By the time I arrived back in January, 2004, the monument had been cut into seventy separate components, the rubber molds made, the wax figures pulled from those molds, the ceramic molds created from those wax figures, and the bronze castings accomplished. All those sections had then been reassembled, the welded joints chased or ground down to the finish surface texture, with the exception of the enlarged 1863 Austrian Lorenz musket rifle held by a hand that was waiting to be welded back to the arm. The rifle leather shoulder strap posed some problems in fabricating a bronze piece that would hang like leather and twist just enough to have a genuine look. That solved, I turned my attention to the interior hands wrapped around the center soldier. The grasping quality of these hands required further work in the metal using a pencil grinder to reshape the knuckles and fingernails.
The completed bronze sculpture was then sandblasted to ensure a clean metal surface that would take the patina appropriately. A liver sulfate solution was applied cold and washed to leave a gray black tone to the metal. Then, along with two other assistants, I heated sections of the metal to 250 degrees and applied a cupric layer which oxidizes to give the metal a light green hue. Over this we applied a ferric solution to blend with the cupric forming a reddish brown surface color and with the addition of paste wax to the hot metal, a rich caramelized tone was created.
The same patina was created on the large bronze plaque that was framed by a rope like border, the corners dressed with a casting of our eagle crest that was created for the shoulder straps on two of the men. The border was first fabricated as a wooden frame that was used to make a mold and then cast in bronze. The bronze frame was then welded back to the flat bronze plaque tablet. The nine hundred pound plaque would be installed beneath the three thousand pound monumental figures.
The foundry work was complete except for some fragment studies adapted from the monument. Each head was recreated as a plaster casting and the original clay head sculptures were reworked to reveal a looser composition reinforcing the anonymity and representative quality of these Civil War men of African descent. The bronze head studies would be available in editions of 40 each.
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“In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky, her grand old woods, her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers, her mighty lakes and star crowned mountains, but my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave holding and wrong. When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers the tears of my bretheren are bourn to the ocean disregarded and forgotten that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.”

When Frederick Douglass spoke these words, the idea of a National Monument to honor black soldiers of the Civil War would surely have seemed a bizarre idea to him a the time. Here was a man who argued tirelessly to convince Abraham Lincoln and others of the rightness of employing Colored Troops, a free man who loved his country enough to demand that it acknowledge and solve the travesty that all men on American soil were not so.
Appropriately, the committee had decided that this memorial monument should be unveiled and dedicated on February 14, the adopted birth date of Frederick Douglas. And so it would be.
On February 2, 2004, a flat bed trailer arrived at the Vicksburg National Military Park. Along with some twenty-five park staff and officials, Dell Weston and I met at the site to install these unprecedented Civil War heroes. As I had come to realize during the previous two years of research and study, these men had suffered no greater individual loss of limb or life than any other white man honored in this remarkable National Park, but certainly no less. Within the Military Park system, this sculptural tribute would serve from that day forward to remind the world of that fact. The plaque was installed first and then the massive bronze creation was lifted with the crane cables, strangely floating into position to be lowered into its proper resting place on the granite clad concrete and steel pedestal. It was a nice moment.
As we all stood there in silence, an elderly retired black man who had worked for many years there in the Park, eased up behind me and whispered, “I never believed I’d see this day.”