offender beyond the ordinary depth of human guilt. (entire speech at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dwebster/speeches/ )
But in 1850, the issue of slavery was threatening to tear the United States apart. Webster supported the Compromise of 1850, having decided he was willing to condone slavery rather than see the Union divided. Like most sacrifices of moral principle to political expediency, the benefits of this Compromise were short-lived: the Civil War began in 1861.
Herewith are two excerpts from Webster's 1850 speech. Read them aloud with feeling, and try to imagine any 21st-century politician speaking such elegant and persuasive prose.
I hear with distress and anguish the word "secession," especially when it falls from the lips of those who are patriotic, and known to the country, and known all over the world, for their political services. Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle. The dismemberment of this vast country without convulsion! The breaking up of the fountains of the great deep without ruffling the surface! Who is so foolish, I beg every body's pardon, as to expect to see any such thing? Sir, he who sees these States, now revolving in harmony around a common centre, and expects to see them quit their places and fly off without convulsion, may look the next hour to see heavenly bodies rush from their spheres, and jostle against each other in the realms of space, without causing the wreck of the universe. There can be no such thing as peaceable secession. Peaceable secession is an utter impossibility. Is the great Constitution under which we live, covering this whole country, is it to be thawed and melted away by secession, as the snows on the mountain melt under the influence of a vernal sun, disappear almost unobserved, and run off? No, Sir! No, Sir! …
Never did there devolve on any generation of men higher trusts than now devolve upon us, for the preservation of this Constitution and the harmony and peace of all who are destined to live under it. Let us make our generation one of the strongest and brightest links in that golden chain which is destined, I fondly believe, to grapple the people of all the States to this Constitution for ages to come. We have a great, popular, constitutional government, guarded by law and by judicature, and defended by the affections of the whole people. No monarchical throne presses these States together, no iron chain of military power encircles them; they live and stand under a government popular in its form, representative in its character, founded upon principles of equality, and so constructed, we hope, as to last for ever. In all its history it has been beneficent; it has trodden down no man's liberty; it has crushed no State. Its daily respiration is liberty and patriotism; its yet youthful veins are full of enterprise, courage, and honorable love of glory and renown. Large before, the country has now, by recent events, become vastly larger. This republic now extends, with a vast breadth, across the whole continent. The two great seas of the world wash the one and the other shore. … (whole speech at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~dwebster/speeches/seventh-march.html )
Ball sculpted a head of Webster just before Webster’s death in 1852. It proved so popular that he created a statuette to go with the head, and sold numerous copies, putting the Webster among the first mass-produced works of art in the United States. In the 1870s Gordon W. Burnham asked Ball to this larger-than-life version for Central Park.
March 10, 1872: Death of Giuseppe Mazzini
* Giuseppe Mazzini. Bronze bust by Giovanni Turini, 1876. Central Park, West Drive near West 66th St.
The 1840s and 1850s were a period of turmoil in Europe, as revolutions by Poles, Danes, Germans, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Croats and Romanians overthrew (temporarily at least) long-established monarchies in favor of socialism, republicanism or anarchy.
Mazzini (1805-1872) was one of these revolutionaries – he championed a combination of Christianity and socialism. Like many revolutionaries he spent years in exile, plotting the next uprising. I like to picture his bronze sculpture sneaking south in the dark of night to conspire with his fellow Italian Garibaldi, whose statue (also by Turini) stands in Washington Square Park. Or he might slip over to Riverside Drive at 113th St., to have a quiet word with Hungarian nationalist Lojas Kossuth, of whom he reported in 1853:
Kossuth and I are working with the very numerous Germanic element in the United States for his [Franklin Pierce's] election, and under certain conditions which he has accepted. Of these conditions he has already fulfilled enough to give us security that he will carry out the rest. He was to appoint American representatives in Europe who would be favorable to us and would help us; and almost all his nominations are such as we desired. He was to give to all battleship commanders instructions opposed to Austria and the despotic governments: he has done it and you have an indication in the conduct of the commander of the frigate at Smyrna. He had promised to give orders to all his diplomatic agents to recognize immediately whatever insurrectionary republican government should be established in an Italian or Hungarian province, and he states that he has done so. [Quoted in Mazzini, Portrait of an Exile, by Stringfellow Barr (Henry Holt, 1935), p. 217.]
