The Forging of Civil War Memory and Reconciliation, 1865

Home , Boston Common (quartet), Cardinal (comics), Confederate Veteran, Horace Binney Sargent, Josiah Patterson, The Confederates

A Dissertation

entitled

“The Sinews of Memory:” The Forging of Civil War Memory and Reconciliation,

1865 – 1940

Steven A. Bare

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Doctor of Philosophy Degree in History

______Dr. Kim E. Nielsen, Committee Chair

______Dr. Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch, Committee Member

______Dr. Bruce Way, Committee Member

______Dr. Neil Reid, Committee Member

______Dr. Cyndee Gruden, Dean College of Graduate Studies

The University of Toledo

May 2019

This document is copyrighted material. Under copyright law, no parts of this document may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.

An Abstract of

“The Sinews of Memory:” The Forging of Civil War Memory and Reconciliation, 1865 – 1940

Steven A. Bare

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in History

The University of Toledo December 2018

“The Sinews of Memory:’ The Forging of Civil War Memory and Reconciliation,

1865 – 1940,” explores the creation of historical memory of the American Civil War and, its byproduct, reconciliation. Stakeholders in the historical memory formation of the war and reconciliation were varied and many. “The Sinews of Memory” argues reconciliation blossomed from the 1880s well into the twentieth-century due to myriad of historical forces in the United States starting with the end of the war leading up to World War II.

The crafters of the war’s memory and reconciliation – veterans, women’s groups, public history institutions, governmental agents, and civic boosters – arrived at a collective memory of the war predicated on notions of race, manliness, nationalism, and patriotism.

In forging a specific memory of the Civil War, the aforementioned stakeholders in the process utilized veterans’ fraternal organizations, joint encampments of veterans, physical space, pilgrimages to sites of memory, and cultural products such as cinema to bind the former belligerent regions, both North and South, together. Out of the effort at reconciliation, a White, predominately middle-class, memory of the war emerged.

iii Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Table of Contents iv

Preface v

1. Chapter One: Organization Building: The Grand Army of the Republic and the United

Confederate Veterans 1

2. Chapter Two: The Flowering of Reconciliation 48

3. Chapter Three: Memorial Mania: Claiming Space in the South in the Name of

Memory and Reconciliation 86

4. Chapter Four: The Pilgrimage: Travels of Memory, Travels of Reconciliation 147

5. Chapter Five: “After All Tomorrow Is Another Day:” Casting Memory of the Civil

War, Reconstruction, and the South Through Cinema 194

6. Chapter Six: Epilogue: Whither the Confederacy? 242

References 249

iv Preface

The front page of the September 23, 1895 Rock Island Argus contained the captivating headline: “End of the Great Love Fest.” The headline captured a “remarkable series of blue and grey reunions” during the late summer of 1895. The “blue and grey” mentioned in the piece referenced a “throng of multitudes” reconciling over the Civil

War. Beginning in Louisville, Kentucky, and ending in Atlanta, Georgia, the veterans, both of the Union and the Confederacy, gathered “to close the great coming together of the north and south” during September 1895. The Rock Island Argus piece summed up an element of the zeitgeist of late nineteenth century U.S. society. After years of bitter acrimony between Union and Confederate veterans from the end of the Civil War in

1865, the emotional healing commenced as the century drew to its close. The reconciliation movement the U.S. experienced beginning in the 1880s and running up to the eve of World War I became a “great love fest .”1

Concomitantly, reconciliation intertwined with the formation of a shared historical memory of the war amongst Union and Confederate veterans, and other stakeholders in the process. The collective memory of the war years the veterans formed, with others following closely, a sociological concept David Gross termed unzeitgemässig, or out of sync with contemporary times. The men, and as we will see other stakeholders, engaged in crafting the war’s historical memory were stuck in neutral. The stakeholders in the historical memory process did not understand, or refused, to acknowledge, the societal changes occurring around them at the end of the nineteenth century. With

Reconstruction closing in 1877, the process of reconciliation could commence. Beginning

1 “End of the Great Love Fest,” Rock Island Argus, Rock Island, Illinois, 23 September 1895, 1. v around 1880, and progressing well into the 1910s, these veterans, and their supporters, took a number of avenues to promote what they felt was perishing – memory of battlefield exploits and the ordeal they experienced from 1861 – 1865. In the process, the veterans, and attendant stakeholders, in the historical memory project attempted to craft a collective memory in a present they felt antagonistic to their needs. What emerged was a warped memory of the war that marginalized wide swaths of the U.S. population, namely

African Americans, newly arriving immigrants, and those who did not experience the war years.2

The study of historical memory creation began in earnest during the Interwar

Period. Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs is credited with beginning the memory paradigm in 1925. However, quite a few scholars attribute the growth of memory studies to work later in the twentieth century, particularly in the 1970s on forward. Paul Fussell’s The

Great War and Modern Memory (1970) is considered the beginning of historical scholarship concerning Western (Euro-American) memory studies. The First World War ushered in the modern era, especially the complex interplay of trauma and memory. The logocentrism of Western modernity and its break between history and memory also figures into this process. Because of the sophistication of historical inquiry – knowledge about the past and change over time – memory is not so much about preservation of folklore and tales, as it is about utilizing how things are remembered vis-à-vis the past event. In addition, a concurrent process in historical memory formation is what British

Marxist historian Eric Hobsawm termed “invented traditions.” For Hobsbawm, writing in

2 Gross, David, from Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture, in The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011): 422. vi the 1980s, invented traditions came to mean “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic of nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.” When dissecting veterans’ and stakeholders’ memorial practices following the Civil War, their actions meant to connect them with the past – the war years. Simply put, the generation that fought, and lived through the Civil War, invented symbolic rituals of remembrance to govern behaviors in the present, as well as the future. With the wealth of scholarship on historical memory formation, the field of memory studies acquired a serious scholarly framework for deconstructing historical events and actors. This would have a tremendous impact on how scholars approached the

American Civil War.3

Michael Kammen’s Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991) helped propel U.S. scholarly production concerning historical memory. According to Kammen, “tradition can have ideological consequences and help to define a culture or subculture,” particularly when dealing with the South’s fascination with the Lost Cause of its failed bid at independence. For Kammen, “public memory, which contains a slowly shifting configuration of traditions, is ideologically important because it shapes a nation’s ethos and sense of identity.” Therefore, the power of historical memory lies in its potential to influence, mold, and configure identity

3 “Introduction,” from The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011): 3-15; Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1970).; Hobsbawm, Eric, from “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky- Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011): 271. vii regardless of the historical record. In essence, memory creation is not necessarily tied to the realities of the historical events.4

If Kammen explained historical memory’s power to mold and shape U.S. identity,

John Bodnar took the concept further and elucidated how cultural manifestations impacted U.S. historical memory formation. Bodnar’s Remaking America: Public

Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth-Century (1992) argued public memory emerges from the “intersection of official and vernacular cultural expressions.”

Official expressions of memory originates from cultural leaders at all levels of U.S. society. In particular, leaders at all levels of society share a need to promote U.S. “social unity, the continuity of existing institutions, and loyalty to the status quo.” Vernacular expressions of memory reside in changing demographics, or more importantly, sharing in an experience such as war. When the two strands of memory promotion, official and vernacular, merge a nationalized public memory – in this case, the U.S. Civil War – emerges for memory consumers. Thus, the creation of Civil War memory by veterans and attendant stakeholders centers on expressions of nationalistic imperatives, as well as those at the regional level.5

If Kammen and Bodnar articulated the persistence of historical memory to shape

U.S. identity, and those who purveyed historical memory formation, then historian

Gaines M. Foster kicked open the door on the South’s preoccupation with its Confederate heritage. Published four years prior to Kammen’s and Bodnar’s groundbreaking work,

4 Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991): 11-13.

5 Bodnar, John, from Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth-Century in The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011): 265-268. viii Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South

(1987) examines the White South’s infatuation with the Civil War and its memory. For years after Appomattox, White Southerners displayed a collective organizational behavior that ran the gamut of resistance to celebration to reconciliation. The White

South hitched its wagon to a specific strain of memory – the Lost Cause – and rode that strain to the point where segments of the northern population came to believe the Lost

Cause a factual accounting of the war’s historical record. By the turn of the century, the

White South’s project to win the hearts and minds of the northern public succeeded as the two former combatants came together in reconciliation. To quote another writer’s quip in commenting on White Southern psychology in the four decades after the war, there always seemed to be a “Confederate in the Attic” of the region’s collective memory of the war.6

The Lost Cause emerged from the writings of ex-Confederate generals immediately after the Civil War. It was the White South’s response to defeat at the hands of the Union Army. Boiled down to its basest elements, the Lost Cause stipulated the

Confederate Army was never truly beaten on the field of battle. Northern advantages in resources, men, and materiel brought the Confederacy to defeat. Furthermore, the Lost

Cause extolled the gallantry of the Confederate soldier, and the White South as solid in its failed bid for independence. However, over time, the Lost Cause morphed into a mythology of the White Southern imagination. According to historian Alan T. Nolan the

Lost Cause “version of the war is a caricature, possible, among other reasons, because of the false treatment of slavery” and African Americans. White Southerners twisted the

6 Foster, Gaines. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 3-7. ix war’s rationale and outcomes as a conflict waged by the South to determine a true

Republican form of government – “of, by, and for the people.” From this sanitized version of historical reasoning, the war was not about slavery and equality, but about

White men being the determiners of their fate. In Lost Cause mythology, the historical record of the war was subverted for an ideological, skewed memory of the war. In essence, myth replaced fact.7

The mythology of the Lost Cause in the South came with an identifiable set of rituals, commemorative practices, and organization. Sociologist Clifford Geertz has offered that the threat of historical change’s disordered nature often elicits the creation of symbols that “account for, and even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience.” For the South, the decade and half following the Civil

War presented a disordered present that did not jibe with a seemingly halcyon past. The rhetoric, rituals of remembrance, built emblems, and hero worship of the Confederacy permitted White Southerners to create, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss,

“commemorative rites that re-created the mythical time of the past and partly mourning rites that converted dead heroes into revered ancestors.” Therefore, the White South engaged in a Janus-faced effort to assuage their lost war, and win the hearts and minds of

White Northerners in the process. The efforts of White memory stakeholders in Dixie from 1865 – 1940 to define reconciliation have elicited quite a response from historians.8

7 Nolan, Alan T., “The Anatomy of the Myth,” from The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, Gallagher, Gary W. and Nolan, Alan T., eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000): 11-27.

8 Wilson, Charles Reagan, “The Religion of the Lost Cause: Ritual and Organization of the Southern Civil Religion, 1865 – 1920,” The Journal of Southern History 46, No. 2 (May 1980): 219-238. x Since the early 2000s, scholars have dissected the forging of the Civil War’s historical memory and its attendant reconciliationist impulses. Historian David W.

Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) is the first substantial scholarly work on the crafting of the Civil War’s historical memory. In Race and Reunion, Blight posits three strands of historical memory of the war emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. One strand, the Unionist, presented itself in the aftermath of the war through dealing with the battlefield dead, the horrors of prisoner of war (POW) stockades, and the gruesome details of military hospitals. This memory strand belonged primarily to the North and the veterans of the

Federal Army. The second strand of memory centered on a whites-only experience. In this version of historical memory, the South’s Lost Cause gained ascendancy in the

South, transported to the North, and codified memory of the war centered on the shared heroism, bravery, and valor of both Union and Confederate soldiers. The final strand of

Blight’s historical memory formulation consisted of the African American response to the war’s meaning – emancipation. For this segment of the U.S. population, the war became one of liberation and its memory centered on the African American combat experience in the name of the Union. Early in the historical memory process Blight postulates, the White North countered the Lost Cause through the prism of fighting to save the Union from a treasons lot. However, over time, according to Blight, the first two memory strands – Union and Lost Cause – merged together to squelch the third, emancipation. By the end of the nineteenth century, race determined which memory became ascendant.9

9 Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001): 1-4. xi Blight’s Race and Reunion opened avenues for historical production on the Civil

War’s memory and the process of reconciliation. One direction of scholarly studies of the

Civil War’s memory and reconciliation concerned how remembrance coalesced inside public cemeteries, particularly in the South. William Blair’s, Cities of the Dead:

Contesting Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865 – 1914 (2004) examined how rituals of remembrance in the region’s public cemeteries defined citizenship and rights.

Blair deploys Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of “invented traditions” – how elites created and governed ceremonies of the nation-state – to explain the White South’s rituals of

Confederate remembrance in cemeteries. In the process of remembrance, cemeteries became contested grounds of memory (Whites and African Americans ascribing differing meanings of remembrance to the built landscape) during the late nineteenth century and up to World War I.10

In a different vein of argumentation, John R. Neff, in Honoring the Civil War

Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (2004), examines how cemeteries became repositories of not only the dead, but sites of U.S. nation-state building. According to Neff, “the act of commemoration articulates the relationship between those involved in the memorial activity and the social, political, or cultural context in which they find themselves.” Furthermore, the cemeteries containing Civil

War dead served as sites of memory, extolling future generations to mark the sacrifices made by the soldiers buried within the cemetery grounds. In this manner, the Southern

(and Northern) public, through military cemeteries, preserved the tangible

10 Blair, William. Cities of the Dead: Contesting Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004): 1-10.

xii memorialization and commemoration of those who died in battle for cause and country.

Civil War cemeteries physically manifested what historian George Mosse has termed

“the cult of the fallen soldier.”11

The process of reconciliation evolved over time and did not begin to make significant strides until the 1880s. For a myriad of reasons, veterans and stakeholders on both sides could not arrive at common ground early in the process. Historians have debated why reconciliation was so problematic. For example, historian Caroline E.

Janney, in Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013), presents a compelling picture of reconciliation’s twists and turns. Janney ultimately argues reconciliation never constituted the predominant memory of the war among its participants and stakeholders. According to Janney, Union veterans held firm to their cause as the right one during, and after the war. Conversely, Confederate veterans refused to concede their wartime cause as incorrect. Therefore, in Janney’s estimation, spasms of reconciliation, whether joint reunions of both sets of veterans, or joint cemetery memorialization rituals, or other memory building activities, tended to reinforce sectional partisanship. According to Janney, while each side might have met under a banner of reconciliation, privately (and sometimes publicly), actors in the reconciliation process still adhered to their interpretation of the war’s outcome and memory.12

“‘The Sinews of Memory:’ Civil War Memory and Reconciliation, 1865 – 1940” parallels, builds on, and diverges from the scholarship enumerated above. First, “The

11 Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004): 1-4.

12 Janney, Caroline. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 5-10.

xiii Sinews of Memory” is a project concerning the crafting of Civil War memory, its negotiation, re-negotiation, and the eventual settling on one common, shared memory of the war. Second, the project examines the various modalities Union and Confederate veterans, and other stakeholders, pursued in creating a collective memory of the Civil

War as they arrived at reconciliation. These items include veterans’ activities, joint encampments, public history institutions, sites of memory, and the act of pilgrimage.

Finally, the study wraps up with how Hollywood impacted the staying power of Civil

War memory long after the generation that fought over its creation passed from the scene.

“The Sinews of Memory” ultimately argues reconciliation did not come easy in the two decades after Appomattox; however, over time, both sides arrived at a common, shared memory of the war predicated on White male heroism, bravery, and valor on the battlefield. Furthermore, reconciliation brought with it understandings of U.S. nationalism/patriotism through imperialistic forays under one flag, mnemonic devices, landscapes of memory, and pilgrimages. Swept up in the reconciliation impulses were women, and other stakeholders, in crafting a shared memory of the war. Yet, in the process of reconciliation, segments of the U.S. population, namely African Americans, were written out of the war’s memory and left to create their own communities of memory. Thus, the main cause of the war – slavery – rarely received lip service from the majority of memory creators. The memory crafted around reconciliation became a predominately whites-only affair.

The first chapter of “The Sinews of Memory” chronicles the formation of veterans’ organizations in the North and the South. The largest of these organizations consisted of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) for Union veterans, and the United

xiv Confederate Veterans (UCV) for those who served in the Confederate Army. The GAR formed roughly thirty years (1866) prior to the UCV (1889). Both organizations had different organizational structures, behavior, memory, and rituals of remembrance.

However, while they paralleled each other in their organizational development and identity, over time they merged in the creation of historical memory. Consequently, the

South’s interpretation of the war’s memory – the Lost Cause – gained ascendancy as the two veterans’ groups lurched towards reconciliation. As reconciliation activities ramped up in the 1880s, the Lost Cause became the memory most associated with the war.

