Saratoga National Historical Park
Saratoga Monument: How Americans Chose to Remember the Victory
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Transcript
The Saratoga Monument was built a century after the battle.
That makes it evidence about nineteenth-century America as well as 1777.
Citizens organized to commemorate the victory, and the cornerstone was laid on the centennial of Burgoyne's surrender in 1877.
The monument's figures turn memory into geography.
Horatio Gates faces north, toward the route of invasion.
Philip Schuyler faces toward his estate.
Daniel Morgan faces toward the positions associated with his corps.
And the southern niche is empty.
That empty niche represents Benedict Arnold.
The builders acknowledged his Saratoga heroism by leaving a space, while refusing him the honor of a statue.
It is one of the most unusual acts of selective commemoration in an American monument.
Every monument chooses.
Who gets a face.
Who gets a name.
What gets simplified.
The battles happened in 1777.
The commemorative landscape was built by later Americans deciding what the Revolution should mean.
You are visiting both histories at once.
The monument also reflects the nineteenth-century American appetite for building national identity through Revolutionary memory.
The Civil War had recently tested whether the United States would remain one country.
Commemorating the Revolution afterward helped create a usable shared past.
That does not make the monument cynical.
It makes commemoration political in the broadest sense.
Americans of the 1870s were deciding what stories could bind the country together.
Saratoga was a powerful candidate.