The American National Biography notes that Franklin Pierce’s secretary of state and some of the diplomats appointed by him to European posts were indeed involved in anti-monarchical plots; one of them caused a crisis with Austria-Hungary.
For more on Mazzini, see the biography by Barr and Mazzini’s own writings, published in 6 volumes (1890-1891). Mazzini, Garibaldi and Kossuth will be covered in the third volume of the Forgotten Delights series (Statesmen, Politicians and Media Moguls). For more details on the series, click here.
March 2006: Balto and the Iditarod Race
*
Balto,
by Frederick George Richard Roth, 1925. Central Park, East Drive at 66th
St. The statue is on the pedestrian walk that runs below the East
Drive. From the west, go to the south end of the Mall, find the statue of
Shakespeare, and walk across the East Drive; then take the stairs down to
the path below, and you'll see the statue just east of the tunnel below
the East Drive. From the east, enter the Park between 66th and 67th
Streets, and bear left at the first intersection to the tunnel under the
East Drive.
Balto portrays the husky that led the dog-sled team on the last two legs of a grueling 1925 journey to deliver diphtheria antitoxin from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. (The only pilot considered capable of flying through the unpredictable Alaskan winter happened to be in the Lower 48 at the time.) Twenty mushers covered almost 700 miles in about six days, despite blizzard conditions, winds up to 80 mph and temperatures that rarely topped 40 degrees below zero.
The
granite rock on which Balto stands bears a plaque with a low relief
of a dog-sled team racing through a blizzard and the inscription:
"Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs that relayed
antitoxins 660 miles over rough ice, across treacherous waters, through
Arctic blizzards from Nenana to the relief of stricken Nome in the Winter
of 1925. Endurance - fidelity - intelligence." Balto was the first
sculpture in New York to honor a dog, and is well-loved and well-rubbed by
children visiting Central Park.
Contestants in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, held annually in March, journey 1,150 miles from Anchorage to Nome, over mountains, tundra and frozen rivers, through dense forests and along the wind-scoured Alaskan coast. The Race is not only a reminder of Balto's 1925 run but a commemoration of the historic Iditarod Trail, cleared in 1910 to allow access to the gold strike at Iditarod. By the late 1920s airplanes made long-distance dog-sledding obsolete, and the Trail returned to nature until cleared for the Iditarod Race in the 1960s. The official Iditarod site at http://www.iditarod.com/ has a map of the Trail and much historical background.
The Thirty-Fourth Iditarod began on March 6, 2006. Typically the winner arrives in Nome nine to twelve days after the start of the race. As I write this (3/11/06), the lead teams have passed the halfway point.
----------
Roth (1872-1944), born in Brooklyn, studied in Vienna and Berlin in the 1890s before establishing a studio in New York. He won the Speyer Prize from the National Academy of Design for Balto. From 1934 to 1936 he was chief sculptor for the New York City Department of Parks under the Works Progress Administration. For the Central Park Zoo, which opened in 1934, Roth oversaw the sculptors of the friezes that adorn several buildings. In 1935 Roth's team worked on the Prospect Park Zoo. By Roth's own hand are the following sculptures in Central Park:
* Honey Bear and Dancing Goat, ca. 1935. Central Park Zoo at opposite ends of the Penguin Building and Visitor's Service Building, 64th St. & Fifth Ave. (The Bear is just north of the Delacorte Clock and slightly west; the Goat is on the south side of the same building as the Bear.) Utterly charming: note the cheerful frogs around the Bear and ducks around the Goat.
*
Sophie Loeb Fountain, 1936. Central Park, 76th St. off Fifth Ave.,
at James Michael Levin Playground. Illustrates characters from Alice in
Wonderland.