The second chapter explores reconciliation as embodied in the joint encampment and its attendant cultural productions. By the 1880s, the generation that fought the war and managed its outcomes began to near its final bivouac. The old veterans felt time ticking against them. Therefore, the men of the GAR and UCV, along with female auxiliary organizations, felt the time to mend the emotional scars and regional divisions had arrived. As the 1880s gave way to the turn of the century, more and more GAR posts visited their UCV counterparts down South. Through these meetings, the process of reconciliation flowered. The historical memory built between Union and Confederate veterans was one of a shared patriotism – even though each wartime cause was antithetical – and love of country. They swept the sectional bitterness of the antebellum period and Reconstruction under the rug, arriving at a sentimental, sanitized memory of the past. In a sense, the reconciliation impulses percolating at the end of the nineteenth century, and up to World War I, displayed historical amnesia regarding the war’s reasons and legacy.

xv Physical space played a role in the formation of historical memory and reconciliation, and is the focus of Chapter Three. The halls and campsites where joint reunions occurred constituted one form of space for memory formation. However, far more was in play from the 1880s to roughly World War I. The National Military Park system staked out five battlefields – one Shiloh – as worthy of preservation and conservation. Great care went into presenting battlefields as objective sites where Union and Confederate veterans built memories through reunions and monument consecrations.

Cemeteries became sites of memory, mourning, and reconciliation. White Southerners gobbled up the region’s civic space through Confederate monumentation. In the process, a specific memory of their war emerged which adhered closely to the South’s Lost Cause.

Northerners visiting the South accepted the monuments and their attendant memory.

Certainly, northern locales built monuments to Union efforts, but the process in the South presents a unique case study since it included both sets of veterans, and predominately occurred on Southern soil.13

The fourth chapter examines pilgrimages by Union veterans to GAR National

Encampments and to sites in the South. Historian Sidney W. Mead, in The Lively

Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (1963), describes Americans as “a people in movement through space who have celebrated the external and material side of their pilgrim’s progress that they have tended to conceal even from themselves the inner, spiritual pilgrimage.” While Mead explored the Christian concept of pilgrimages made by

Americans, by the early nineteenth century the U.S. public’s concept of a pilgrimage morphed into a secularized voyage. Modernity, through its technological and

13 The other four National Military Parks consecrated in the 1890s were Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga-Chattanooga, and Vicksburg. xvi communications advances, provided veterans with the potential to conduct pilgrimages.

These advances in the late nineteenth century allowed Union veterans – this veteran group conducted the majority of the travel – to visit GAR comrades, and more importantly, to visit sites of memory and mourning in the South. Through the pilgrimage, veterans reconciled and became bound as citizens of one U.S. nation-state. In addition, women and kin joined the men on their excursions. Because of this, the purpose of pilgrimages blurred between leisure and memory formation. The pilgrimage was a critical element of memory formation from 1890 to the eve of World War I.14

The final chapter of “The Sinews of Memory” explores how Hollywood, beginning with The Birth of a Nation and concluding with Gone with the Wind, has impacted the U.S. public’s memories of the war and Reconstruction. By the time The

Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, fewer and fewer veterans remained alive to recount their stories. Reconciliation was, more or less, a completed project. Generations born after the war and Reconstruction began the process of carrying on the war’s memory. In doing so, they utilized cinema to keep the paradigm of the war’s historical memory in line with the one touted by the South. Through cinema, the White South was venerated,

Jim Crow buttressed, and, both Union and Confederate soldiers portrayed as heroes.

Indeed, by the premiere of Gone with the Wind in 1939, nearly fifty percent of the

American public had attended a showing of The Birth of a Nation. As President

14 Mead, Sidney W. The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1963): 7-8.

xvii Woodrow Wilson remarked at a private screening of The Birth of a Nation, cinema had the power to “teach history by lightning.”15

In 1867, the U.S. population counted 1.8 million veterans of both sides. These men, Union and Confederate, constituted 5% of the total U.S. population. Even by the

1880s, there remained considerable numbers of Union and Confederate veterans.

Furthermore, other stakeholders, such as women, got in on the act of crafting the war’s memory. Quite a few historians have produced interpretations and studies concerning the veterans’ and stakeholders’ memory of the war and the process of reconciliation. This project tracks a few of the studies, but also veers in a different direction. While historians, such as Janney and Neff, outline the caustic relations between each region in the fifteen years after the war, there occurred a cooling off between the war’s memory stakeholders beginning in the 1880s. Certainly, animosity existed well into the twentieth century; however, those voices still claiming right and wrong during, and after the war, were more or less announcing their claims in an empty forest. Yet, examining veterans’ organizations, their activities, the appropriation of space, acts of pilgrimages, and film provides a nuanced interpretation of memory formation and its byproduct, reconciliation.

This project does not outright challenge other historians’ claims of rancor in reconciliation – the historical record shows they existed. What this project sets out to demonstrate is that the people, and processes, involved in the war’s historical memory formation and reconciliation finally came to mutual understandings as the nineteenth century closed and gave way to the twentieth, even if the memory consecrated was warped from the actualities of the conflict and its aftermath. The late nineteenth century

15 Lenning, Arthur, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Film History 16, No. 2, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (2004): 118. xviii and early twentieth century efforts to make sense of the carnage of 1861 – 1865 truly bound all stakeholders by “the sinews of memory.”16

16 Marten, James, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011): 245-249. xix Chapter 1

Organizational Building: The Grand Army of the Republic and the

United Confederate Veterans

In September 1866, the city of Rock Island, Illinois, hosted a Grand Army of the

Republic (GAR) encampment. The Davenport, Illinois Post No. 1 of the GAR made a journey to Rock Island to attend the encampment festivities. Later that year, Richmond,

Indiana similarly hosted a GAR encampment. A large procession of Union veterans in carriages, on horseback, and on foot made quite a commotion in Richmond by singing

“Glory, glory, hallelujah” as they made their way through the town. Indiana Governor

Oliver P. Morton made a few remarks in addressing the veterans. Morton spoke of his wartime service and his aspiration that the old veterans in Blue represented his “hope that

I have in the future of our country.” From the end of the Civil War up through the early twentieth-century, scenes of Union veterans attending Grand Army of the Republic encampments like those in Rock Island, Illinois and Richmond, Indiana would play out across the Midwest and the North.

In the South, veterans’ gatherings gained steam in a slower manner than their

Union counterparts above the Mason-Dixon Line. Because of the wartime destruction throughout much of the South and Federal occupation during Reconstruction,

Confederate veterans lurched towards fraternal bonding through a sectional – and by

17 “From Davenport,” Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, 26 September 1866, 4.; “Gov. Morton at Green Mount,” The Richmond Palladium, Richmond, Indiana, 8 November 1866, 1. 1 extension, national – organization. However, once the region rebuilt itself after

Reconstruction and became an economic dynamo beginning in the 1880s, the veterans in

Grey recognized the need for a similar “big tent” organization like the Grand Army of the

Republic. Thus, in l889 Confederate veterans organized themselves into the United

Confederate Veterans (UCV) and held “camps” throughout locations in the former

Confederacy.18

This chapter explores the evolution of the GAR and UCV in the run-up to the mid-1880s. Both veterans’ groups labored tirelessly on behalf of their respective constituency. They held encampments (GAR), or camps (UCV), and pumped out cultural production, such as publications, centered on the needs of each organizations’ members.

Early on in the process, speeches and public pronouncements sounded far removed from reconciliation. Indeed, at times, it seemed the two sides would never find common ground. However, over time, tensions thawed allowing reconciliation to flower.

Ultimately, both organizations fixated on their version of the historical record and memory of the war; yet, eventually they merged into a common shared historical understanding. As a northern preacher remarked at a UCV camp on the eve of the twentieth-century, “to be brave in danger” bound the Blue and Grey “heroes” together.

The two sides thought they shared commonalities from “seeing the Elephant” (Civil War terminology for combat). However, over time, the ex-belligerents met on ground born of battle and ideologies of shared sacrifice and patriotism.19

Laying the Groundwork: The South in the Final Decades of the Nineteenth-Century

18 “News Condensed,” Semi-Weekly Interior Journal, Stanford, Kentucky, 8 July 1890, 2.

19 “The Confederate Reunion,” The Anderson Intelligencer, Anderson Courthouse, South Carolina, 21 June 1899, 3. 2 In order to understand the context of historical memory formation during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a cursory examination of the Southern social milieu helps ground the stakeholders’ in a frame of regional reference. The purpose here is to demonstrate how the South became the region in which most activities around sectional repair occurred. The South found itself in a state of economic and social flux from the end of Reconstruction to the turn-of-the-century. In 1877, Reconstruction and

Federal occupation of the South ended. By 1880, the region began to emerge as fertile ground for Northern business and investment. Advertising, name brands, and mass produced products flowed into the South in an ever greater current. The movement of capital and a consumer society southward signaled stronger ties of the region to national economic trends. Southern business leaders pounced on the opportunities afforded by

Northern capital and a burgeoning manufacturing base. From the 1880s to the first decades of the twentieth-century, more and more mining, manufacturing, and lumbering pulled Southerners, regardless of race, into the wage labor market. Consequently, villages and towns appeared where virtually little existed before. Cities such as Birmingham,

Atlanta, and Richmond grew exponentially, drawing people in a centripetal force to the growing urban-industrial centers. The South was a region in flux as the nineteenth century drew to a close.20

Southern boosters, business leaders that touted the economic vitality of the South, courted Northern investors to the favorable business climate, that is the absence of a concerted effort at organized labor, the region provided. The South did not only sell the

North on economic regeneration; the North aligned with the South on racial matters.

20 Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007): ix. 3 Northern urban centers practiced some of the segregationist policies as the South, just covertly. The “color line” held firm throughout the South after 1880. Segregation and racial purity laws permeated the southern legal system. Lynching, which rose exponentially during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, became the most brutal and sensational example of a concerted white effort to reassert absolute dominance, by drawing the sharpest possible boundaries between white and African

American Southerners. The campaign of white supremacy was part of a larger effort by prosperous whites to purify the Southern body politic, rendering it fit for inclusion in the racist and national parade of economic progress. In sum, Southern political and business leaders presented a white, complacent work force that jibed with national feelings on racial matters. While the North possessed workplace and housing segregation, the white

South expanded its control of the African American population in the region through legal and terroristic methods.21

In addition, a generational shift occurred, as those who experienced the Civil War became middle-aged and older adults. Gilded Age veterans joined veterans’ societies in large numbers. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) attracted nearly one of every two

Union soldiers still alive. The Southern version, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), drew one of every three or four Confederate veterans. These organizations allowed the aging veterans to craft the history told of the conflict. Anticipating death and fearing their deeds and justifications might be lost to the younger generation, the GAR and UCV sought to establish commemorative and remembrance activities that would survive their passing. Social tensions in the 1880s and 1890s, such as urbanization, immigration, and

21 Lears, Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009): 93. 4 labor unrest, furthered these veterans’ groups effort to ramp up memorialization activities and rituals. As many scholars have argued, it was during the 1880s and 1890s that the reconciliation movement accelerated.22

Two years after the end of the Civil War, the United States counted more than 1.8 million veterans in its midst. By the 1880s, the Civil War veterans’ numbers remained high. In both the North and South, this constituency held an enormous amount of influence with a very loud voice. In the North, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) agitated for veterans’ pensions (and won) as well as the codification of sacred, nation- state recognized holidays, such as Memorial Day. In the South, the United Confederate

Veterans, along with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, took on similar tasks, most notably the memorialization of Confederate soldiers of all ranks. For the generation that fought the war and lived with its aftermath, the business of remembering the sacrifices of 1861 – 1865 constituted a serious matter. While their children might not have felt the same way, the veterans worried that their sacrifices might soon be forgotten.

Thus, the two major veterans’ organizations of the former combatants established activities that secured their memories of the war and advocated a shared historical connection with the war.23

Twenty years after the Civil War and nearly a decade after Reconstruction, the veterans of the Blue and Grey appeared even more ready to recall the most exciting and traumatic moments of their lives. Some longed to revisit old battlefields, while others

22 Foster, Gaines. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.): 112-113.

23 Marten, James, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011): 245-249. 5 relished the opportunity to travel to some distant city. Some found comfort in reunions with old foes that they could not find among civilians, individuals who did not experience the war’s trial by fire. Even if they had faced each other from opposite ends of the rifle, these men believed that they shared a powerful bond in the horrific moments they collectively survived. Some reasoned that the men who had shot at them might help them better understand their own experiences and help heal any lingering wounds. Whatever their reasons for attending the Blue or Grey meetings, one parameter became clear: the former combatants mutually agreed not to discuss the causes of the war. Instead, the men limited their reminiscences to the military campaigns of 1861 – 1865. They commiserated over the severities of camp life, marches, and combat, commending each other for their bravery on the field of battle.24

“All Honor to the Boys in Blue:” The Grand Army of the Republic’s Reunion Activities

The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) served as the main Northern organization for veterans of the Union Army to join. Founded in 1866 in Decatur,

Illinois, the organization grew, contracted, and grew again during the last decades of the nineteenth-century. The GAR organized itself into “Posts” named after leading Union figures of the war effort. Little more than community units early in the organization’s history, GAR Posts at their height in 1890, counted 490,000 members. The organization agitated for veterans’ pensions for both White and African American veterans, and advocated generally on behalf of those who wore a Union uniform during the war. The

GAR held a “National Encampment” every year from 1866 to 1949. In 1956, the last

24 Janney, Caroline E. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 166-167. 6 GAR member died and the organization dissolved. By 1900, the GAR served largely as an organization for the promotion of patriotism and the commemoration of Memorial

Day.25

Early in the GAR’s growth, individual Posts held reunions, or, activities also known as “campfires.” These nostalgic events were all-veteran social gatherings at which certain practices of the wartime camp were resurrected for an evening. Usually held during winter, the campfire typically began with an invitation from one Post to another to visit its hall, sometimes with a marching escort from the train station. Once at the hosting Post’s hall, the visitors participated in a program that included such activities as an “old time army meal” of coffee, hardtack, beans, along with clay-pipe smoking, drinking, war stories, the blowing of army calls on a bugle, and the singing of war songs.

GAR leaders asserted the campfires built camaraderie amongst the Blue veterans and strengthened their ties of brotherhood. Nostalgia, a wistful remembrance of the past, intermingled with memories to create claims of brotherhood through shared war experiences.26

GAR membership waned in the early 1870s, but picked up steam by the middle of the decade and well into the end of the nineteenth-century. For example, the state of

Illinois counted forty Posts in 1868. By 1875, the state number had grown to 300 Posts with a membership roll of 40,000 Union veterans. These numbers represented the general organizational composition and growth. The members of the GAR sought “to preserve the memory of the hallowed dead;” or, to “bring comfort to the bereaved families by the

25 McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992): xii-xiv.

26 Ibid., 175.; The National Tribune, I No. 31, 18 March 1882, Washington, D.C.: 8. 7 War” motivated membership a growth in membership numbers after the decline in the

1870s. In this manner, the GAR became the de facto preserver of the Union’s “cost of liberty and the suppression of rebellion.”27

The GAR’s motto was “Fraternity, Charity, and Loyalty.” Fraternity signified a bond between “comrades” of the organization. Charity meant “fellow men,” which in the late nineteenth century was interpreted as GAR members, Union veterans, and, possibly, male kin. Loyalty attached itself to a patriotic moniker: “loyalty to country.” The GAR motto fit nicely with late nineteenth century U.S. patriotism and jingoism. U.S. society found itself in a state of flux from immigration at the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Organizations like the GAR touted themselves as patriots due to their military service during the Civil War. In addition, the GAR utilized its members as exemplars of Americanism for those arriving into the country during the era.

Fraternity between comrades marked the men of the GAR as a masculine ideal during the

Victorian period in the U.S. in which women began to have a greater presence in the public sphere. The fraternity GAR comrades enjoyed parsed them from the greater role women began to take in public spaces. The GAR “hall” or “post” allowed the comrades to enjoy a male centered space bereft of the changing social realities outside closed doors.

