Admiral Farragut Monument

The Admiral David Glasgow Farragut Monument was installed and dedicated in Madison Square Park in 1881. During the Civil War, Admiral Farragut commanded the Union naval fleet in its defeat of Confederate forces at the 1864 Battle of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Although his famous order, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!,” may have been apocryphal, it endured as an emblem of his courage. One of New York City’s most acclaimed historic public works, the monument was a collaboration between Irish-born American Renaissance sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who made the bronze statue of the admiral, and Beaux-Arts architect Stanford White, who collaborated on the pedestal in the form of a high-backed bluestone bench. The statue was distinguished in its day by the admiral’s naturalistic presence, an innovation in an era when figurative sculpture was often formal and academic. Farragut appears to stand on a ship’s prow, with ocean gales blowing open the coat of his naval uniform, binoculars poised in one hand and a sword hanging at his side. The base, with undulating lines suggesting the high seas, includes bas-reliefs of two female figures, Loyalty and Courage. While Farragut is clothed and identified, these female symbols are unnamed, draped attributes in service to characteristics of his military prowess. Significant dates in the admiral’s life are inscribed across one side of the base. The bluestone bench deteriorated and was replaced in 1935 with a granite copy made by Public Works Administration artists, while the original is preserved at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Park in Cornish, New Hampshire, the site of the artist’s summer home. Farragut, born in Tennessee in 1801, was the son of Elizabeth Shine, who immigrated from Scotland to North Carolina, and John Farragut Mesquide, a merchant captain from Menorca who immigrated to America in 1776 and served in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. After his mother’s death, his father placed his five children with separate families. Farragut joined the Navy in 1810 at age nine, served in the War of 1812, and became the adopted son of David Porter of the U.S. Navy. His first wife was Susan Caroline Marchant, and after her death he married Virginia Dorcas Loyall; their son, Loyall, was born in Norfolk, Virginia. Shortly before the Civil War, when Virginia announced it would secede, the family moved to New York to side with the Union. Historians have called Farragut a Southern Unionist. Biographies published in 1892, 1941–1943, and 2000s, along with a 1997 book on his Civil War campaigns, emphasized his operational tactics more than the central issue of slavery. Although his biographers have addressed neither his opinions on nor his practice related to slavery, 1840 and 1850 census records from Norfolk indicate that Farragut and his wife’s family held enslaved Africans, whose names were not recorded. His position as a slaveholder remains part of ongoing review of his place in history, and his efforts against Confederate forces, which would ultimately contribute to the abolition of slavery, are now considered only one part of his legacy.

New York, New York · United States