By Tom Benoit
THE KEENE SENTINEL
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — The town plans to hold a June 19 (Juneteenth) dedication of a plaque that will correct Brattleboro’s Civil War monument to recognize the service of Black soldiers, as well as of substitute soldiers who served in place of wealthier town residents.
“People are left off of monuments because it was fashionable in the day … there was no thought that there was Black Civil War vets,” said Curtiss Reed Jr., a Brattleboro resident, founder of the Vermont African American Heritage Trail and a member of the committee to correct the memorial.
The plaque is being created after Joe Rivers, a history teacher at Brattleboro Area Middle School, worked with years of students to establish an accurate number of Brattleboro citizens who served in the Civil War.
Rivers and his students, working with the Brattleboro Historical Society and using names listed in newspapers from the time, located 427 soldiers who enlisted from Brattleboro, contradicting the monument, which states 385 men enlisted.
At least 56 of them were killed, according to Rivers.
The new plaque will indicate that approximately 450 soldiers and sailors served from Brattleboro. According to Rivers’ research, determining the number of substitutes — soldiers who fought in place of wealthy men who paid to avoid service — has been difficult.
He and his students counted 35 substitutes, while Mary Cabot’s “Annals of Brattleboro” states 55 Brattleboro soldiers were substitutes.
Rivers and three of his students, Priya Kitzmiller, Avery Bennett and Annabelle Thies, brought the middle-schoolers’ research to the attention of Peter Elwell, then Brattleboro’s town manager.
And according to Elwell, one of them asked him, “What are you going to do about it?”
Elwell started a committee of community members, including students who did the research, to correct the record. The committee decided the new plaque should feature words versus something visual and symbolic.
It will display a multi-paragraph explanation, giving information about the monument on the Brattleboro Common and also telling the fuller story, according to Elwell.
The plaque will state that the monument’s north-facing side, which lists Civil War battles fought by Brattleboro soldiers, does not include those fought by 22 Black soldiers from Brattleboro — battles such as the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm, the Battle of Fair Oaks and the Appomattox Campaign in Virginia. Black soldiers also served in Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation freeing all those held in slavery.
“This monument and the statements at the 1887 dedication ceremony … failed to recognize the Civil War service and sacrifice of African Americans, working class laborers, and those who served as substitutes for privileged White men who chose not to serve,” the plaque will state.
The plaque will also discuss the image on the memorial. The image depicts a Union and Confederate soldier shaking hands, with the Union soldier handing emancipation papers to a kneeling Black man.
“This image reinforces a stereotype that credits ‘civilized’ White men for benevolently ‘giving’ freedom to a grateful and subservient enslaved individual, obscuring the centuries-long struggle by Africans to oppose and fight slavery in the Americas,” the plaque will note.
The dedication ceremony’s date — Juneteenth — is a federal holiday originating in Texas and commemorating the day news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached Galveston.
Reed says the new plaque will bring the record up to date. Whether the decision to leave Black soldiers’ service off the monument was conscious or unconscious is unknown, he added.
“Black history is Vermont history,” he said, “… it’s important for people to know that part of their history is hidden from them.”
A public dedication ceremony will be held on Sunday, June 19, at 2 p.m. on the Brattleboro Common. Members of the committee will speak at the ceremony about the importance of the new plaque.
Tom Benoit can be reached at [email protected].
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