Charity blurred a bit across gender lines with women’s auxiliaries supporting GAR comrades’ public efforts. However, behind closed doors charity meant the mutual support of fellow GAR members. Finally, loyalty to country meant unquestioned support of the

U.S. and its militaristic and imperial efforts. Prior to the 1880s, the GAR made it clear this meant Union. As the U.S. became an imperial power at the end of the nineteenth

27 “The Boys in Blue,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, 11 May 1875, 4. 8 century, the GAR rolled itself into the imperial ambitions of the country. To become a

GAR member, the potential prospect possessed an “honorable discharge from the Union army or navy.” The GAR fashioned itself a secretive society. Because of this standing, applicants met a rigorous initiation process. If an applicant received a “small number of black-balls,” that veteran did not gain admittance to the organization. The fraternal initiation procedures and secrecy of meetings marked the GAR on par with Freemasons and other secretive ritualistic fraternal organizations in the late nineteenth century U.S.28

The GAR’s initiation procedure aligned with the boom of civilian fraternalism during the last decades of the nineteenth century. However, according to historian Stuart

McConnell, what set apart the GAR apart from civilian fraternal organizations were members’ links through their wartime service. As McConnell argues, male fraternal organizations in the late Victorian United States predicated their existence and benefit to their members around concepts of manhood; that is private and public personas demonstrating masculinity around rituals binding men together. McConnell holds up the

Freemasons as a prime example of an organization devoted to brotherhood and masculinity. Their secrecy and initiation rituals allowed the male members to move beyond boyish childhood while at the same time strengthening bonds of masculinity in a period where masculinity might seem amorphous outside the Masonic Temple. The GAR

Post building provided physical space to engage in masculine behaviors that seemed impermissible outside the Hall. In addition, unlike Masons, GAR members did not need group think to test their masculinity. Members of the GAR pointed to the furnace of

28 Ibid., 4. 9 battle as the pivotal moment of moving beyond adolescence. Thus, the GAR set itself as a different kind of fraternal organization built on the shared experience of war.29

Prior to the 1880s, GAR members frequently invoked the rightness of their wartime cause in speeches given at GAR Halls. Usually, addresses dwelt on some aspect of wartime experience or chastised the South for their rebellion. Horace Binney Sargent of GAR Post No. 11, Charlestown, Massachusetts used his platform to elucidate the tensions between the former combatants. Sargent began his 1872 speech with pronouncements to his “comrades” about sacrifice and martial prowess. Then, he moved into condemnation of the Southern cause:

“That judgment bar of treasonous would seem incomplete, without the encircling crown of murdered witnesses, wearing the reproachful, blood-stained garments of the grave rather than the angel-robes of martyrs, who had been so far the followers of Christ that they, too, had died for men!”

Sargent and his comrades of GAR Post No. 11 in Charlestown, Massachusetts reflected a seething animosity vis-à-vis their former combatants. Holding onto old bitterness of the war allowed men like Sargent to cloak themselves in righteousness. On the surface, chastising the Confederate cause buttressed the Union’s war aims as the only correct one.

Sargent’s speech also demonstrated that the emotional scars of the war still festered seven years after the cessation of hostilities.30

In the early 1870s, Union veterans still held firm that the Confederacy was, more or less, treasonous in its failed bid at independence. As Sargent made clear, the

29 McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992): 84-86.

30 Sargent, Horace Binney. Address to Grand Army Post No. 11, Charlestown, MA, Delivered May 30, 1872. (Boston: Press of Rockwell and Churchill, 1872). Newberry Library, Chicago: 6-8. 10 Confederacy caused the deaths of numerous Union comrades. Sargent did not end there.

Later in his speech, Sargent proclaimed:

“You, who fought over a hundred fields for the right to have a country and a flag, would be twisted in the adept fingers of men, who, while you were freshly bleeding in the anguish of your victories, were compelled to accept the sharp alternatives, - The Flag! – wave it!”

In this particular stanza, Sargent waved “the bloody shirt.” At the end of the war and into the 1880s, the GAR and Republican politicians deployed the bloody shirt in an effort to bring wayward Republicans and Democrats to task in order to curry favor with the electorate. While commemoration of Union veterans remained an important aspect of

Northern society, men like Sargent felt those in power were turning their backs on the

“Boys in Blue” in an effort to get on with the business at hand in the 1870s and early

1880s. Sargent’s use of the bloody shirt attempted to demonstrate to his comrades that their needs deserved attention in postwar America. Prior to the mid-1880s, GAR speeches and public pronouncements at Post events attempted to gain the ear of those socially and politically connected. As time passed, speeches like Sargent’s became less caustic about indifferent Northerners and treasonous Southerners.31

Sargent’s speech also included an understanding that the Union fought the war to end slavery. As historian David W. Blight has noted, what historians call the

“Emancipationist Narrative” of the war grew out of the Union Army’s liberation activities and characterized the war primarily as one that ended slavery. According to

Blight, the Emancipationist Narrative of the war embodied African Americans’ complex

31 Lears, Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009): 1-2.; Sargent, Horace Binney. Address to Grand Army Post No. 11, Charlestown, MA, Delivered May 30, 1872. (Boston: Press of Rockwell and Churchill, 1872). Newberry Library, Chicago: 6-8. 11 remembrance of their own fight for freedom, the tumultuous politics of radical

Reconstruction, and in conceptions of the war as a reinvention of the republic with the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional equality. Sargent made a case for white Union veterans to take a stake in Blight’s concept of the Emancipationist Narrative, as well as free labor ideology. Near the end of his speech, Sargent implored his Blue brethren, “Dear comrades of the Grand Army of the Republic, by your act of war, you have made labor sovereign. White and black are armed with vote and musket forever…You have rescued labor from the despotism of the overseer’s lash.” Sargent also made a case for the “Free Labor” ideology of the prewar Republican Party. Per Sargent, by destroying the institution of slavery the liberating Union Army gave not only a political voice to enslaved African Americans but set the Freedmen on a path to ownership of the fruits of their labor (not mention free labor aided the White men Sargent spoke to in the audience). However, as the historical record bears, African Americans were denied their civil rights and found the free use of their labor circumscribed once

Reconstruction ended. Sargent, and those in attendance for his speech, recognized the blood sacrifice given for the eradication of slavery. They claimed the moral high ground.32

As the 1870s drew to a close, GAR events continued focusing on memorialization and commemoration mixing the rightness of the Union cause and free labor ideology. For example, on May 30, 1879, Judge Advocate Colonel Thomas F. Barr gave a Memorial

Day speech to the GAR Post in Stillwater, Minnesota. Early in his address, Col. Barr laid out who was right and who was wrong in the conflict:

32 Ibid., 18-19; Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001): 2. 12 “It is to the glorious cause for which the brave men and the true, of the North, laid down their lives, that honor is sought to be paid through these ceremonials, by keeping alive the memory of the valor and patriotism of the devoted men who gave that cause its triumph. It was no gladiatorial contest in which we were engaged – a test of the physical prowess of the sections. It was a death-grapple between right and wrong, on the result of which the world’s progress in civilization depended.”

Barr believed firmly whose cause was right: the Union. Barr’s understanding of the

Union’s war aims as “right” versus “wrongness” of the Confederacy’s aims legitimized the sacrifice of Col. Barr’s comrades. Memory, valor, and patriotism coalesced in providing the ultimate triumph of the Union Army. Barr took aim at the Confederacy as the wrongful party in the war.33

Col. Barr’s indignation grew as his address wore on. Near the end of the speech, he harangued the South as a cancer upon the freedom loving states of the North.

Furthermore, he defended the “free labor” system as superior to the slave economy of the

South:

“There had grown up in the South – and it was not the least of the evils of slavery – a class of persons of vaunted superiority, who toiled not, though they did spin – political theories. They had long walked in the clouds, and looked down with supreme contempt upon their fellow-citizens of the North, whose honest labor had created great and prosperous states.”

Col. Barr took a shot at the planter class. For people who were supremely confident in themselves and their economic system, they lacked the perseverance and industriousness of the northern populace. Surely, slavery was an evil to be eradicated through strife; but, vanity served as the double downfall of the South. According to Col. Barr, the North possessed a truly benign economic model and the hardy individuals who created a

33 Barr, Colonel Thomas F. Memorial Address at Stillwater, Minnesota, 30 May 1879. (Publisher Not Provided, 1879), Newberry Library, Chicago: 3. 13 prosperous region. A lazy populace living the good life on the backs of enslaved African

Americans inhabited the South. With Reconstruction just wrapped up at the time of Col.

Barr’s address and with the war only fourteen years in the rearview mirror, tensions regarding the causes, efforts, and memories of the war generation still seethed.34

As Sargent and Barr pointed out, the former combatants did not see eye-to-eye on the war’s causes. The Northern speakers at GAR events felt confident that their cause constituted the right choice. The South was treasonous in GAR members’ estimation, with slavery as the war’s true cause. As historian Caroline Janney argued, historical memory of the causes of the war between the Blue and the Grey found themselves at an impasse as the 1870s drew to a close. Confederate veterans clung to the Lost Cause narrative of their struggle while condemning Northern aggression as the cause of the war.

On the eve of the 1880s, GAR members still clung to their rightness, even going so far as to appropriate space on behalf of their claims. The 1878 GAR National

Encampment, for example, occurred on the Gettysburg battlefield. Private residences and businesses in Gettysburg went full red carpet for the 1878 National Encampment.

According to one news report, a residence in Gettysburg went so far as to hang a sign with “Welcome to our defenders” painted on it. Several thousand GAR members turned out in Gettysburg and “bands with music” filled the south-central Pennsylvania countryside. The theme of the 1878 National Encampment was “Patriotism.” The

Encampment took on the tone of a religious revival with speeches, prayers, and benedictions to the “patriotism” of the veterans. On the eve of the 1880s, Union veterans

34 Ibid., 6. 14 still remained quite hostile to the ex-Confederates and were not ready to meet on common ground.35

However, tensions thawed as the 1880s opened and moved forward. The former combatants understood their time to make amends was running short. The U.S. shifted generationally as the 1880s blossomed. Those born during and shortly after the war did not possess the sense of urgency the veterans on each side did. Electing to forget the rancor and bitterness of the war, the veterans of the Blue and the Grey began to find common ground on which to build reconciliation. By the mid-1880s, GAR Posts began offering an olive branch of sorts to their former foes.36

For example, at the Sixteenth GAR National Encampment held by the Department of the Potomac Post in Washington, D.C. during January 1884, Department Commander

Samuel S. Burdett extended tidings to the Robert E. Lee Camp No. 1 of the United

Confederate Veterans. Burdett appealed to the altruism of his comrades in attendance to

“raise funds for the indigent and wounded Confederates of the late war.” Tugging further on the heartstrings of his comrades, Burdett further implored his fellow veterans to sincerely “wish that the proposed fair for the indigent and maimed soldiers of the late war who fought against us may gather in so great a harvest that comfort may be brought to the fireside to each and every one of the deserving.” Burdett’s magnanimous plea, which wrote out African American Union veterans from the equation, pivoted from the bitterness Sargent and Col. Barr displayed a decade earlier. Attendees at GAR encampments often spent time devising ways to aid their Confederate counterparts in the

35 “On the Gettysburg Battlefield,” The New York Herald, New York City, New York, 22 July 1878, 5.

36 Janney, Caroline E. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 170-172. 15 South since Confederate veterans did not have access to federal pensions. Oftentimes, drives collected money to send south for destitute Confederate veterans. GAR members felt it an obligation to support Confederate veteran relief efforts since no federal funding came from the U.S. government (and did not until well into the twentieth-century). Thus, by the mid-1880s, a cooling off occurred between the former combatants. While joint encampments between the Blue and Grey were not far off, the altruism of Burdett’s speech and the magnanimity towards their former enemies at GAR National

Encampments shows that Union veterans were warming to the idea of reconciliation.

However, not all reunion activities encompassed the rank and file of Union veterans.

Even U.S. presidents got in on the act of reunion activities of the GAR.37

President Rutherford B. Hayes served as a commander of an Ohio Infantry

Regiment during the Civil War, and became the U.S. President in 1877 following a

“compromise” that put him into office if he removed the remaining Federal troops occupying the South. Hayes’s move effectively ended Reconstruction. Hayes ardently supported Union veterans and their needs following the war; therefore, Union veterans were never far from his thoughts. Hayes understood the generational shift occurring in the U.S. and the war generation’s desire to commemorate their four years of sacrifice.

Writing in his diary on Sunday, May 13, 1883, Hayes wistfully commented on the passing of his generation from the scene. In looking on the deaths of Union veterans,

“The death of the Union heroes to their fathers and mothers, wives and sisters – to all of

37 Burdett, Samuel S. Address of Department Commander Samuel S. Burdett at the 16th Annual Encampment of the Department of the Potomac, Grand Army of the Republic Held At Washington, D.C., January 30, 1884. (Publisher Not Provided, 1884), Newberry Library, Chicago: 9-11.; McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992): 177-179. 16 this generation of their blood – is a life long sorrow; to all of the future generations a pride and joy.” A little over two weeks later on Decoration Day (Memorial Day) 1883,

Hayes commented on the need for Decoration Day: “The drift of my talk was that

Decoration Day is entitled to be and remain forever one of our national holidays. Also that Lincoln was the Commander-in-chief and fell in battle! That Decoration Day is therefore Lincoln Day.” Hayes linked the deaths of Union heroes, the passing of a generation, and Decoration Day together. Hayes sought to treat the South beneficently and kindly (Hayes was an ardent supporter of universal education in the South), while at the same time remaining true to his Union Army roots. It is no coincidence that Hayes invoked the ghost of Lincoln, the man credited with ending slavery while saving the

Union.38

Even commenting in private, President Hayes echoed what many Union veterans believed and felt proud of: the Civil War ushered in the death of slavery in America.

Writing in his diary in September 1885, Hayes stated:

“We gave freedom to the slave but it was for the good of the whole country; nay, it was for the good of all mankind. We wiped out the line between the North and the South for the good alike and equally of North and South. We blotted out the color line in all statute books for the benefit equally of the white race and the colored race.”

Hayes conceptualized the war as not only a moral crusade against slavery, but as an effort at bringing the two sections together by eradicating the evil. By insisting that sectional lines and the “color line” had been eliminated, Hayes’ wistful memory of the war aligned with that of many Union veterans. According to historian David W. Blight, quite a few

38 Williams, Charles Richard, Ed. Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States, Volume IV, 1881-1893. (Columbus, OH: The F.J. Heer Publishing Company, 1924), Hayes Presidential Center and Library: 117, 118-119, 128. 17 Union veterans subscribed to the Unionist Interpretation of the war. For these men, the war was fought for preservation of the Union. Therefore, their memories of the war effort centered on the effort to bring the wayward South back into the fold. In addition, Hayes mixed in some of what historians have called the Emancipationist Narrative. Hayes remembered the war as having a dual mission: to end slavery and restore the South to the

Union. Many of the Boys in Blue similarly subscribed to the dual nature of the Unionist and Emancipationist Narratives. This allowed Union veterans to claim moral high ground in competing versions of the war.39

Aside from creating physical space (Halls and Posts) for their members, the GAR also dabbled in cultural production. To this end, the GAR possessed its own publication:

The National Tribune. The National Tribune of the GAR began publication in 1877, and ran through 1917, costing subscribers $.50 per year rising to $1.00 per year near the end of its run. To supplement its subscription income, the magazine ran numerous advertisements for turn-of-the-century products and bric-a-brac. A favorite of The

National Tribune was Scott’s Emulsion, an elixir that promised to eliminate ailments that reduced strength and caused fatigue. Other companies ran advertisements as well.

Whether watches, jewelry, elixirs, or other late nineteenth-century hucksterism, the reader of The National Tribune could purchase products that supplemented the standard subscription rate for the periodical.40

39 Ibid., 162.; Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001): 3.

40 Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, III No. 1, January 1895, Nashville, TN: 2.; The National Tribune, XII No. 36, 6 April 1893, Washington, D.C.: 12. 18 For the majority of its run, The National Tribune successfully agitated for federal pensions for Union veterans. The pages of The National Tribune also contained battle reminiscences, letters to editors, anecdotal stories, and advice columns. The National

Tribune possessed a very Northern flavor. Published weekly at this point in its run

(1890s), The National Tribune arrived at subscribers’ homes and businesses each

Thursday of the month. As a weekly publication, The National Tribune offered advice for the farmer working in the North or the Midwest. Furthermore, a weekly feature concerning activities in Washington, D.C. titled “The National Capital” appeared. The weekly piece on D.C. buzz bonded the Union veterans to their wartime national HQ. This particular column linked nicely with the supremacy of the Federal Republic stance many

Union veterans claimed during the war. Subscribers and readers of The National Tribune conjoined their wartime aims with their postwar world. Through The National Tribune,

GAR veterans espoused their cause for joining and fighting the war. Having a national organ that understood their needs and desires served Union veterans suffering in the postwar environment and helped ground them in a rapidly changing society after the war.41

By the 1890s, The National Tribune moved on from mostly pension activism to a more eclectic selection of columns that allowed contributing veterans to aid in the historical memory process of their wartime experience. This included pieces on war reminiscences, stories of individual soldiers, and U.S. public figures, such as Presidents.