* Mother Goose, 1938. Central Park, Mary Harriman Rumsey Playground, near the East Drive and 72nd St.
Roth later served as president of the prestigious National Sculpture Society (http://www.nationalsculpture.org/nss/default.asp).
For more on Roth, see Proske, Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture (Brookgreen Gardens, SC, 1968) I, 165-8.
March 13, 2004: Justice
* Justice. Unknown artist, ca. 1887. Copper sheets over an armature (like the Statue of Liberty), painted white. Cupola of City Hall, facing south.
Justice holds in her right hand an unsheathed sword, in her left the traditional balance. She's often shown blindfolded (to symbolize fair and equal administration of justice to all), but a number of statues exist where her eyes are wide open; this is one of them.
In August 1858, New York celebrated the completion of a transatlantic cable (which failed in September, and was not reconnected until 1866) with a fireworks display so exuberant that the cupola of City Hall caught fire. A blindfolded Justice crashed down through the burning roof. A new wooden Justice soon rotted, to be replaced in 1887 by this one of painted copper. The current statue was mass-produced in Ohio from the work of an anonymous artist.
Literally and metaphorically, Justice had her back turned on the Manhattan courthouse where Martha Stewart was recently convicted. Ms. Stewart may or may not have acted illegally. But the government's choice to spend so much time and money investigating and prosecuting her - rather than people who are clearly a threat to lives and property - demonstrates priorities so misplaced that that they must be based ultimately on a profoundly flawed idea of justice.
Some food for thought on the Stewart trial:
“Martha and the Tall Poppies,” by Robert Tracinski, http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/marthastewarttrial.shtml
And on justice in general:
"Justice consists first not in condemning, but in admiring - and then in expressing one's admiration explicitly and in fighting for those one admires. It consists first in acknowledging the good; intellectually, in reaching an objective moral verdict; then existentially, in defending the good - speaking out, making one's verdict known, championing publicly the men who are rational .... What counts in life are the men who support life. They are the men who struggle unremittingly, often heroically, to achieve values. They are the Atlases whom mankind needs desperately, and who in turn desperately need the recognition - specifically, the moral recognition - to which they are entitled. They need to feel, while carrying the world on their shoulders, that they are living in a human society and that the burden is worth carrying." - Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, pp. 284-5 (paperback).
On the City Hall Justice, see Burrows & Wallace, Gotham p. 676, and Gayle & Cohen, The Art Commission and the Municipal Art Society Guide to Manhattan’s Outdoor Sculpture pp. 43-44.
March 22, 1832: death of
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
* Goethe by Karl Fischer, designed ca. 1832; this is a 20th-c. copy in bronze of the original iron-and-copper piece. Bryant Park, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, near 40th Street (just east of the carousel).
Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774, was an inspiration to romantic writers throughout Europe. Although by the end of the eighteenth century Goethe himself was praising classicism, Part 1 of Faust, published in 1808, was a landmark in romantic art. In part 2 of Faust, published the year of Goethe’s death, he symbolically reconciled the romantic and classical styles in the union of Faust and Helena.
All of Faust, in an English translation by George Madison Priest, is available at http://www.levity.com/alchemy/faustidx.html . Here’s a short excerpt from Part 2 (published the year Goethe died), included here because it’s a gem of a description--not of a truly learned man, but of a mind so concrete-bound that it can’t think beyond what’s directly visible.
I see the learned man in what you say!
What you don't touch, for you lies miles away;
What you don't grasp, is wholly lost to you;
What you don't reckon, you believe not true;
What you don't weigh, that has for you no weight;
What you don't coin, you're sure is counterfeit.
While reading up on Goethe, I also found his startlingly modern “Prometheus,” the writing of a disgruntled theist rather than an atheist. The German original and English translation appear at http://www.freeinquiry.com/prometheus.html .
“Prometheus”
Cover your
heavens, Zeus,
with gauzy clouds,
and practice, like a boy
who beheads thistles,
on the oaks and peaks of mountains;
but you must allow
my world to stand,
and my hut, which you did not build,
and my hearth,
whose glow
you envy me.
