Download At the end of the Civil War there were nearly 2.5 million men who

At the end of the Civil War there were nearly 2.5 million men who had donned
the blue or the gray. This was vastly more veterans than the combined total of all of the
other American wars fought up to that time. These men had naturally formed bonds that
they were reluctant to abandon, and the war had not been over for very long before
groups of former soldiers began to seek out ways to come together at local, state, and
national levels.
Former Union soldiers were the first to organize. Soon after the end of the war,
several officers gathered in Philadelphia and founded the Military Order of the Loyal
Legion of the United States, known also as MOLLUS. MOLLUS was never a particularly
large organization because of its stringent membership requirements: only Union
officers and their eldest male sons could join. However, MOLLUS inspired numerous
imitators with more relaxed standards. Among them were the Society of the Army of the
James, the United States Soldiers and Sailors Protective Society, the United States
Service Society, and the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). The GAR was the single
most important Civil War veterans' organization, numbering 400,000 members at its
peak in the 1890s. The GAR was able to enroll so many members because it allowed all
Union veterans to join, including African Americans. Children and wives
of veterans could also be a part of the organization.
Confederate soldiers soon followed the lead of their Union counterparts. In 1870
several former Confederate officers gathered in Richmond, Virginia, and founded the
Association of the Army of Northern Virginia. Similar groups, mostly with limited
memberships, were established in the other former Confederate states over the course of
the next decade. The most prominent of these groups was the Association of the Army of
Tennessee, the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans of Virginia, and the North Carolina
Society of Ex-Sailors and Soldiers. Finally, in February 1889, these groups came
together to form the United Confederate Veterans, or UCV. The UCV founded two
auxiliary organizations, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of
the Confederacy; both are still in existence. At its height in the early 1900s, the UCV
counted 80,000 members among its ranks.
Both Confederate and Union veterans organizations served a variety of purposes in the
lives of their members. Perhaps most obviously, they provided camaraderie.
Most veterans posts held regular social meetings. They also organized regular reunions
of regiments or brigades. Often, the UCV and GAR would coordinate on "campouts,"
where entire armies would reunite on the important battlefields on the anniversaries of
the battles fought there. Campouts were held on the 25th and 50th anniversaries of
Gettysburg, for instance.
In addition to their role as social organizations, veterans groups were also
powerful political lobbies. The GAR was arguably the single most influential interest
group in the United States in the years between Appomattox and the turn of the century.
If a candidate for state or national office wished to be elected on the Republican ticket,
the GAR's support was often critical. For example, of the men who won
presidential elections between 1868 and 1900, only Democrat Grover Cleveland was not
a member of the GAR. Veterans expected concessions in exchange for their support. In
the years immediately after the war, they pushed for harsh terms for the readmission of
the South, and they were staunch supporters of Radical Reconstruction. Later, the GAR
focused on securing federal funding for veterans' hospitals and pensions. A succession of
pension bills was passed in the 1870s and 1880s, each increasing the amount being paid
to former soldiers or relaxing the requirements for pension eligibility. By the mid-1890s,
pension payments to Union veterans and their families accounted for 40 percent of the
entire federal budget.
Confederate veterans did not have the political leverage that their Union
counterparts enjoyed, but they nonetheless focused on the same issues. The Fourteenth
Amendment prohibited former Confederates from receiving federal benefits,
so veterans groups in the South were compelled to turn to their state governments and
private entities for support. Some Southern states, notably Louisiana, Georgia, and
South Carolina, established relatively generous pensions for their veterans. Other states,
including Texas and Louisiana, provided grants of land for former soldiers. In 1885 a
combination of public and private funding allowed for the founding of Lee Camp, the
first soldiers home for Confederate veterans. Ultimately, there were a total of 16 soldiers'
homes that provided care for more than 20,000 indigent and disabled ex-Confederates.
As the GAR and UCV worked to provide health and pension benefits for veterans, they
also strove to shape the memory of the war. Veterans were interested in placing the
bravery and sacrifice of the common soldier at the heart of the narrative. To that end,
the GAR, the UCV, and their auxiliary support groups undertook a variety of initiatives.
Each organization commissioned history textbooks and lobbied for their use in schools
so that children could be taught the "correct" version of what had happened during
the war. Both organizations played a role in establishing Memorial Day as a national
holiday, and both the GAR and the UCV erected countless monuments to soldiers and
their leaders across the country, particularly at important battlefields and at cemeteries.
Roughly 500 monuments were built by Southern veterans' groups, while approximately
5,000 were unveiled by the GAR and its allies. The majority of these monuments were
built between 1880 and 1910.
In 1896 William McKinley became the last veteran of the Civil War to be elected
to the presidency. By the start of the 1900s the Civil War was beginning to seem distant
in the minds of Americans, and a majority of veterans had already passed away. When
the 50th anniversary campout at Gettysburg was held in 1913, it was widely understood
that the event would be the final gathering for the men who had fought in the Civil War.
By the time of World War I the number of living veterans had been reduced to a few
thousand, and by the time the GAR disbanded in 1949, it was down to less than a
hundred. The last Civil War veteran, Albert Woolson, died in 1956, 95 years after the
first shot was fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.
References/ Further Information
Wallace Evan Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans' and Hereditary
Organizations in America, 1783–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1955);
Patrick J. Kelly, Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans' Welfare State,
1860–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997);
Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–
1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992);
Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of
Black Civil War Veterans(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004);
William White, The Confederate Veteran (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Confederate Pub. Co.,
1962).