In an April 1893 edition, the lead story consisted of accounts concerning the Battle of

Chickamauga. Coinciding with efforts to create a National Battlefield Park at the

41 The National Tribune, XII No. 36, 6 April 1893, Washington, D.C.: 7, 12. 19 northern Georgia battle site, The National Tribune captured the memory and preservation zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century. Veterans agitated for the historic preservation of battlefield sites from the war, which included Chickamauga. In chronicling the battlefield, the Chickamauga story attempted to transport the reader to the scene: “The warbles of the night birds, the silent tears of the men who thought of wives and babies, mothers and sisters, and sweethearts, no words, only sobs half-suppressed sighs, told of the presence of a hundred listeners.” This particular piece on the Battle of Chickamauga dripped with sentimentality and sadness, while fostering the veterans’ sense of stoic masculinity and bravery on the field of battle. Union veterans and GAR members perhaps found comfort in writing war reminiscences to The National Review because it validated what they experienced in combat and assuaged the anguish of those combat experiences.42

African Americans contributed mightily to the Union war machine and also did not shy away from trumpeting their contributions. African American Union veterans had more life and death reasons to trumpet their contributions to the Federal government’s military effort. During the Civil War, nearly 200,000 African American troops served in the Union Army and Navy. Comprising nearly twenty-five percent of Union forces, these men served the gamut of combat duties to logistical support and supply. The most famous

African American unit in the war was the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Colonel

Robert Gould Shaw, the son of a noted Boston abolitionist family, commanded the 54th

Massachusetts. Their assault upon Confederate Fort Wagner along the South Carolina coast earned Col. Shaw and his men fame amongst the Northern populace and Union

42 The National Tribune, XII No. 36, 6 April 1893, Washington, D.C.: 1. 20 veterans. Col. Shaw and nearly twenty-five percent of the regiment died during the assault. The sacrifices of units like the 54th Massachusetts held substantial meaning for the African American community, particularly in the North. Subsequently, many African

American GAR Posts sprang up in the North bearing the name of Col. Shaw. These Posts presented a unique opportunity for African American Union veterans to share experiences and commiserate with fellow black veterans. In addition, African American

GAR Posts provided a space for black veterans to agitate for equality in the North and the

South.43

As historian Barbara Gannon points out, the majority of GAR Posts were segregated up until the 1880s. As a stated policy, the GAR renounced segregation and, in

1890 and 1891, permitted African American veterans to participate at White Department

Encampments. Yet, according to Gannon, there were a number of integrated posts throughout the North, Midwest, the South, and even one in Ontario, Canada. However, the majority of African American Union veterans preferred to form their own GAR Posts rather than integrate into a White Post. Gannon posits the reason for African American

Union veterans constituting their own posts was the impact these veterans had on the local black communities where the Posts existed. The African American Post represented a source of community pride and as a keeper of the historical memory of the black experience in the Civil War. It is estimated at the turn-of-the-century that all African

American Posts numbered one hundred or so of the 6,000 GAR Posts nationwide.

Certainly African American posts constituted a small fraction of total GAR posts; yet, at

43 Ragan, Diane. Grand Army of the Republic Department of Pennsylvania: Personal War Sketches of the African American Members of Col. Robert Gould Shaw Post No. 206 Pittsburgh. (Pittsburgh: Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society, 2003): 1.; Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001): 4. 21 the same time represented a significant contributor to the GAR’s popularity and Union veterans’ memory formation.44

One particular Post that left behind a solid historical record of its history was the

Col. Robert Gould Shaw Post No. 206 located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Gannon devotes a great deal of analysis outlining Post No. 206’s lively history. The Shaw Post chartered itself in May 1881 under the GAR’s Department of Pennsylvania. Post No. 206 contained an all African American Union veteran membership. The Post met predominately at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall from 1910 – 1924. Prior to moving into the Memorial Hall, the Post met in five locations throughout Pittsburgh.

Between 1881 and 1904, Post No. 206 membership increased from fourteen charter members to 275 black Union veterans. According to Gannon, Pittsburg’s Shaw Post met twice a month in the various physical spaces it occupied. Much like other GAR posts around the United States, Post No. 206 adhered faithfully to the customs and rituals of the

GAR and demonstrated allegiance to the cardinal principles of the organization previously mentioned. The all African American Post was a present fixture at integrated

GAR functions in Pittsburg. Post No. 206 participated in citywide celebrations of

Emancipation Day, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and Memorial Day observances. In

1885, Post No. 206 received an invitation from the White, Pittsburgh-based, Col. J.W.

Patterson Post No. 151 to partake in a celebration honoring the anniversary of Union victory and the 1865 surrender of Robert E. Lee’s command of the Army of Northern

44 Ragan, Diane. Grand Army of the Republic Department of Pennsylvania: Personal War Sketches of the African American Members of Col. Robert Gould Shaw Post No. 206 Pittsburgh. (Pittsburgh: Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society, 2003): 5.; Gannon, Barbara A. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011): 35-46, 201-207. 22 Virginia at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Through inviting the African American members of Post No. 206, the all White Patterson Post demonstrated to their black comrades shared ties born of battle. More than fifty members of Post No. 206 had been present at the surrender ceremonies of Lee and his Confederate army. In a twist of peculiar irony, the United Confederate Veterans organization solicited aid from Post No.

206 for indigent rebel veterans. As the record shows, the UCV was unaware the members of Post No. 206 were all African American. Not surprisingly, Post No. 206 shot down the request for “brotherhood” from the Confederate veterans’ organization.45

Like many GAR Posts, Post No. 206 was politically active. However, Post No.

206 agitated for social causes in addition to federal veterans’ benefits. When Pittsburgh hosted the 1894 GAR National Encampment, aside from the usual camaraderie at these grand GAR events, Post No. 206 used the National Encampment in their city to focus on

Jim Crow legal codes. The codification of segregation was not the only issue. Lynching sprang up in the region, further strengthening a reign of terror by White Southerners on the region’s African American population and Post No. 206 advocated for the GAR to take a stand against the repugnant practice. In a September 17, 1894 Pittsburgh Post

Gazette article, members of Post No. 206 opposed the “Southern Custom” of lynching and pushed for GAR resolutions denouncing lynching. The GAR took a progressive stand on the repugnant Southern practice; however, those below the Mason-Dixon line cared little what a black GAR Post thought. The African American veterans stated the daily outrages of lynchings grew in frequency and endorsed Ida B. Wells, a “young colored woman,” whose national and international activism, along with the Anti-Lynching

45 Ibid., 19-20.; Gannon, Barbara A. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011): 35-26. 23 League, pressured Southern leaders to end the practice. The African American veterans in attendance at the 1894 GAR National Encampment recommended starting a “fund and assist each other in securing their rights at all public places of amusement, hotels, etc.” in both the North and the South. According to Gannon, Post No. 206’s agitation suggested these veterans possessed a modicum of influence within the GAR’s national organization.46

While the GAR wrestled with integrated and separate Posts, individual African

American contributors to The National Tribune used their voices to tout the valor and combat effectiveness of Black Union units. Since the end of the war, other GAR members had given African American combat regiments only a mixed bag of praise or indifference regarding their combat performance. Those White soldiers who commanded

African American combat units understood the valor black soldiers displayed against the

Confederate armies. However, aside from men like Horace Binney Sargent, getting their

White comrades to see the Union effort as one of union and emancipation presented a challenge to the black veterans who wore Blue. Thus, it was a special moment if these veterans received praise in the national organ of the GAR.

The June 1, 1893 edition of The National Tribune included a piece on the combat effectiveness of African American units. An African American combat veteran contributed to the June 1893 issue of The National Tribune and understood what his

African American brethren faced: “we are so used to being ignored that silence comes handy…that the ‘darkies’ at Morganza hooped the rebels out…the colored troops are

46 Ibid., 7-8,; Pittsburgh Post Gazette, 17 September 1894.; The National Tribune did take a stand against lynching. In its 22 November 1906 issue, the publication stated, “On principle The National Tribune is opposed to lynching in all its forms.” The National Tribune, 22 November 1906, Washington, D.C., 4. 24 rarely recognized.” The writer went further, “We don’t blame the comrades much, because we don’t talk much – never did, but we do a great deal of thinking, and the time was when we did some little fighting…I never heard of any colored troops deserting on account of the Emancipation proclamation, and being restored to the rolls after the war in order to be eligible as pensioners…I do know of colored troops fighting until annihilated.” The writer proudly defended the actions of African American combat troops during the war. From the author’s estimation, “Colored Troops” did more in combat with less griping and little out of them since the end of the war. The National Tribune provided another mouthpiece, besides the African American press, in which to explain

Black contributions to the Union war effort. Readers of The National Tribune were exposed to African American veterans’ perspectives and memories of the war. In addition, The National Tribune also cemented Blight’s Emancipationist Narrative of memory that African Americans held tightly to as Reconstruction gave way to a re- inscription of white supremacy and Jim Crow throughout the South.47

GAR reunions and encampments allowed veterans to construct a nostalgic remembrance of the war and similar fondness for their time in the Union Army. For example, at an 1883 gathering in Denver, Colorado, GAR encampment members lived in tents, slept on straw beds, ate army meals, and chatted at night by campfires. In 1884, in

Minneapolis, Minnesota, GAR campers participated in similar rituals as the Denver encampment the previous year. The 1887 National Encampment held in St. Louis,

47 In the 6 July 1891 Rock Island Daily Argus, African American GAR veterans vehemently opposed the GAR’s Grand Encampment held in Washington, D.C. in 1891. According to the report, black GAR veterans opposed the GAR Encampment in D.C. because “in their places of business no negro could or would be accommodated.” Black activism amongst African American GAR members extended to the U.S. Capital and made a statement on segregated spaces in the city. The Rock Island Daily Argus, 6 July 1891, Rock Island, Illinois.; The National Tribune, XII No. 44, 1 April 1893, Washington, D.C.: 3. 25 Missouri included 3,500 tents to house 25,000 Union veterans. St. Louis’ parks held the tent city with each miniature camp within a two-mile radius of other sites housing veterans. A bale of straw marked the veterans’ beds with each member bringing with him essentials needed for camp life in his knapsack or kit. Members of the St. Louis encampment experienced similar sights and sounds as those heard during wartime – bugle calls, roll, and the elements of the camp encompassed by the tent and kit. By venerating artifacts of the war – pipes, bugles, tents, uniforms, hardtack – of a long lost camp rather than as harbingers of postwar American society, the GAR encouraged a static memory of the war. Through reconstructing wartime life, the Blue veterans seemed stuck in time – holding on to a memory of the past while dismissing the realities of

Gilded Age America. This historical memory craftsmanship of the war occurred during

Post activities and grand reunions or encampments.48

The 1894 National GAR Encampment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania emerged as a spectacle of historical memory making for those Union veterans in attendance. Over

50,000 Union veterans descended upon the industrial city in southwest Pennsylvania.

According to newspaper reports, Pennsylvania gave “more sons according to her quota as a sacrifice to the god of battles than any other State in the Union.” Making Pennsylvania sacred ground was the fact “thousands of troops passed” through Pittsburgh “on their way to ‘the front.’” During the Pittsburgh encampment, 40,000 Union veterans marched down

“Pittsburgh’s 5th Avenue” to the tune of “100 bands playing martial airs.” For the veterans and crowd watching the spectacle, “the old familiar war tunes to which they and

48 McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992): 177-179.; Journal of the National Encampment, 1883, “Unofficial Proceedings,” p. 192.; Journal of the National Encampment, 1884, “Unofficial Proceedings,” p. 254-270.; Bismarck Weekly Tribune, 30 September 1887, Bismarck, Dakota. 26 their comrades rushed to victory or to death filled the air and echoed back from the surrounding hills.” Veteran commentators noted that the martial music brought “the flush of patriotism and courage to their cheeks.” The old soldiers, instead of marching with gleaming bayonets, ambled along with the aid of walking canes. The mixture of marching, martial music, and spectacle made the Pittsburgh encampment one emblematic of other National Encampments. In the process, a static memory of the war solidified itself; a moment caught in the past, but one that did not jibe with contemporary realities, especially in an industrial city like Pittsburgh.49

In addition to a static memory of the war, the GAR members indulged in a bit of historical amnesia as well. The shock of modern industrialized combat, the failures of

Reconstruction, and the societal turmoil wrought by industrialism, immigration, and urbanization in the Gilded Age United States contributed to the veterans’ clinging to a false idealization of the past. In an 1881 gathering in Lafayette, Indiana, camp members drilled, conducted dress parades, had campfire chats, and feasted on military grade rations while sleeping in tents. The desire to recreate their wartime experience implied

GAR veterans’ dissociation with the current state of American society. Union veterans in the GAR seemed stuck in time, suggesting they were unable to cope with or understand the changing circumstances around them. The camaraderie at reunions and encampments only fostered this sense of alienation from a “civilian” population that appeared strange and foreign. The fraternal pleasures of a recreated camp life permitted a dip in sentimental waters rather than dealing head-on with the ugliness of the war. The message fostered at reunions or grand encampments was one of brotherly love and camaraderie

49 “G.A.R. at Pittsburgh,” Dakota Farmers’ Leader, Canton, South Dakota, 21 September 1894, 3. 27 that stripped away the hubris and ramifications – industrialization, urbanization, immigration – of the postwar United States, and ignored the class differences existing amongst the veterans during the economic boom and bust cycle of the 1870s through

1890s. The stories shared at grand GAR events around campfires only buttressed commemoration of the war from a pleasant perspective, which eschewed the nastiness of actual combat. GAR revelers engaged in activities recreating a life – army life – that had long since passed them by and probably never existed in the way they recreated and remembered it. By the mid-1880s and well into the 1890s, the old men of the Union

Army espoused an idealized version of the war. A central tenet that came out of GAR members at National Encampments and individual Post meetings was the necessity of the war for a national cleansing of the sin of slavery and preservation of the Union. In the estimation of the veterans, the “late unpleasantness” became an effort of national salvation.50

As the 1880s dawned, many members of the GAR warmed to the idea of extending olive branches to their former foes. For example, the governor of Colorado, an ex-Confederate soldier, J.B. Grant, not a GAR man, spoke to the 1883 National

Encampment in Denver. In his speech, at an evening campfire, Grant exclaimed the men of the Union Army “were not only triumphantly vindicated by the sword in 1865, but are today enshrined in the hearts of people from Maine to Georgia, and under their guiding influences friend and foe are gleaning alike the blessings of a free, a prosperous and a united country.” Grant’s remarks hit on a feeling brewing between the former antagonists. As the nineteenth-century drew to a close, GAR members took to the pages

50 “The New Invasion of the South,” The Indianapolis Journal, Indianapolis, Indiana, 14 September 1894, 4.; The National Tribune, IV No. 5, 1 April 1881, Washington, D.C.: 5. 28 of the organization’s publication (and newspapers) agitating for reconciliation for the sake of the nation and argued that men on both sides passed through a shared baptism of fire. The fiery rhetoric at early GAR meetings and encampments gave way to a desire to mend old wounds with their White Southern brethren. In their minds, Union veterans felt the time was right to begin the healing process. To this end, turn-of-the-century reconciliation articles popped up in newspapers in the North. For example, in the March

15, 1898 The Scranton Tribune, reconciliation trumpeted like a clarion call in an article titled “In Union Is Strength.” According to The Scranton Tribune, “the country is to be congratulated upon the almost obliteration of the sectional lines which for so many years marked the division of the United States into slave and free territory.” Furthermore, “the era of reconciliation so long and earnestly desired, has happily come, and the feeling of distrust and hostility between the sections is everywhere vanquished.” The Rock Island

Argus made similar claims to reconciliation in its February 23, 1903 edition. According to the Argus, “after the civil war came the efforts at reconciliation and slowly the broken bonds were made ready for the welding process.” Thus, during the final two decades of the nineteenth-century and into the early twentieth-century, reconciliation became a distinct possibility. However, would Confederate veterans openly embrace the process?

The main fraternal organization for Southern veterans, the United Confederate Veterans

(UCV), presented the greatest opportunity.51

Brothers South of the Mason-Dixon Line: The United Confederate Veterans and Their Reunion Activities

51 Janney, Caroline E. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 166-168.; Journal of the National Encampment, 1883, “Unofficial Proceedings,” p. 196.; The Scranton Tribune, Scranton, Pennsylvania, 15 March 1898, 4.; The Rock Island Argus, Rock Island, Illinois, 23 February 1903, 6. 29 Chartered in June 1889 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the United Confederate

Veterans (UCV) served as the preeminent veterans’ organization for former Confederate

Army and Navy personnel. Prior to the UCV’s chartering, former Confederates had created and joined numerous state and local veterans’ organizations. For example, the

Army of Northern Virginia had an association: The Association of the Army of Northern

Virginia AANVA, Virginia Division. The AANVA declined to join the founding of the

UCV. The UCV accepted more regular soldiers and was less stratified than the

AANVA.52

In the early 1890s, the UCV succeeded in organizing “Camps” throughout the

South. The exact membership of the UCV remains elusive because the organization never released comprehensive membership numbers. Computing membership numbers through census tracts and newspaper reports, historian Gaines M. Foster arrived at a membership number of roughly 80,000. According to Foster, former Confederates joined the UCV at a rate of one in three to one in four. UCV membership was open only to those who served in the Confederate Army and Navy during the war. UCV camps engaged in similar activities as GAR Posts: orations, camaraderie, and historical memory formation. The end of the nineteenth century saw the peak membership for both the GAR and UCV.53

Much like the GAR, the aging members of the UCV expressed a sense of urgency to record their wartime deeds and actions. Per historian Foster, the timing of the UCV’s founding owed much to the social tensions of the 1880s and 1890s. The South built a

52 Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 93-94, 100. According to Foster, the AANVA declined in status due to its elitist roll. Members of the AANVA were courted from the upper crust of Confederate military leadership. The AANVA drew the majority of its members from the middle and upper-middle classes.