I know
nothing more shabby
under the sun, than you gods!
You wretchedly nourish,
from offerings
and the breath of prayers,
your majesty;
And you would starve, were
children and beggars not
such hopeful fools.
When I was a
child
I did not know in from out;
I turned my confused eyes
to the sun, as if above it there were
an ear to hear my laments -
a heart like mine
that would pity the oppressed.
Who helped
me
against the pride of the titans?
Who rescued me from death -
from slavery?
Did you not accomplish it all yourself,
my sacred, glowing heart?
Yet did you not glow with ardent and youthful goodness,
deceived, and full of gratitude
to the sleepers above?
I, honor
you? Why?
Have you ever alleviated the pain
of one who is oppressed?
Have you ever quieted the tears
of one who is distressed?
Was I not forged into a man
by all-mighty Time
and eternal Fate,
my masters and yours?
You were
deluded if you thought
I should hate life
and fly into the wilderness
because not all of my
budding dreams blossomed.
Here I will
sit, forming men
after my own image.
It will be a race like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to enjoy and to rejoice,
and to pay no attention to you,
as I do!
Goethe is buried in Weimar near his friend Schiller, whose bust near the bandshell in Central Park.
March 24, 1844: Death of
Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen
* Self-Portrait by Thorvaldsen, 1894; copy in bronze of a marble original of 1839. Central Park, off Fifth Ave. at 96th St., on a wooded hill where the 96th-St. Traverse meets Fifth Ave.
Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), little known today, was the most famous European sculptor in the decades following Canova’s death (1822). In 1797 Thorvaldsen traveled on a fellowship from his native Denmark to Rome, and there he remained for over forty years. “Thorvaldsen quickly became Rome’s most admired artist,” wrote Rosenblum and Janson, “and his studio, with its display of original plasters, was a pilgrimage goal for countless prominent visitors as well as aspiring artists.” (Nineteenth-Century Art, p. 191).
Thorvaldsen produced more than 90 freestanding sculptures, over 150 portrait busts, and some 300 reliefs in marble and bronze. To classical archeologists (you know you’re out there), he’s familiar as the man who did the original restorations of the sculptures found at the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina. The restorations have since been removed, which is certainly better for the historical accuracy of the sculptures (Thorvaldsen was an artist, not a student of Archaic Greek art), but a loss for the history of classical studies and the history of 19th-century sculpture.
The plaster originals for many of the sculptor’s works are in the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, whose website is regrettably short of images. For links to museums that do have his works, visit www.ArtCyclopedia.com and search for “Thorvaldsen.”
This sculpture shows Thorvaldsen as a sculptor, wearing a workman’s shirt, leggings, and slippers, and holding a chisel and mallet. His elbow rests on one of his own sculptures, a figure of Hope. On the pedestal appear copies of two of his best known reliefs, Night and Day.
The only other outdoor work by Thorvaldsen in Manhattan is a zinc copy of his Hebe (Youth) atop the Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park.
March 26, 1827: Death of
Beethoven
* Beethoven, by Henry Bearer. Central Park Mall, opposite the band shell. The figure in front, holding a lyre, is the Genius of Music.
What you ought to have gotten by clicking on this Salute is the Emperor Concerto in quadraphonic sound. Since I lack the technical ability to make that happen, I’ll give you instead the estimate of the eminent Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians on Beethoven:
From his success at combining tradition and exploration and personal expression he came to be regarded as the dominant musical figure of the nineteenth century, and scarcely any significant composer since his time has escaped his influence or failed to acknowledge it. For the respect his works have commanded of musicians, and the popularity they have enjoyed among wider audiences, he is probably the most admired composer in the history of Western music. (2nd ed., vol. 3, p. 73)
And, since I did a Salute to Goethe a few days ago, here’s Goethe’s comment on Beethoven:
His talent amazed me; unfortunately he is an utterly untamed personality, who is not altogether in the wrong in holding the world to be detestable but surely does not make it any the more enjoyable either for himself or for others by his attitude. He is easily excused, on the other hand, and much to be pitied, as his hearing is leaving him, which perhaps mars the musical part of his nature less than the social. (ibid., p. 86)
In researching this Salute to Beethoven, I was vividly reminded that artists (like Hollywood actors) can produce remarkable work, even though their explicit philosophy is defective, depraved or startlingly superficial. To make the point, here’s a mixed bag of Beethoven quotes gathered from a Google search:
Music, verily, is the mediator between intellectual and sensuous life... the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose.
