Gilded Age Gender Norms, Horse Testicles, Civil War Memory

Why has Farley never written on this statue in Lexington of General John Morgan and his mare Bess? See, Bess has testicles because the sculptor felt it wasn’t manly enough for a general to be riding around a mare. This says a good bit about the late 19th century’s obsession with manliness and war, with the imperialists of the period going through a Greatest Generation-esque fetishization of the military experience of their fathers and comparing their own manhood unfavorably to them. Proper Civil War memory could provide young men examples of bravery, courage, and manhood they could then take with them to Cuba, the Philippines, or whatever Latin America country we decided to invade on a given early 20th century day. And thus, a man’s horse needed to be a male, at least so it seems to have needed to be for this gender-worried sculptor.