53 Ibid.,106-107. 30 codified legal system of segregation known as Jim Crow, putting African Americans in second-class citizenship status. In addition, lynching increased exponentially from the

1880s through the end of the 1890s. Industrialization and urbanization compounded the rising social anxieties of the region. The increasing industrialization and urbanization of the South fed into former Confederates’ desires regarding remembrance. The rise of an industrial South, the spread of a town culture, the encroachment of market capitalism, and national integration of the region into the U.S.’s broader economy threatened

Southerners’ sense of community and continuity. Public debates regarding the New South helped make Southerners’ particularly conscious of the changes surrounding them. The commercial values associated with the New South and demands by an expanding commercial society troubled some of the former public figures of the Confederacy. Men like John B. Gordon, first organizational head of the UCV, an ex-Confederate General and Governor of Georgia, felt the pangs of time pressing on old wounds, both physical and metaphorical. For Gordon and similar ex-Confederates, the New South held both promise and the potential to bury their memories of the war. As the South industrialized and urbanized, Gordon and his ilk uneasily embraced the New South mantra while at the same time clinging to the past. Thus, anxieties regarding the changing social and political landscape drove up UCV membership. Much like their Northern brethren in the GAR,

Southern veterans and fellow stakeholders in the memory process turned inward in an attempt to not only rewrite the history and memory of the war, but also to quell the turmoil around them. At UCV Camps, Confederate veterans wildly cheered men like

Gordon who seemed to have a hand on the pulse of the present and the past.54

54 Ibid., 113-114. 31 At their Camps, UCV veterans engaged in similar activities to those of the GAR.

UCV members enjoyed the camaraderie that membership brought with it as well as a sounding board for their interpretation of the war and its historical memory. While the

Lost Cause had its genesis in the 1870s, by the 1880s and 1890s the Lost Cause interpretation of the war held primacy in the South. Through Camps and memorial commemorations, veterans and other White Southerners claimed a specific history and memory of the war. Consequently, nearly all White Southerners joined in with the veterans in insisting that the Confederate military was never truly beaten in the field.

Union materiel superiority and overwhelming numbers brought about Confederate defeat.

This historical interpretation reassured the White South they had acted rightly in 1861. In addition, the Lost Cause narrative contained a Whites-only version of antebellum society and the war. Down in Dixie, the White populace squelched an Emancipationist

Interpretation of the war and controlled the memory of the war and its aftermath from a

White Southern prospective. Consequently, orations by former Confederate leaders at

Camp meetings reassured the old soldiers in attendance that their honor survived defeat undiminished. The UCV helped the Southern social order weather a period of anxiety with a minimum of disruption and only a modicum of change.55

Similar to the GAR’s National Encampments, the UCV conducted big tent events that brought together Confederate veterans in one location. On Columbus Day, October

21, 1892, for example, the UCV held a large gathering in southwest Louisiana. The

Confederate veterans assembling in Louisiana experienced “where the visitors will be fed and sheltered in the old camp style.” The Grey veterans marched on the 21st followed by

55 Ibid., 144. 32 speeches and then a large barbecue dinner. The encampment “provided tents, and every old soldier will bring his old gray blanket.” The camp style venue with soldiers providing their own blankets evoked “memories of the days from 1861 to 1865, when we stood together for a cause we all loved so well.” The hands of time were not far from the veterans’ minds. In fact, organizers praised the large gathering as one last opportunity to

“have one more good old Confederate rally before we pass away into the Great Beyond.”

Even railroads got in on the act of Confederate idealization by providing “reduced rates over their lines” into southwest Louisiana.56

Much like their Northern counterparts in the GAR, UCV members desired to create a lasting legacy of their wartime exploits. As historian Caroline Janney contends, by the 1880s, the generation of veterans who experienced the war as young adults were now coming into their own, running businesses, and rearing children. They had the time and resources to participate in UCV activities and events. The veterans engaging in UCV affairs desperately wanted their children to understand the old timers’ devotion to the

Confederate cause, even though it failed. For many UCV members, something tangible needed to occur to position the conflict as being not for naught. One UCV leader speaking in the mid-1880s summed it up best:

“To our children and their children’s children, let it be our pride to teach them, as is done in every land where patriotism and self-sacrificing spirits are honored and esteemed, that the Confederate shed their blood for their Mother, Virginia, defending a cause she knew to be just and right.”

This leader insisted that the ex-Confederates acted justly and patriotically for a righteous cause, thus coming away with a sense of victory. The South assuaged the pain of defeat

56 “Grand Reunion of Confederate Veterans,” Lake Charles Commercial, Lake Charles, Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, 24 September 1892, 3. 33 through revision of the war’s historical record. Physical defeat gave way to a Southern sense of victory in the “hearts and minds” of the region’s White populace. The veterans in Grey gobbled up the pronouncements that theirs was a righteous cause worthy of veneration on a national level.57

Confederate Memorial Day held a special place in the hearts of UCV members and other White stakeholders. The practice of honoring Confederate dead began in 1866 when the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia passed a resolution to memorialize Confederate soldiers killed during the war. The women of the Ladies

Memorial Association chose April 26th as the date to practice Confederate memorialization activities, which coincided with the exact date that the last Confederate

Army in the field surrendered, General Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina.

Confederate Memorial Day observances often began with a procession of children carrying small Confederate battle flags, followed by militia units and, of course, the local

UCV Camp. When the parade reached the cemetery or monument chosen for the event, the spectators in attendance listened to orators praise the heroics and courage of Southern soldiers. The speeches often touted the martial supremacy of the Confederate soldier, included an ad encomium to the women on the home front, and reaffirmed that the South indeed fought for constitutional liberty. Confederate Memorial Day festivities were a

“whites only” affair, as the orations and codes of behavior associated with Confederate

Memorial Day buttressed the hegemony of Whites in the postwar South. White

Southerners used April 26th as an occasion to further trumpet the Lost Cause. By the

57 Janney, Caroline E. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 154; Thomas T. Munford Speech to Confederate Veterans, Lynchburg, Virginia. (Duke University: Munford-Ellis Family Papers, 1884). 34 1890s, the April celebrations assisted the White populace throughout the region to claim public space in the name of white supremacy and the righteousness of the wartime

Southern cause.58

Southern Ladies Memorial Associations (LMAs) drew in white, predominately

Protestant, women from all over the South. As historian Francesca Morgan outlines, these precursor organizations to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) engaged in neo-Confederate ideologies and rituals of remembrance to the Confederacy’s blood sacrifice. According to Morgan, the LMAs worked diligently to “present Confederates as

Americanism’s true heirs and protectors.” From a historical memory standpoint, the efforts of the region’s LMAs, and subsequently the UDC, crafted a collective memory that aligned with a burgeoning sense of U.S. nationalism as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Moving from mere remembrance rituals, the LMAs tied into memory projects the UCV and the GAR were building as the 1880s moved into the 1890s. The work of these women’s organizations conducted ideological activism that rarely received push back from the North.59

Over time, Confederate Memorial Day became quite a serious affair. More than mere grave decoration and parades, the occasion often shut down business in smaller cities and towns. For Confederate Memorial Day in 1893, for example, the city of

Augusta, Georgia closed banks and public offices and considered the day “a general holiday.” In Columbus, Georgia the same year, businesses in the city suspended

58 Janney, Caroline E. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 157-158.

59 Morgan, Francesca. Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005): 28-30. 35 operations at 1pm. In 1895, the Florida State House passed a resolution making April 26th officially Confederate Memorial Day and a legal holiday. In addition, in 1895,

Confederate veterans gathered in Chicago, Illinois’ Oakwoods Cemetery on April 26th to dedicate a monument to the graves of unknown Confederate POW dead buried in the cemetery. Even in the North, the proceedings of Confederate Memorial Day made the news.60

Aside from UCV Confederate Memorial Day spectacles, pecuniary reasons drove

Southern cities to compete for UCV encampments and reunions. The UCV reunions brought into a city thousands of ex-Confederate soldiers looking to spend money. For instance, the UCV Richmond reunion in 1896 drew 100,000 folks. In 1898, Atlanta held the UCV’s reunion with 60,000 veterans and their families flocking to the city. In order to make money from these activities, municipalities spent upwards of $100,000 on free room and board for indigent veterans, decorations, flags, parades, and receptions.

Boosters such as William Dallas Chesterman of Richmond, Virginia recognized the business bonanza a UCV reunion generated. Located in Richmond, Virginia, Chesterman had served as an editor of the Richmond Times prior to the Civil War. When hostilities broke out, he enlisted in the Confederate Army and served in a Virginia infantry regiment. Chesterman understood the price Richmond paid during the war and saw its opportunities post-Reconstruction. In the nearly thirty years between the fall of

Richmond and the publication of Chesterman’s “James River Tourist” in 1889, the city became a hub of southern industry, transportation, and tourism. Chesterman’s “James

60 “Memorial Day Observances,” The Roanoke Times, Roanoke, Virginia, 27 April 1893, 4.; “News in Brief,” The Yale Expositor, Yale, St. Clair County, Michigan, 26 April 1895, 2.; “The Southern Dead,” Marshall County Independent, Plymouth, Marshall County, Indiana, 19 April 1895, 6. 36 River Tourist” worked to bring a vivid picture of Richmond, and by extension Norfolk, to the reader. Chesterman dispersed his tract through rail lines, direct marketing, and distribution through fellow boosters. Therefore, Confederate veterans visiting the former

Capital of the Confederacy possessed a working knowledge of what Richmond, Virginia offered.61

Boosters, like Chesterman, produced marketing pamphlets and tracts to attract the

Confederate veterans’ organization. A combination of advertising and city booster rhetoric, Chesterman’s “The James River Tourist” tract presented Richmond and its surrounding region as a unique destination. The Ballard House and Exchange Hotel marketed themselves as the preeminent accommodations in Richmond. For $2.50-$4.00 a day, guests could stay in an Italianate structure with modern conveniences such as steam in each room. Furthermore, “electric cars pass the Door every few Minutes, giving prompt and pleasant access to all parts of the City.” The advertisements for the hotels portrayed a sanitized city with the modern conveniences of metropolises where veterans not located in an urban setting could enjoy the trappings of a large city.62

Leisure and booster imperatives were not the only element at work in UCV reunions. Lost Cause ideology emerged as a common theme at UCV activities and encampments. A Southern creation in the 1870s, the Lost Cause permeated Southern culture during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Proponents of the Lost

61 Marten, James. Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in the Guilded Age. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011): 130-131.; Chesterman, William D. The James River Tourist, A Brief Account of Historical Localities on James River, and Sketches of Richmond, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. (Richmond: Everett Waddy, Printer, 1889): 8, 23.

62 Chesterman, William D. The James River Tourist, A Brief Account of Historical Localities on James River, and Sketches of Richmond, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. (Richmond: Everett Waddy, Printer, 1889): 8, 23. 37 Cause, mostly former Confederate military leadership, spoke reverently of the battlefield heroics of the Confederate Army during the war, as well as the primacy of Southern nationalism before, during, and after the war. By defending secession as constitutional and morally just, former Confederates insisted that they fought to defend their homeland only to be overwhelmed by the materiel might of Union forces. While denouncing

Republican Reconstruction governments as the true usurpers of liberty, White

Southerners attempted to claim the moral high ground. According to one newspaper account out of Charlotte, North Carolina, “our sympathies were with the Confederate cause…but that cause was lost…” With the UVC trumpeting its tenets, the Lost Cause proved a successful rallying point for the cause of Southern self-rule. While the Lost

Cause did not encompass the re-arming of the Confederate Army, the project offered another type of war – one waged to win the hearts and minds of not only White

Southerners, but the UCV’s Northern brethren in the GAR as well. As another newspaper out of Bamberg, South Carolina stated, “the nobler title of Confederate hero and martyr of the Lost Cause” fit anyone who served under the Confederate battle flag. Therefore, those White Confederates who sacrificed blood consecrated the Lost Cause. Naturally, the White South intermingled the mantle of “hero” and “martyr” for the living, as well as the dead. As we will see in a later chapter, the White South codified its hero worship and soldierly martyrdom through the claiming of physical space.63

During encampments, the UCV praised the Southern soldier as the ideal of

Southern righteousness. In extolling the virtue of the Confederate Private, the UCV promoted an image of discipline and self-sacrifice for the good of the Confederate cause,

63 “Sixteenth Volume,” The Western Democrat, Charlotte, North Carolina, 10 September 1867, 3.; “Valiant Son of France,” The Bamberg Herald, Bamberg, South Carolina, 23 November 1899, 6. 38 as well as the region. In their musings at encampments, ex-Confederate military leaders created a fiction of the Southern soldier as a solid, law-abiding, loyal common man – a desired typology in the tumultuous waning decades of the nineteenth century. The

Confederate Private did more than serve the purpose as a role model. The mythological figure of the steadfast Confederate Private emphasized the soldiers’ skill and courage in battle, thereby helping to reassure veterans at the same time it promoted desirable behaviors among the general Southern population. Ex-Confederate military leaders held up the Confederate Private as a hero. The deployment of common man-turned-hero allowed the same leaders to use the Private as the heavy lifter of rebuilding the region under the New South mantra. Thus, the Confederate Private became the ideal example of rebirth for the New South, in the process erasing class differences, and social realities, in the region.64

The UCV generated its own interpretation of the Civil War, which over time tempered the animosity that existed after the war’s conclusion and hoisted the

Confederate soldier as an exemplar in a rapidly changing South. In 1895 George

Moorman, a Southern booster, wrote a letter quoting a John B. Gordon speech, which espoused a growing feeling in the White South that, while Southern “civilization” might have ended with Robert E. Lee’s defeat at Appomattox Courthouse, there was hope the future presented a mutually shared bond between former foes based on shared sacrifice:

“To cherish such memories and recall such a past whether crowned with success or consecrated in defeat, is to idealize principle and strengthen character, intensify love of country and convert defeat and disaster into pillars of support for future manhood and noble womanhood. Whether the Southern people under their

64 “A Monument to Our Confederate Dead,” The Banner-Democrat, Lake Providence, East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, 10 November 1900, 3.; “Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 124-125. 39 changed conditions may ever hope to witness another civilization which shall equal that which began with their Washington and ended with their Lee, it is certainly true that devotion to their glorious past is not only the surest guarantee of future progress and holiest bond of unity, but also the strongest claim they can present to the conscience and respect of the other sections of the Union.”

Moorman’s and Gordon’s view of the past, which aligned with the UCV’s, had its roots in the acceptance of defeat and reunion in the 1880s and 1890s. Confederate defeat no longer seemed a death knell as it had in the two decades after the war. After the war, much of the South remained devastated from physical battle and exhaustion supporting the Confederate war effort. For the Confederate Private returning from war, not much was left to them save what little they owned prior to the war. Yet, most went back to tending farms and prior life as they had before the conflict. Men like Moorman and

Gordon were more concerned with utilizing the Confederate Private and the sense of a shared past to meet the growth affecting the region, and by extension, U.S., in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The past provided an anchor in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing setting. Portraying the war as a defense of constitutional rights and invoking a common past built upon the resolve of the Confederate Private allowed UCV leaders to maintain social stability and control. The version of the

Confederate Private coupled with the revision of history met the needs of elite

Southerners who felt uneasy in a changing world around them.65

Much like the GAR, the UCV possessed media geared towards its veteran members. The magazine, The Confederate Veteran, ran from 1893-1932. The

Confederate Veteran cost subscribers $.10 a copy, or $1.00 – $1.50 per year near the end

65 Ibid., 125-126.; George Moorman to Clement Evans, 19 November 1895, Adjutant General’s Letterpress Book, UCVA Papers, Louisiana State University. 40 of its run in 1932. To supplement subscription income, The Confederate Veteran often included advertisements for sundry items much like The National Tribune. In addition, similar to The National Tribune, readers of The Confederate Veteran wrote numerous letters to the editor of the magazine. Most commentary came from southern states; however, a few editorials arrived from more northern locales. Usually, readers of the ex-

Confederate periodical commented on wartime experiences or ideas concerning monument drives in the South (more on this in a later chapter). Sometimes the commentary came with ideas for future content. One particular writer, located in

Michigan, gave advice to the editors of The Confederate Veteran. Possibly a Confederate veteran transplanted to the Midwest, the writer sounded familiar refrains of Lost Cause terminology. While adhering to the Lost Cause narrative, the Michigander tempered his advice. According to the editorialist located in the Midwestern United States, The

Confederate Veteran should serve as “the voice of the South” and the periodical’s mission “to secure the cherished traditions and facts of the men and women of the ‘lost cause’ who enriched the world with history and memories to make the South and the cause that made an army of veterans famous.” The editorial did not stop with trumpeting the Lost Cause. Indeed, the writer encouraged The Confederate Veteran to “be just; be generous; be true…we have seen the wreck of too many partisan magazines, while all hail and support one from a fixed point of view…now, after a quarter of a century, let the calm sad voice of history give simply the truth.” This particular editorial paints a picture of having it both ways. The Lost Cause still held sway; however, “objectivity” needed detailed attention and partisanship had no place in the pages of The Confederate Veteran.