I shall seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely.
When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
To play without passion is inexcusable!
Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.
Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.
Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.
Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.
The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, "Thus far and no farther."
What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.
Concerts in Central Park were popular with the city’s German-American immigrants. The Beethoven Mannerchoir, which often performed there, commissioned this monument to Beethoven in 1884. Bearer later sculpted a similar bust for Prospect Park’s Concert Grove (near the Wollman Skating Rink).
March
1863: Lincoln, Vallandigham, and habeas corpus
* Abraham Lincoln, by Henry Kirke Brown, 1868. North end of Union Square, near 16th St.
In March 1863, the third year of the Civil War was about to begin, and with Union volunteers reduced to a trickle, Lincoln had signed the Conscription Act authorizing the draft. Clement Vallandigham, a prominent “Copperhead” politician (a.k.a. a “Peace Democrat” or Southern sympathizer) closed a rousing speech in New York City with an exhortation to fellow Democrats: “He denied that we owe any obedience to our conscription act … We are under no obligation to respond beyond the limits of law constitutionally enacted” (reported in the New York Times). Two months later in Ohio, Vallandigham told another crowd that the war was “wicked, cruel and unnecessary – a war not being waged for the preservation of the Union, but for the purpose of crushing out liberty and establishing a despotism – a war for the freedom of the blacks and the enslaving of the whites.”
The governor of the Military Department of the Ohio (which included the state of Kentucky, a front-line zone) promptly arrested Vallandigham and had him court-martialed. He was sentenced to close confinement in (horrors!) Boston. Vallandigham’s lawyer requested a writ of habeas corpus, which would have brought Vallandigham before a civilian court. The petition was denied.
Lincoln, who had a sense of humor as well as a canny political mind, transmuted Vallandigham's sentence, ordering that he spend the duration of the war in the Confederacy. Writing in June 1863 to the irate Albany Democratic Committee, Lincoln explained:
“[H]e who dissuades one man from volunteering, or induces one soldier to desert, weakens the Union cause as much as he who kills a Union soldier in battle. Yet this dissuasion or inducement may be so conducted as to be no defined crime of which any civil court would take cognizance.
Ours is a case of rebellion – so called by the resolutions before me – in fact, a clear, flagrant, and gigantic case of rebellion: and the provision of the Constitution that ‘the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it,’ is the provision which specially applies to our present case. …
[Mr. Vallandigham] was not arrested because he was damaging the political prospects of the Administration, or the personal interests of the Commanding-General, but because he was damaging the army, upon the existence and vigor of which the life of the nation depends. He was warring upon the military, and this gave the military constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands upon him. …
I can no more be persuaded that the Government can constitutionally take no strong measures in time of rebellion, because it can be shown that the same could not be lawfully taken in time of peace, than I can be persuaded that a particular drug is not good medicine for a sick man, because it can be shown not to be good food for a well one.”
Vallandigham promptly fled the South for Niagara Falls, and by mid-1864 had resumed his political life, without any interference from the Lincoln administration.
Vallandigham’s arrest was a cause celebre at the time, although it turned out to be of negligible consequence to the outcome of the war. But it does raise some fascinating questions that are still worthy of debate. Are there limits to free speech when a country is at war, rather than at peace? Do civilians ever fall under military jurisdiction? Can a government established to protect individual rights temporarily abrogate those rights, if the very existence of the government is at stake – if some citizens are attempting to overthrow the government by force, rather than by the means established in the Constitution?
Henry Kirke Brown also did the equestrian George Washington at the south side of Union Square. For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
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