Pension Building Civil War Frieze

Sculptor Caspar Buberl and General Montgomery Meigs (former Quartermaster General of the Union Army) “agreed to a design in which scenes of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and sailors, as well as a quartermaster, medical personnel, and a black teamster … would proceed around the building. The repetition helped the project to be economical, but the frieze’s sheer length helped the repetition to not be overly noticeable.”
— Kim O’Connell, “Former Pension Bureau A Stunning Tribute to Civil War Soldiers,” HistoryNet (accessed April 4, 2022)

Meigs also wrote to Buberl:
“Most of the drivers of Baggage wagons were freedmen Blacks. They wore whatever they could pick up, any rusted ragged garment. But very many or perhaps most of them succeeded in getting possession of cast off blue overcoats. Perhaps it will be better not to give them this overcoat which will make them like enlisted men, which they seldom were. But by all means make the driver a Negro full blooded. A soft hat very much dilapidated will be right. I leave all the clothes to your taste, but he must be a Negro, a plantation slave freed by war.”
— Joyce L. McDaniel, “Caspar Buberl: The Pension Building Civil War Frieze and Other Washington, D.C. Sculpture,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., Vol. 50, The Fiftieth Volume (1980), p. 333

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