41 This editorial suggests publications for veterans became fertile ground for the expression of reconciliation between the former combatants.66

Education at the primary and secondary level also concerned the members of the

UCV and the editor of The Confederate Veteran. A textbook blitz occurred at the end of the nineteenth century spearheaded by the UCV and its women’s auxiliary, the United

Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). UCV and UDC members felt that history, especially that written by Northerners, condemned the South. The UCV and UDC believed the education provided at the primary and secondary school level contained too much bias from a Northern perspective. To counter the perceived bias, the UCV and

UDC agitated for a more nuanced approach to the South’s history and conduct during the war.67

Northern textbook publishers did not respond to the efforts of the UCV and UDC to publish “appropriate” school materials. Members of both organizations believed that the “correct” or “authentic” education, especially Southern history, was necessary for future generations of Southerners. Often times the UCV would take to the pages of The

Confederate Veteran to proselytize an “impartial” interpretation of the region’s past as well as that of the Confederacy. Committees appointed by the UCV sprang up throughout the South to address “procuring an unpartisan school history of the United States, in which justice should be done to the South, with special reference to its part in the war between the States.” Camps of “the Confederate Veterans throughout the entire South” took “the trouble to collect all material in the way of documents, personal recollections,

66 Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, I No. 1, March 1893, Nashville, TN: 78.

67 Cox, Karen L., Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003): 94, 116-117. 42 etc., within their reach.” The objective of these committees was to provide “histories of the United States, suitable for use in schools and academies” written “in the past few years which…deal fairly with all questions touching the South and the war between the

States.” Through these efforts, the hope was “that the best thought of southern as well as northern writers is now directed to this matter,” encouraging “the hope that the long and sorely felt want of a correct history for our children will soon be, if it is not already, supplied.” The attempt to promote an impartial history outside the South was rather optimistic. The UCV and its contributors hoped that promoting their version of history in

Northern and Southern schools and colleges would lead to vindication with reconciliation mixed in. This interest in education meant that The Confederate Veteran possessed a large readership that extended beyond just veterans. A Miss Harriet R. Parkhill of

Jacksonville, Florida commented in an 1893 edition:

“Having taught several years after the close of the war, I felt keenly how ignorant the children of the next generation would be of the true action of their forefathers, and instead of glorying in their bravery and their grandeur of their character and deeds, they would learn to be ashamed of them. This sheet [The Confederate Veteran] will do a noble work in teaching the young of the South and the whole world the true history of those sad but wonderful four years.”

The UCV and its supporters believed that history from a Southern perspective served as a corrective to existing histories of the war.68

Though generated prior to the UCV’s founding, the Lost Cause found a ready chorus in the organization. UCV members created a place where they could tell history as they wanted it. They listened to speeches by former Confederate military leaders, debated soldierly exploits, and partook in revelry not much different from their GAR

68 Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, I No. 4, April 1893, Nashville, TN: 119.; Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, I No. 6, June 1893, Nashville, TN: 166. 43 counterparts. However, UCV members took their revised history outside the Camp and disseminated it across the region. The UCV became a regional and, eventually, a national organ of the Lost Cause. The UCV positioned the Lost Cause as one waged by heroic, honorable men defending a way of life and their homeland. UCV members used commemorative activities to purposely package the Lost Cause as a noble effort. In the thirty years since the end of the war, UCV orators admonished listeners that the “world has been more than just to the Confederate soldier.” The battlefield heroics of

Confederate soldiers became an emblem of pride for the South. In venerating the common Confederate soldier, the region sold to itself, and consequently the North, an idealized image of common sacrifice and toil during the war. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Lost Cause narrative of the war became as popular as the Union’s cause. The Lost Cause’s tenets of bravery, heroism, and sacrifice squared with Union veterans’ understanding the war from similar perspectives. Certainly, both ex-Rebels and ex-Yanks remained bitter towards each other. However, the bitterness thawed over time.

The prospect of joint encampments provided the perfect opportunity to bury the one past while at the same time creating a new one that fit both organizations’ needs and ideological interests.69

“The New Invasion of the South:” Historical Memory and Reconciliation at the Joint Encampment

Louisville, Kentucky hosted the 1895 GAR National Encampment. The 1895 event marked the first time the GAR went south of the Ohio River for its annual

69 Janney, Caroline E. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 190-191; R.A. Brock, Ed., Southern Historical Society Papers, 21, 1893, Richmond, Virginia, Stiles, Major Robert, “Dedication Address for the Monument to the Confederate Dead at the University of Virginia,” 16. 44 spectacle. While Kentucky was technically a “border state” during the war, it supplied an equal number of troops to both the Union and Confederacy and thus embodied a middle ground. The interesting element of the GAR “invading” the South again was the fact

Louisville boosters extended the invitation to the GAR. Northern cities had vied vigorously for GAR National Encampments; however, GAR leaders accepted this unusual invitation by noting, “the offering of a hand that cannot be refused, the extension of an olive branch must not be rejected.” Tensions had certainly thawed somewhat in the thirty-years after the war. It also meant that local Louisville boosters considered the thawing of tensions to be a potential economic boon. At the same time, GAR members, at least non-African American or integrated Posts, hoped to experience some of that renowned “Southern Hospitality” in Louisville.70

The “new invasion of the South,” The Indianapolis Journal recognized in

September 1895, marked a clear departure from previous GAR National Encampments.

Leaders of the UCV – John B. Gordon, for example – spoke at various GAR events during the festivities in Louisville. The citizens of the Kentucky city turned out in droves to welcome the GAR veterans. Louisville opened halls, gardens, and parks to the Union veterans. According to one account, “over 70,000 people attended the old Kentucky barbecue” during the event. With so many Union veterans descending on Louisville, boosters characterized it as a “new invasion of the South.” However, this time the invasion did not include arms and artillery. The GAR members came with open minds and empty bellies. The inclusion of UCV speakers provided a harbinger of things to come for the former foes. The hospitality displayed by Louisville’s citizens demonstrated a

70 “The New Invasion of the South,” The Indianapolis Journal, Indianapolis, Indiana, 14 September 1894, 4. 45 “Southern” city could host a grand gathering of Union veterans without animosity or rancor.71

It is no surprise the end of the nineteenth century witnessed the formation of the

GAR and UCV. As the century closed, more “fraternal” organizations sprung up around shared experiences, gender, or lineage related to nationalism and war. The Women’s

Relief Corps, an axillary of the GAR organized in 1883. The Daughters of the American

Revolution formed in 1890. Soon followed the Daughters of 1812 and the United

Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). These female-centric organizations often overlapped in membership and class, while supporting in an adjunct capacity their male counterparts in the veterans’ themed organizations. Often times, the women’s organization “encamped” with their male counterpart offering a quasi-wartime experience. Other times, the women’s organizations spearheaded memorial/monument activity, engaged in educational initiatives, or simply made themselves a voice of the male veteran. Whether a male or female-centric organization, the modus operandi of these groups quickly became a driving element for historical memory formation.72

By the end of the nineteenth century, sentiments for “uniting those who fought on different sides” in the Civil War ran high. GAR delegates from various Posts and the national organization sought to arrange potential deals with UCV Camps for joint encampments. The GAR arranged and proposed “to have fraternal delegates sent from one encampment to the other.” The issue hinged on whether the UCV would welcome

71 “Wind Up of Veterans,” Little Falls Weekly Transcript, Little Falls, Morrison County, Minnesota, 20 September 1895, 12.

72 Cox, Karen L., Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003): 34. 46 such overtures. In due time, veterans of both sides came to see the joint encampment as an opportunity at reconciliation. The “congratulations” from Grand Army of the

Republic, “aye, of the nation, are due” to the veterans down South. The joint encampment would become a historical memory vehicle as well as a powerful reconciliation tool made possible by the creation of veterans’ groups.73

73 “Peace Day,” The Topeka State Journal, Topeka, Kansas, 8 September 1898, 1. 47 Chapter 2

The Flowering of Reconciliation

In 1883, preceding the GAR National Encampment in Louisville, the Lincoln Post

No. 11 of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) located in Newark, New Jersey paid a visit to the Robert E. Lee Camp No. 1 of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) located in Richmond, Virginia. The Lincoln Post’s “Historian of the Expedition” described the travel south as a fraternal visit. The aging veterans of these two posts felt it necessary to do what politicians in the eighteen years following the end of hostilities in 1865 had not – build bridges between the old combatants and heal an emotionally fractured nation.

According to the Lincoln Post’s Historian, “After eighteen years of political effort, the result was a ‘solid South’ in opposition to almost a solid North. A race so great as the

American people, and a nation so splendid as ‘our dear country’ needed other ties to bind it together.” Thus, “the wounds of bloody war must be bandaged by loving hands, and the asperities of four years of strife, must be softened and soothed by loving words proceeding from the fullness of loving hearts.” The effort of these two posts point to a grander effort at reconciliation between “Reb” and “Yank.” In so building fraternity amongst the old combatants, numerous events between the veterans’ organizations attempted to heal wounds that still festered amongst the North and the South. In the process, such fraternal visits formed a collective historical remembrance of the Civil War bereft of animosity and hard feelings.74

74 Benson, C.H. “Yank” and “Reb,”A History of a Fraternal Visit Paid by Lincoln Post, No. 11, G.A.R., of Newark, N.J. to Robert E. Less Camp, No. 1, Confederate Veterans and Phil Kearney Post, No. 10,

48 What follows is an examination of how joint-encampments, along with other stakeholders in the memory making process, and attendant cultural productions around these events of the 1880s and 1890s, did a great deal to repair the bitterness caused by four years of war. In the process, Confederate and Union veterans, as well as their supporters, such as women’s auxiliaries, used these historical memory vehicles to not only physically reunite a nation, but as moments to recast and build a shared memory of the war. As we will see, joint-encampments, a museum, and their cultural ephemera assuaged bitterness between some of the former combatants. This chapter traces the evolution of historical memory though a variety of stakeholders’ machinations during the high water mark of reconciliationist activities. Their work at crafting a memory of the war cemented the two sides together and did much to quiet tensions in Gilded Age

America. The U.S.’s first overseas imperial foray in 1898 provided a final plank in the reconciliation bridge.

The difficulty of the Civil War and its complex reasons for the four years of bloodshed has led numerous historians to formulate hypotheses for the reconciliation movement of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Most scholarly production regarding reconciliation centers on the issue of race. Union and Confederate veterans came to an understanding on a shared memory of the war as one of common sacrifice, valor, bravery, and heroism amongst White males. In the process of reconciliation, the war’s ugly reason – slavery – was swept under the rug and not discussed. In a sense, all stakeholders in the process of building reconciliation suffered from historical amnesia. The men of the GAR and UCV only concerned themselves with

G.A.R., of Richmond, VA., October 15th to October 18th, Inclusive,. (Newark, NJ: M.H. Neuhut, Printer, 1884): 12. 49 a narrow memory of the war. They became agents and “memory brokers” in constructing a usable past meeting their needs for making sense of the trauma they collectively experienced. In the process, they mythologized the past and created a sentimental, sanitized historical memory of the war. Thus, the emergence of joint encampments between Union and Confederate veterans provided physical space for the construction of a collective past.75

Some historians contend that joint encampments such as the one between the

Lincoln Post and the Robert E. Lee Camp did not foster reconciliation on mutual terms.

For instance, historian Caroline Janney argues both Union and Confederate veterans favored national unity on their own terms. In Janney’s estimation, the majority of Union veterans embraced a reconciliation that left no doubt about who had been right in the war.

For their part, ex-Confederates refused to concede their cause had been unworthy. Janney contends that gestures of reconciliation, whether actions such as returning captured battle flags or appeals for joint-encampments of the GAR and UCV, tended to reinforce sectional loyalties rather than diminish them. To some extent, Janney is correct. Not all reconciliation initiatives met with warmth and brotherly love. Indeed, tensions still seethed between the former combatants at many of these events. Yet, by the 1880s, the generation that fought, and lived through, the war realized the folly of remaining bitter.

Memory of their wartime experiences fostered more reconciliation than it did not.76 As

Virginia Governor William H. Mann (a Confederate veteran himself) declared at the

75 Holyfield, Lori and Beacham, Clifford, “Memory Brokers, Shameful Pasts, and Civil War Commemoration,” Journal of Black Studies 42, No.3 (April 2011): 437-439.

76 Janney, Caroline. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 6-7.

50 fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg in 1913, “There is no North and no South, no rebels and no Yanks. All is one great nation.”77

Both sides of the “late unpleasantness” understood time was not on their side because of the growing age of veterans. To this end, many of the Blue and Grey veterans spent time composing war sketches, memoirs, and histories of their wartime experiences.

As reconciliation flowered into the latter decades of the nineteenth century, veterans on both sides expressed a shared vision of a common country. For many of those who experienced the war, such a war as theirs “enables a citizen of a state, to look beyond the confines of his own state and section, and with sharpened vision see the grandeur and magnificence of the whole broad country.” In reliving the war through joint encampments, as well as certain physical spaces, veterans, whether Blue or Grey, crafted memories to pass on to future generations. The veterans on both sides felt the generation coming of age in the final two decades of the nineteenth century did not understand what the veterans experienced during the war. As one commentator remarked in the mid-

1890s, “Like the leaves of autumn, the old veterans are silently dropping by the wayside, but as the buds of spring are put forth in new vigor, so the memory of their valor will be transmitted to posterity.”78

What did reconciliation mean to the stakeholders involved with the process? For the historical actors, reconciliation meant more than mere reunion of the two sections.

77 Ibid., 10-11; Washington Post, July 1, 1913, Washington, D.C.

78 Benson, C.H. “Yank” and “Reb,”A History of a Fraternal Visit Paid by Lincoln Post, No. 11, G.A.R., of Newark, N.J. to Robert E. Less Camp, No. 1, Confederate Veterans and Phil Kearney Post, No. 10, G.A.R., of Richmond, VA., October 15th to October 18th, Inclusive,. (Newark, NJ: M.H. Neuhut, Printer, 1884): 69.; R.A. Brock, Ed., “The Defenders of Vicksburg, A Monument to Their Memory Unveiled at Vicksburg, Mississippi, 25 April 1893.” Southern Historical Society Papers, 21 (Richmond, Virginia: Lowry, M.F.: 1893): 205.

51 Reconciliation was a multi-layered, complex process. To begin with, reconciliation pivoted on the shared bravery, valor, and heroism of the White Union and Confederate soldiers. At the same time, the competing memories of the war – the Lost Cause for the

South and, what historian John R. Neff terms, The Cause Victorious for the North – merged into the Lost Cause as the one adopted by both sides. Surely, Union veterans and their stakeholders occasionally balked at the South wining the narrative and interpretations of the war; however, the large majority of Northerners found the Lost

Cause acceptable as the nineteenth century waned and the twentieth century opened. The idea of American valor and bravery on the battlefield, even if one side attempted treason, squared neatly with emerging U.S. nationalism and imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century. In the process, African Americans, particularly Union veterans, became marginalized with a few voices in the GAR attempting not to give ground.

African American veterans were left twisting in the wind as an indifferent White North acquiesced to the White South’s interpretation of the war. As we will see in this chapter, and subsequent chapters, reconciliation was more than mere ideology and orations.

Commemorative rituals, physical space, and travel also played a role. In winning the

“hearts and minds” of the White North, the White South came to define the terms of

“surrender” on the historical memory of the war and reconciliation.79

“Billy Reb and Johnny Yank:” The Joint Encampment

Prior to the 1880s, tensions between Union and Confederate veterans still seethed; however, during the 1880s and 1890s encampments between the two former belligerents

79 Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004): 8-9.

52 flowered. The historical memory and reconciliation process meant GAR Posts spent time

“down South” with UCV Camps. Conversely, UCV Camps found a welcoming embrace from GAR Posts in the North. Therefore, the joint encampment became a vehicle of reconciliation. With the social milieu of the late nineteenth century roiling around them,

Blue and Grey veterans found the joint encampment a safe space to hash out their wartime experiences and to make amends. Reconciliation was not the only byproduct of these meetings. Cultural production in the form of histories and periodicals came about extolling the virtues of the White Civil War soldier. Ultimately, the joint encampment gained notoriety for its historical memory making impulses. As the two sides conducted joint encampments and played soldier, they swapped stories of bravery and heroism on the battlefield. In this manner, the joint encampment assuaged the emotional scars of the war. As R.E. Colston claimed in an address to the Ladies Memorial Association of

Wilmington, North Carolina, the process of reconciliation addressed a need for mending of wounds through the passage of time “shall be the great healer and consoler of almost every form of human woe.”80

A joint encampment usually began with an invitation from a UCV Camp to a

GAR Post, or vice versa. For example, in early June 1883, the idea for a joint encampment between the Phil Kearney Post No. 10 based in Newark, New Jersey of the

GAR and the Robert E. Lee Camp of the UCV based in Richmond, Virginia came from one of the members of the Phil Kearney Post. The Post arranged a committee to explore a joint encampment in Richmond with the UCV Camp and to determine logistics and costs.

