($ in dollars) to be used "for a suitable memorial to the Confederate soldier." Artists Henry Bacon The monument was designed by Henry Bacon, who had been the principal designer of the Lincoln Memorial. He spent much of his youth in Wilmington and is buried there. Francis Herman Packer The statue was sculpted by Francis Herman Packer, a native of Germany who lived on Long Island, New York, and was a student of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. A decade earlier, Packer had been hired by a United Daughters of Confederacy chapter in Wilmington to sculpt the Confederate George Davis Monument (removed, August 2021), located one block to the north and dedicated in 1911. Lost cause inscriptions On the stele Obverse 1861–1865 To the Soldiers of the Confederacy Reverse Erected by a Committee under the testator's Will representing the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Confederate Veterans Association and his Executor MCMXXIV On the pedestal Confederates blend your recollections Let memory weave its bright reflections Let love revive life's ashen embers For love is life since love remembers PRO ARIS ET FOCIS This monument is a legacy of Gabriel James Boney Born Wallace, NC 1846 – Died Wilmington, NC 1915 "Confederates blend your recollections" The inscription is a rewriting of a poem about Christmas to suit Confederate memorial needs. The poem was printed in The Canadian Monthly January 1876 issue, more than 40 years before planning on the monument began. The author was Anglo-Irish diplomat Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Dufferin had no involvement with the American Civil War. Between 1860 and 1864, he was assigned to a diplomatic posting in Syria, and through the remainder of the 1860s served as Britain's Under-Secretary of State for India. At the time the poem was written, Dufferin was Governor-General of Canada. As the First Battle of Fort Fisher began on Christmas Eve, 1864 and ended with the capture of as many as 600 North Carolina Junior Reserves taken to Prisoner of War Camps in the north, and the Second Battle two weeks later took an equal number of men primarily ages 15-19 years old, many of whom perished, Dufferin's statement of Christmas "winds (that) blow bitter" describes the sad loss of hundreds of young soldiers (all drafted to war) on Christmas and thereafter. The poet urged men to "blend their recollections" of joyous Christmases past to relieve remembrances of sorrow. CHRISTMAS by the