Forgetting George Washington Dugan: public memory, emancipation, and the Concord Soldiers’ Monument

This reflection considers attempts by inhabitants of Concord, Massachusetts to address the omission of the name of George Washington Dugan – the only Black Concordian to enlist in the Union Army during the American Civil War – from the Concord Soldiers’ Monument. In exploring the emphasis the community have placed on incorporating Dugan’s name into the Soldier’s Monument, the argument places these efforts within a longer trajectory of monumentalization which envisages the commemoration of Emancipation as an end in itself. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s speech at the dedication of the Concord Soldiers’ Monument in 1867 offers an example of this mode of thought. A further examination of the racially-charged Enlightenment philosophies of “progress” that inspired his speech and his view of the monument’s purpose provoke new and important questions about the form public commemorations of Black wartime service might take. The piece turns, finally, to Dugan’s missing body, its likely resting place on Morris Island, South Carolina, and its impact on the rhetoric of dedication at Boston’s Robert Gould Shaw Memorial to consider the merits of public forgetting – or, rather, of de-centralizing the monument as a commemorative mode.