Edinburgh's Lincoln Memorial - Tombstone Tuesday

Did you know that, thought to be the only monument to the American Civil War outside the USA,  is in Edinburgh? 

It is in the Old Calton Burial Ground  in Edinburgh,  and was erected in 1898 in memory of the Scottish soldiers who fought  in the American Civil War on the side of the Union.   It features a freed slave and   one of Lincoln’s famous quotations "To preserve the jewel of liberty in the framework of freedom". A bronze shield bears the old US flag, and is wreathed in thistles to the left, and cotton to the right to signify the two countries.

 

Calton Cemetery (below), just off Princes Street,   was opened in 1718 as a non-denominational burial ground and is the resting place of prominent merchants and other notable worthies of the city.   

 

Looking up to Calton  Hill and  the Dugald Stewart Monument which was  modelled on the ancient Temple of the Winds in Athens,

 

Philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), an influential  figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, is commemorated in an imposing mausoleum besides the Lincoln statue.       In his  will,  Hume requested that a "Monument be built over my body ... with an Inscription containing only my Name and the Year of my Birth and Death, leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest". The tomb was designed by renowned architect Robert Adam in 1777. 

 

 

Transported in 1793 to Botany Bay in Australia was the fate of the Political Martyrs, commemorated in this towering obelisk which dominates the burial ground - In an  atmospheric photograph taken as rain clouds were gathering,

The Political Martyrs were early campaigners for  universal suffrage  and were charged with treason and sedition for  corresponding with the French (at the time of the French Revolution).

The inscription reads:  To the memory of Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe-Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, and Joseph Gerrald, erected by the Friends of Parliamentary Reform in England and Scotland 1844.  

The Reform Act  of 1832 was the first major step towards the vote for all  and the men were pardoned in 1838, with this monument erected some 50 years after their stand,

 

 

A view (right)  from, the burial ground up to the  turreted Governor's House - the only remains of the notorious Old Calton Jail.  It   received its first prisoners in 1817 and was closed in 1925. Demolition followed to provide a site for St. Andrew's House - the home of Scotland's senior civil servants.  

In 1913 three women suffragettes  were sent to Calton Jail from the Scottish Borders having been found guilty of attempting to destroy the new stand at Kelso Racecourse.  The were sentenced to nine months' imprisonment  However they were liberated within a week having gone on hunger strike.  The terms of their temporary release  stated that they must return after a stipulated number of days - an instance of the infamous "cat and mouse"  policy.

 

Below is Edinburgh's Nelson Monument on Calton Hill.  Designed like an upturned telescope, it remembers Admiral Horatio Nelson and his death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. 

 

 

 

 

If you think you may have ancestors buried in Old Calton Burial Ground, there is an excellent  website listing all the names - click HERE to find out more.  


Tombstone Tuesday is one of the many daily  prompts from www.geneabloggers.com to encourage bloggers to record their family history.





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