October 4, 2015: In this view of the Civil War soldier at top of the monument at Keokuk National Cemetery, it doesn’t look like he has a specific insignia. But that’s likely intentional, at least in part because he represents unknown soldiers buried there.
In an article published online a week ago but in print (at least the section in the Des Moines Register) Sunday, USA Today went after the existence of Confederate monuments across the country.
Although most of these monuments are in former Confederate states, they are also in border states that fought alongside the Union, such as Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia and Maryland; in Union states, including Massachusetts, Iowa and Pennsylvania; and in states that were mere territories in 1861, such as Montana, Arizona and Oklahoma.
Hold it. HOOOOOLLLDD IT. I am not going to say I’ve never seen a Confederate flag flying in Iowa, because I have. But to say Iowa has monuments sympathetic to the South is, as they might say in the 1860s, a scurrilous accusation.
A list of Confederate monuments on Wikipedia lists none in Iowa. In a comprehensive listing of Civil War monuments across Iowa, a majority are “Civil War Soldier” or “Veterans Monument/Memorial”. The word “Confederate” appears four times, two of which are captured cannons. A third is for POWs who died in transit to Rock Island. The fourth is for “Iowa’s Confederate General”, Sul Ross, who was born in Bentonsport the year before his family left for Texas. It is a rock with a plaque on it.
There is a site in Davis County, three rocks with plaques on them, marking “the northernmost point of incursion into Iowa by Confederate forces.” That’s a historical fact, not a glorification of anything.
So what monument, let alone monuments plural, could the article be referencing? One possibility is the monument at the veterans cemetery in Keokuk. A handful of Confederates are buried there, but there is nothing for them except the grave markers (and flags on Memorial Day). The “Find a Grave” website says, “The monument is a large granite obelisk topped with the figure of a Confederate soldier standing at parade rest.” However, multiple other sources indicate this has to be false.
- First and foremost, the monument was put up by the Woman’s Relief Corps, which is the auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic — the UNION side!
- The inscription says “To Our Unknown Dead”, nothing more specific.
- The official page for the Keokuk National Cemetery from the Department of Veterans Affairs says it’s a “Union soldier standing at parade rest.”
- The Winter 1955 issue of the Annals of Iowa, “Grave Markers at Keokuk,” says, “A monument to the other 48 [unknown soldiers] was erected by the Women’s Relief Corps in 1912 and shows a Union soldier, standing at parade rest, on the top of a stone shaft.”
- It’s unlikely there is any sort of insignia, because the manufacturers of Civil War monuments — who basically would have been carving these things en masse in the early 20th century because so many places wanted one — could sell to both sides merely by saying “this depicts a soldier”.
I feel comfortable in saying no carved Confederate statue or monument with flowery language to their war dead occupies a place of prominence in the state of Iowa. If USA Today‘s rationale for mentioning the state is Sul Ross’ rock or the Keokuk statue, that is the thinnest gruel imaginable.