80 McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992): xiii.; R.A. Brock, Ed., “Address of Gen. R.E. Colston Before the Ladies Memorial Association at Wilmington, N.C.” Southern Historical Society Papers, 21 (Richmond, Virginia: 1893):16. 53 After computations, the committee determined travel, room, and board for each member of the Phil Kearney Post traveling south would cost $20. The Post also established a

“Richmond Fund” through donations and a fundraising event. The event raised $600 that lessened the per capita cost for the traveling members. Near the departure date, the Post held a meeting that established a strict guideline on alcohol consumption. The members traveling to Richmond, known as “The Brigade,” accepted the strictures regarding intoxication and promised not to “indulge in any unseemly or unsoldierly conduct.”

Members of the Phil Kearney Post understood clearly the admonishment to behave while in Richmond. When visiting a UCV Camp’s home base, GAR leaders expected their members to behave in what they considered proper soldierly conduct, aligning with temperance ideals of the era.81

At times, invitations displayed more joviality than the correspondence between the Phil Kearney Post and the Robert E. Lee Camp. In 1889, the Seventeenth Michigan

Volunteer Infantry invited the “Stonewall Regiment” of Virginia to a joint reunion in

Grand Rapids, Michigan September 25, 1889. Those attending the reunion could purchase railroad or steamer tickets at reduced cost. Future Michigan U.S. Representative and U.S. Senator, the Honorable J.C. Burrows, was to deliver the keynote address.

Organizers claimed that “alone should warrant you in making any every sacrifice in order to hear once more our gifted comrade.” The Seventeenth Michigan Volunteers encouraged attendees to bring, “your wives, your families, and your sweethearts…” to the reunion. The inclusion of kin marked this particular joint encampment as a “family”

81 Benson, C.H. “Yank” and “Reb,”A History of a Fraternal Visit Paid by Lincoln Post, No. 11, G.A.R., of Newark, N.J. to Robert E. Less Camp, No. 1, Confederate Veterans and Phil Kearney Post, No. 10, G.A.R., of Richmond, VA., October 15th to October 18th, Inclusive,. (Newark, NJ: M.H. Neuhut, Printer, 1884): 12- 20. 54 affair. The veterans attending the event in Grand Rapids desired the opportunity to play soldier for relatives and friends. As if there was not enough incentive, humor became a method of attracting folks. Comrades attempting to sing or play “The Girl I Left Behind

Me” or “We Won’t Go Home ‘Till Morning” faced a mock court martial or banishment to the cavalry, a particularly nasty fate for an infantry soldier. The reunion’s advertisement displayed merriment and a good time to be had by those in attendance.

Humor signaled to the revelers that the time had come to replace bitterness with ebullience.82

The joint encampment offered the opportunity for GAR or UCV members to visit an urban area outside their usual circumstances. Most, if not all, joint encampment attendees utilized railroads to reach their destination. For their sojourn south in 1884, the

Phil Kearny Post used railroads from Newark to Richmond. The Phil Kearney Post assembled in downtown Newark at the Pennsylvania Railroad Depot and boarded trains of three coaches and two sleeper cars for their trip to Richmond, Virginia. Visitors to the

Seventeenth Michigan Volunteer Infantry joint encampment used the Central and

Western Michigan Railroad to reach the meeting place in Grand Rapids, Michigan. While

Grand Rapids did not qualify as a bustling metropolis, it held promise as an opportunity for GAR and UCV members to leave their immediate vicinity. On the other hand,

Richmond was a more attractive locale. Located in the temperate South and the site of the

Confederacy’s capital, the city experienced growth and suburbanization in the two decades after the war’s conclusion. Utilizing its Revolutionary and Civil War heritage,

82 “An Interesting War Paper,” Shepherdstown Register, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, 26 September 1889, 1.; Advertisement for “Stonewall Regiment” Reunion, 1 September 1889, Razelmond A. Parker Collection, Box 14, Folder 2, Detroit Public Library. 55 Richmond positioned itself as a prime encampment destination. Boosters like William

Chesterman, through his “The James River Tourist” tract, touted the Revolutionary War and the Confederacy’s cultural emblems, and interestingly enough the Confederate White

House, as sites worthy of visiting. Indeed, specific mention is made of touring the grounds of the great Confederate manufactory Tredegar Iron Works. In a macabre, weird twist, GAR members visiting Richmond could get up close and personal with the factory that produced the armaments that killed and maimed many of their comrades.83

Travel to a joint encampment included visiting sites of battle along the journey.

As the Phil Kearney Post made its way south to Richmond, the “Brigade” crossed the

Rappahannock River in northern Virginia. Eyes scanned the passing scenery where bullets had once flown while Union soldiers laid a pontoon bridge across the

Rappahannock River in 1862. Quite a few of the old Union soldiers of the Phil Kearney

Post had crossed the Rappahannock in December 1862 to engage Confederates on the south banks of the river at Fredericksburg, Virginia. The horror of that battle flooded the minds of the men as they crossed the river nearly twenty-four years later. C.H. Benson,

Phil Kearney Post historian, commented on the Fredericksburg battle after his return. In his estimation, the battle had been a Union blunder. The “memories of that terrible week of battle, the awful struggle, the horrible butchery of the ‘Boys in Blue,’ the fruitlessness and uselessness of it all, will never die out from the minds of those who participated in that stupendous blunder.” The historian of the Phil Kearney post spoke for many of the

83 Benson, C.H. “Yank” and “Reb,”A History of a Fraternal Visit Paid by Lincoln Post, No. 11, G.A.R., of Newark, N.J. to Robert E. Less Camp, No. 1, Confederate Veterans and Phil Kearney Post, No. 10, G.A.R., of Richmond, VA., October 15th to October 18th, Inclusive,. (Newark, NJ: M.H. Neuhut, Printer, 1884): 39- 43.; Advertisement for “Stonewall Regiment” Reunion, 1 September 1889, Razelmond A. Parker Collection, Box 14, Folder 2, Detroit Public Library. Chesterman, William D. The James River Tourist, A Brief Account of Historical Localities on James River, and Sketches of Richmond, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. (Richmond: Everett Waddy, Printer, 1889): 15. 56 men in attendance in commenting on the action at Fredericksburg. Even twenty-four years later, the Boys in Blue had not let go of the slaughter they witnessed at

Fredericksburg. Further down the rail line, the pain of Fredericksburg gave way to more enjoyable reminiscences. The “Brigade” detrained about fifty miles south of

Fredericksburg and engaged with the local populace. The men foraged, played games, and partook in drinks at a local watering hole.84

Joint encampments ran in both directions. By the mid-1890s, the GAR and UCV familiarized themselves with each other, often with reconciliationist tones. In 1893, the combined efforts of the GAR and UCV led to a joint reunion in Chicago, Illinois coinciding with the Columbian Exposition and World’s Fair held in the city the same year. Chicago based GAR members, in conjunction with ex-Confederates living in the city, spearheaded efforts to bring a joint reunion to the Midwestern metropolis. They hoped “old veterans of the North and South, who faced each other on so many battlefields, will meet in peaceful reunion, to talk over their old battles and attend the World’s

Fair together.” On May 30, 1893, a “grand reunion memorial service” occurred “and the blue and grey” decorated the graves “of the 6,000 Confederate soldiers buried at

Oakwood Cemetery, Chicago, and the graves of the Union soldiers buried there.” The

Confederate graves held the remains of Prisoners of War (POWs) who died at Camp

Douglas, a POW stockade outside Chicago. Solemnity was not the only activity on the agenda in Chicago. The National Committee assisting with the Chicago reunion provided tents “furnished by the Government to camp in, and the old boys who wore the blue and

84 Benson, C.H. “Yank” and “Reb,”A History of a Fraternal Visit Paid by Lincoln Post, No. 11, G.A.R., of Newark, N.J. to Robert E. Less Camp, No. 1, Confederate Veterans and Phil Kearney Post, No. 10, G.A.R., of Richmond, VA., October 15th to October 18th, Inclusive,. (Newark, NJ: M.H. Neuhut, Printer, 1884): 47- 53. 57 the gray can go into camp by States and have one good time together before they pitch their tents beyond the silent river.” The Chicago reunion held the opportunity to reconcile with former foes over the graves of departed comrades with a mix of solemnity of a joint encampment and frivolity through the backdrop of the 1893 World’s Fair.85

Often times, UCV reunions included prominent Northern guests, often quasi- celebrities during the war. For example, in August 1893, UCV Camp Commander Joseph

F. Johnston invited Ulysses S. Grant’s widow, Julia Grant, to attend the UCV reunion held by Camp Hardee in Birmingham, Alabama. The Hardee Camp held the reunion

September 15 – 16 1894. Commander Johnston assured Mrs. Grant that “the men who wore gray will extend to you a welcome as genial as our Southern sun, and will be proud to do honor to the illustrious lady who was so cordial in her reception of Mrs. [Jefferson]

Davis.” Johnston went further:

“We feel that your presence at this reunion will be good for you and for us – good for our common country, and that it will testify to the world that the people of the South, those who fought from conviction, and maintained four long years, but unequal contest, have nothing in their hearts but respect for the brave and true men who opposed them, and are ready now, should occasion require, to show their willingness to uphold and defend the Union of our fathers.”

Commander Johnston’s invitation demonstrated that both former combatants reconciled under a common banner of U.S. nationalism, the “Union of our fathers.” Through invitations to individuals like Ulysses S. Grant’s widow, mutual respect began to bridge the divide between the former foes.86

85 Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, I No. 1, January 1893, Nashville, TN: 23.

86 Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, I No. 8, August 1893, Nashville, TN: 227.

58 Railroad companies recognized that joint encampments meant potential business.

For the May 1885 joint encampment held in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Mississippi and

Tennessee Railroad, along with the Illinois Central Railroad, ran daylight specials from

Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans for $6 round trip. The “old soldiers who wore the

Gray and the Blue” could bring a lunch along for the ride to the Crescent City. According to the advertisement for the railroads, the joint encampment in New Orleans promised to

“be the event of your life.” The two railroad companies vied for the business of the veterans. They “positively” guaranteed “that no sleepers will be required, and no expense will be spared to secure the greatest comfort and enjoyment” to the old soldiers. Joint encampments meant big business.87

Richmond, as discussed, was a favorite southern location for a joint encampment.

Southerners in the city took the festivities seriously. Such events provided an opportunity to show how modern southern cities had become; they also provided an opportunity to showcase the Confederacy’s patrimony while educating visitors on the righteousness of the Southern cause in the war. In 1888, a consortium of Chicago businessmen with ties to oil, insurance, and sporting goods manufacturing raided the former Confederate capital of

Richmond, Virginia on a different sort of mission. Instead of occupation of the ex-capital, these men were after a historical item: the former, and notorious, Libby Prison. The team of businessmen ordered the structure dismantled, loaded its pieces onto over fifty railroad cars, and transported the prison back to Chicago. Once back in Chicago, Libby Prison was carefully rebuilt, named the Libby Prison War Museum, and housed over 100,000

Civil War artifacts and memorabilia from both the North and South. The venture gained

87 “The Mississippi & Tennessee and Great Illinois Central Railroads” Advertisement, Memphis Daily Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee, 3 May 1885, 1. 59 opprobrium in Chicago with the Chicago Herald proclaiming the project as a “rape of the famous old war relic from the banks of the placid James.” The Chicago museum men countered that the effort was meant to foster reconciliation, that the museum and its artifacts reinforced the notion that “the country is whole.” Even The Confederate Veteran chimed in with an advertisement proclaiming, “No sectional animosity is intended – no

North, No South, but a fair representation of the great Civil War, from both Northern and

Southern standpoints.” However, Richmond’s residents felt the need to hold on to their cultural resources and influence opinions of the war through artifact displays and interpretation. To counter further Northern pillage of ex-Confederate relics, the

Confederate Memorial Literary Society (CMLS) formed in 1896 and set about saving the former Confederacy’s patrimony.88

The CMLS consisted of a collection of pro-Confederate, ideological Southern

White women intent on preserving the South’s cultural heritage specifically related to the war. The women of the CLMS also belonged to the United Daughters of the Confederacy

(UDC). The gender and class composition of the CMLS, along with the UDC, aligned with the postwar South’s fixation on White women as the keepers of Southern patrimony.

In the minds of the UDC, they, according to historian Karen Cox, served as the truthful heirs of Confederate culture. The UDC engaged in efforts to memorialize the Southern soldier and “correct” the historical record of the South’s war from 1861 – 1865. The

CLMS’s efforts at historic preservation made sense to the women composing the group – they either experienced the wartime home front, or heard stories from their mothers. The

88 Hillyer, Reiko, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” The Public Historian 33, No. 4 (November 2011): 36.; Chicago Herald, Chicago, Illinois, 21 1889.; Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, I No. 7, July 1893, Nashville, TN: 225. 60 CLMS, which overlapped with the UDC, built upon the ideology of the Lost Cause along race and class lines. While UCV members played soldier at camps, the UDC did the heavy lifting of memorializing the Confederacy. To that end, the CLMS’s desires to historically preserve Southern wartime culture met success in the formation of a museum

– the Confederate Museum – in Richmond, Virginia.89

The CMLS, in conjunction with the UDC, forged a neo-Confederate nationalism through their efforts and utilized the Confederacy’s built patrimony to tout their ideology.

These were no mere passive groups. They practiced Confederate memory activism openly centered on the cultural authority of the White female members of the organizations. Aside from agitating for Confederate monumentation across the region, the neo-Confederate women of the CMLS and UDC found a neatly packaged opportunity in the former Confederate White House. In turning the space into a quasi-scientific display of Confederate memorabilia and artifacts, the CMLS, and its adjunct the UDC, could tout the legitimacy of the Confederacy’s failed bid at independence to Richmond’s visitors.

The ideological work of the CMLS and UDC acquired a patina of scientific rationality through the displays in the museum.90

The CMLS founded the Confederate Museum in Richmond in February 1896. For

$.25 daily and free on Saturdays, the museum presented a slice of Confederate patrimony.

The Confederate Museum’s purpose was to preserve Confederate artifacts, staunch any further raiding by Northern interests, and to transmit the ethos of the Lost Cause with the

89 Cox, Karen L., Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003): 1-3.; “Virginia News,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 10 February 1896, 2.

90 Morgan, Francesca. Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005): 34-35. 61 museum serving a didactic purpose. The founders of the Confederate Museum set about defending the Southern cause in the war with artifacts and relics that depicted the South in positive terms. In addition, the museum served as a bulwark against the increasing industrialization and urbanization brought about by New South boosters. By displaying military and cultural ephemera from the war, CMLS leaders used the museum’s space to tell the story of a vanquished people experiencing further stress from the societal changes occurring around them. In the minds of CMLS leadership, the museum pushed back on further cultural homogenization on Northern terms.91

The museum worked to demonstrate the South’s emerging late nineteenth century social order by portraying slavery in a benevolent light, thus justifying Jim Crow segregation. The museum depicted the White South as “solid,” aligning the region’s

White working class with the region’s White social leaders. The museum’s form and function provided a space where Whites of the region, regardless of class background, were told a story of a common heritage from the war. The museum emphasized the valor and sacrifice of the Confederate soldier in ways that garnered sympathy from the North and helped foster reconciliation. Most importantly, through the museum’s artifacts and relics the CMLS controlled historical interpretation of the war and its aftermath. The

CMLS curators promoted Confederate veneration as well as sectional reconciliation.92

91 “Confederate Veterans,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 7 January 1896, 3.; “The Confederate Museum,” The Times, Richmond, Virginia, 7 May 1899, 7.; Hillyer, Reiko, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” The Public Historian 33, No. 4 (November 2011): 36.

92 Hillyer, Reiko, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” The Public Historian 33, No. 4 (November 2011): 37.

62 The Confederate Museum aligned with the three-dimensional narratives of

“civilization” and progress from barbarism offered up by Gilded Age museums in the

North and World’s Fairs occurring around the United States during the period. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth century museums and World’s Fairs occurring all over the country explained the present by displaying an idealized past of U.S. progress through scientific rationality. However, in its early iteration, the Confederate Museum critiqued the commercialized present while celebrating a nobler past. The CMLS created a myth of southern virtue and sacrifice that domesticated the effects of industrialization and urbanization in the New South. While Northern museums and World’s Fairs touted U.S.

“civilizational” progress, the Confederate Museum, early on, aimed at a regionalized flavor. The collection and exhibition of Confederate artifacts, such as slouch hats, muskets, bayonets, ammunition, and uniforms, allowed a nuanced display of sentiment – sentimentality that appeared lacking in Northern commercial culture. In addition, the

CMLS also believed they were engaged in systematic historical work validating their interpretation of the Civil War with the patina of science; that is science wrought through historical artifacts. Yet, over time, the Confederate museum became a space devoted to the same ideology of its Northern counterparts.93

During the late nineteenth century, U.S. museums and educational institutions experienced a turn in professionalization and the CMLS and its museum cashed in on the professionalization movement. With the emergence of scientific processes to the disciplines of History, Anthropology, and Archaeology, museums became more than

93 Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984): 1-5.; Hillyer, Reiko, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” The Public Historian 33, No. 4 (November 2011): 37. 63 mere spaces for the display of artifacts and relics. The profession of curatorial sciences allowed museums to become de-facto experts on the interpretation of historical matters.

As the Confederate Museum became the chief regional repository for the artifacts of the

Lost Cause, the CMLS portrayed the romance of the Antebellum South as rationality – a cultured, literary society bereft of the chaos of urbanization and industrialization – and countered what they perceived to be Northern encroachment upon both the memory of the war and future direction. Northern interests might take pieces of Confederate patrimony up north for commercial gain; however, the Confederate Museum and its founders utilized space to counter Northern interpretations of the war and its memory.

Therefore, at first the CMLS and the Confederate Museum pushed against reconciliation.94

As noted earlier, the sale and transport of Libby Prison to Chicago shocked

Richmond’s white elite and suggested that Yankee visitors could loot the South of its historical artifacts, thus depriving Southerners with a connection to their past. In 1889, the year the Libby Prison War Museum opened in Chicago, the Atlanta Constitution claimed, “the historic landmarks of the South should be kept where they are rather than be sold to the Barnums of the North.” Southerners took notice of these new Yankee raiders pillaging Southern relics. One commentator in the Confederate Veteran remarked,

“What are our people thinking? Are they selling these relics that should be held as sacred treasures in every Southern household to enterprising relic hunters, who in turn place them in museums in the North, and charge the seller a big price to visit and see what they considered worthless?” With Northerners more frequently visiting the South and the

94 Ibid., 39-40. 64 region’s cultural resources from the war, leaders, such as those of the CMLS, partnering with the UCV in utilizing Confederate veterans as museum docents, felt the need to keep

Confederate artifacts where they belonged – in the South. In essence, Libby Prison’s removal and subsequent metamorphosis into a Northern spectacle ignited in the CMLS a desire to save one of the last pieces of Confederate patrimony in Richmond – the

Confederate White House.95

The CMLS believed the Confederate White House symbolized the last bastion of

Confederate heritage untouched by Yankeedom. As more and more Northern visitors flooded Richmond, either as part of joint encampments or pleasure seekers, the CMLS utilized the Confederate White House to celebrate and define Confederate history. The

CMLS believed that not only were Northerners ransacking the southern landscape of its sacred landmarks, but that the history of the war was in danger of domination by a prejudiced Northern interpretation. Therefore, the CMLS was determined to counter the victor’s version of the Civil War and seized upon the Confederate Museum and

Confederate White House as a chance to prove that the South was right in the war and the conquerors wrong. The museum’s founders argued the museum’s collection was evidence of the righteousness of the Lost Cause. Furthermore, the collection provided an opportunity to present object lessons on the heroism and endurance of the Confederate soldier and to manage a version of historical remembrance. The CMLS regarded its preservation work as sacrosanct, distinctive for the region’s ties to its past and future

95 Ibid., 40-41.; “Save the Battlefields,” Atlanta Constitution, reprinted in The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., 30 April 1889, 4.; Cunningham, S.A., Ed. “Keep War Relics in the South,” The Confederate Veteran Magazine, 3 No. 1, January 1895, Nashville, TN: 23. 65 edification of the Southern people. Moreover, if a few Yankees bought into what the

CMLS peddled, so much the better.96

The CMLS and its Confederate Museum, housed in the former Confederacy’s

White House, served not only as a tangible reminder of the South’s wartime legacy, but as a tourist attraction for joint encampments held in Richmond. Within its halls, the

Confederate Museum displayed the artifacts and wartime detritus of the heroic Southern soldier. As the GAR and UCV came to drink from the same reconciliationist cup, the

Confederate Museum furthered reconciliation through its displays. Overtly, and covertly, the museum came to symbolize the shared heroism, bravery, and sacrifice of Union and

Confederate veterans. As the two veterans’ organizations hammered out a shared memory of the war bereft of the leading cause of the hostilities – slavery – the CLMS and the museum helped foster the collective memory of the two sides. The women of the CLMS worked diligently to portray, through scientific rationalization of displayed artifacts, that the two White populations that fought the war were not that much different. In the process, GAR veterans visiting Richmond took in what the CLMS and museum sold.

Termed another way, the CLMS utilized the museum to win the hearts and minds of

Union veterans attending joint encampments.97

Southern states provided relics and funding for the museum. In turn, the museum’s work included rooms devoted to each state of the former Confederacy. States donated relics, artifacts, and historical materials to the museum. For example, South

Carolina spent $100 in 1901 on equipment and furnishing their room at the Confederate

96 Hillyer, Reiko, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” The Public Historian 33, No. 4 (November 2011): 43.

97 “Confederate Museum,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 22 September 1915, 4. 66 Museum. However, the CLMS realized relying on donations would not fill the space and keep the museum afloat. Partnering with the UCV and UDC, the CLMS gathered in donations at the turn-of-the-century to keep the museum running. The Portsmouth,

Virginia Chapter of the UDC established a fund raising drive of $2 a person to stock the

Virginia Room of the Confederate Museum with items related to the state’s participation during the war. The “patriotic” and “earnest” UDC members carried out the drive diligently to bring in funds for the museum’s work. In the process, the patriotism espoused aligned with the South’s skewed historical record of the war.98

Through displays of rusty pistols and tattered slouch hats, the curators of the

Confederate Museum hoped to arouse sentiment, reverence, and rational thought brought on by the taxonomy of objects related to the war. They hoped that being in the presence of Confederate artifacts, considered sacred, permitted patrons to experience the past more directly and stir historical imagination. The CMLS saw no conflict between sentiment and science. The organization believed that the emerging professionalization of late nineteenth century science, when coupled with sentimentality, produced a historical record that stood on foundations of reason buttressed by authenticated data in the form of objects. Repeatedly, the CMLS employed the scientific language of the period – cataloguing materials, ascension, and interpretation – expressed faith that the organization uncovered objective historical truth through the collection and physical display of tangible evidence. The museum curators carefully arranged their objects in the most state-of-the-art dustproof and mothproof cases. To add more historical authenticity, the museum employed Confederate veterans as docents who added anecdotes providing a

98 “Over One Million,” The Batesburg Advocate, Batesburg, South Carolina, 6 March 1906, 5.; “Donations by Portsmouth Chapter, U.D.C.,” Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Virginia, 27 February 1900, 10. 67 direct experiential connection with the past. Drawing upon the evocative power of relics, as well as their scientific aura, the CMLS appealed to emotion and imagination while claiming historical objectivity.99

The CMLS and its Confederate Museum presented an educational opportunity for

Union veterans visiting Richmond during joint encampments. As reconciliation ramped up in the 1890s, Northern patrons to the museum experienced Southern Americana. The artifacts, docents, and interpretation of the war coalesced with the reconciliationist imperatives of the closing decades of the nineteenth century. As Union veterans experienced the Southern interpretation of the war through cultural heritage pieces, such as the Confederate Museum, the Confederacy’s sacrifices merged with those Union vets dealt with during the war. The notions of common sacrifice, heroism, and bravery on the battlefield entwined seamlessly with the reconciliation activities at joint encampments.

Perhaps, “Johnny Reb” was not that much different from “Billy Yank?” Spaces, such as the Confederate Museum, demonstrated that both sides could share in similar wartime experiences. The sense of sameness peddled by the Confederate Museum helped foster reconciliation through artifacts, relics, and interpretation.100

Even with joint encampments, museums, and other ephemera aimed at reconciliation, not all voices sang from the same hymnal. The Southern Historical Society

Papers (SHSP) attempted to rewrite history through the Lost Cause narrative but took a different angle on reunion and reconciliation. Founded shortly after the war, leading ex-

Confederates took to its pages to defend Southern war aims and trumpet the Lost Cause

99 “Confederate Museum,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 22 September 1915, 5.

100 “Historic Spots in Richmond,” The Times, Richmond, Virginia, 11 March 1900, 18. 68 in general. In 1873, the Southern Historical Society Papers moved from New Orleans,

Louisiana to Richmond, Virginia and elected ex-Confederate General Jubal Early as its president. The publication’s goal was to preserve supposedly authentic records of the

Southern effort in the war. By extension, its aim at readership consisted of those sympathetic to the Lost Cause. By the middle of the 1890s, the SHSP still harped on the fact that the South was just in its seceding from the Union. General Clement A. Evans had an 1895 speech to the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia published in the

October 1895 edition of the SHSP. In his speech, Gen. Evans rehashed the tired refrains of Southern secession. According to Gen. Evans, the South:

“Saw the hard hand of impatient fanaticism uplifted against their prosperity. With unspeakable sadness they beheld centralization tightening its coils to crush out the Statehood of the States…The South did not secede from its proud place among the States to maintain the abstract theory of secession…When the States withdrew they dissolved no Union, broke no law and formed no conspiracy…Their principles simply maintained the principles which all true patriots now assert that there must be no Eastern, no Western, no Northern, no Southern supremacy of any kind, but a Union of One People of the many States, equally and honestly governed, without favoritism for special States, sections, classes, or conditions.”

In Gen. Evans’ estimation, the South followed the rule of law according to the

Constitution when the region seceded from the Union. The Federal government became the evil entity in the saga of 1861 – 1865. Without centralization and meddling from

Washington, D.C., the South most likely would not have seceded. But, since it did, it did so as the true patriots of the war. When contrasted with the reconciliationist tone of joint encampments, or the veneer of reconciliation put forth in the Confederate Museum, this

69 particular speech demonstrated how far the South had come since the war, and yet at the same time, demonstrated how far the region still had to go regarding reconciliation.101

Yet, by the mid-1890s, the efforts of the UCV, UDC, and CMLS won the battle to define reconciliation. At the same time, the South became a frontier for economic expansion. Sloughing off the perceived failures of Reconstruction and the animosity following the war, many in the newly unified nation hoped commercial relations would take precedence over sectional rivalry, and the language of economic progress would replace the language of discord. According to the shared bonds of reconciliation, commerce would be both the cause and effect of sectional healing, and brotherly affection among White Americans, forged by a deeper understanding of shared sacrifices, would solidify new relationships between northern capital and southern resources.

Despite the inclusion of African American Posts within the GAR, the memories of the war fostered through spaces like the Confederate Museum became a whites-only affair.

The “era of reconciliation,” so long sought between 1865 and roughly 1880, found a ready audience with White male veterans and their female counterparts in auxiliary organizations. With help from spaces like the Confederate Museum, the Blue and the

Grey came to agree upon the Confederate interpretation of the Civil War. Upon an early contested memory of the war, both former belligerents found common ground in a sense of shared heroism and sacrifice. Thus, the joint encampments and Northern tourists to places like Richmond often left with a skewed version of the war and its outcome. The

101 Janney, Caroline E. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013): 142.; R.A. Brock, Ed., “Contributions of the South to the Greatness of the American Union: An Address by General Clement A. Evans, Delivered Before the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia, 10 October 1895.” Southern Historical Society Papers, 23 (Richmond, Virginia: Lowry, M.F.: 1895): 17-18. 70 Confederate Museum’s cultural production aided in creating a shared memory of the war predicated on the Lost Cause. Perhaps ex-Confederate General Bradley T. Johnson understood the mood the best at the dedication of the museum in 1896: “Martyrs must be glorified” if even those martyrs wore different uniforms during the war.102

Reconciliation bubbled forth into its own periodicals devoted to the message of

“clasping hands over the bloody chasm.” First published in 1892 and edited by Joseph W.

Morton, a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based publisher, the Blue and Gray: The Patriotic

American Magazine touted reconciliationist messages. The magazine appeared monthly during the early to mid-1890s. The Blue and Gray went further than either The National

Tribune or The Confederate Veteran did in promoting harmony between the former combatants. By 1894, the Blue and Gray ardently supported reconciliation between

Union and Confederate veterans. The Blue and the Gray shared similarities with The

National Tribune and The Confederate Veteran in that it published battle reminiscences, socio-political pieces, and news regarding joint encampments between the GAR and

UCV. However, The Blue and the Gray devoted considerable space openly advocating reconciliation. In fact, in 1893 the magazine supported and reported on the formation of a fraternal organization composed of veterans of both camps – “The United American

Veterans (UAV).” March 1893 witnessed the first formation of a United American

Veterans camp in Rio Grande, Texas. According to the Blue and Gray, the

“establishment of the U.A.V., in which all generous-hearted American veterans may, if they wish, extend the hand of fraternal brotherhood to former foes, has a field for

102 “Confederate Museum,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 22 September 1915, 5.; “Sectionalism Almost Obliterated,” The Evening Bulletin, Maysville, Kentucky, 29 August 1896, 6.; R.A. Brock, Ed., “Oration of General Bradley T. Johnson, The South’s Museum.” Southern Historical Society Papers, 23 (Richmond, Virginia: Lowry, M.F.: 1896): 370. 71 usefulness that can hardly be measured by words.” Furthermore, it considered the GAR and UCV “clannish” and “somewhat narrow.” The author of this piece argued that the time was right “for a loyal supporter of the broader, national organization” such as the

UAV. If that did not induce membership in the bipartisan UAV, it “is difficult to believe that any American, possessing a particle of intelligent patriotism will decline to endorse the sentiments expressed” in the formation of the UAV. Tugging on the sense of shared patriotism of both sides helped conceive the UAV and foster reconciliation.103

The UAV set up shop in Washington, D.C. However, expanding beyond the U.S. capital was a logical choice. The UAV composed orders to move “branches” beyond the

D.C. area. The UAV planned to name the branches after the towns and cities where they were located. The organization went so far as to rename themselves the “United Order of

American Veterans.” The primary objective of the UAV was to promote reconciliation between the major veterans’ organizations as the nineteenth century drew to a close. In the founding documents of the UAV, a declaration of principles stated, “We believe that men who gave patriotic service in response to duty, as they saw their duty, deserve honorable consideration of their countrymen.” The aim of the UAV was “to unite and bring together in one body the veterans of the war, both union and confederate.” To that end, appealing to the patriotism of either veteran set seemed natural. The patriotism espoused eschewed a right and wrong during the war The UAV set out to “warmly commend by many of our leading citizens who fought in both armies and numerous

103 “News Books Free to Subscribers,” The National Tribune, Washington, D.C., 12 October 1899, 4.; Morton, Jr., J.W. Blue and Gray: The Patriotic American Magazine, III, No. 4, The Patriotic American Company: Philadelphia, PA: 1894, 218. 72 applications for membership have already been presented by such men.” Reconciliation found a hearty embrace within the UAV.104

With its motto “Fraternity, Union; Now and Forever!”, The Blue and the Gray aimed at a readership open towards reconciliation. The magazine’s run ended in 1895, but the periodical’s messages included the most ardent voices at bringing the former combatants together. Much like The National Tribune and The Confederate Veteran, The

Blue and the Gray based its income on subscriptions and advertisement dollars.

Subscribers to the periodical received a new copy monthly at the cost of $.10 a month or

$1.50 a year. Reconciliation poured forth from the pages of The Blue and Gray. In the

May 1893 edition, a letter to the editor advocated for one permanent Memorial Day bereft of sectionalism: “Let us establish a flower and a flag with which and under which the children of the nation, and the whole nation, may on this memorable and Memorial

Day march in true order and full ranks…the beauteous symbol of the truest union, the broadest culture, and the gentlest peace.” The magazine’s core focus tapped into the reconciliationist emotions bubbling forth as the nineteenth century drew to a close.105

The Blue and the Gray advocated for joint encampments more than The National

Tribune or The Confederate Veteran. In the April 1894 edition of the magazine, GAR and

UCV Posts and Camps found a willing conspirator in bringing the two sides together.

The magazine admonished the two fraternal organizations to extend cordial invitations to visit Southern locales to commiserate, share memories, and reconcile, while positioning

104 “Opposed to Sectionalism,” The Critic and Record, Washington, D.C., 21 April 1891, 2.; “The United Veterans,” Evening Star, Washington, D.C., 25 September 1890, 5.

105 Morton, Jr., J.W. Blue and Gray: The Patriotic American Magazine, II, No. 1, The Patriotic American Company: Philadelphia, PA: 1893, 4. 73 White male military citizenship as the patriotic standard. According to the editors of the

Blue and Gray, “Quite right boys in blue and gray! Get nearer together and help the rest of your oppressed fellow-citizens to rout the motely crew of howling dervishes who would have the world believe that you are still thirsting for each other’s gore.” The magazine made it a purpose to foster reconciliation through grand joint encampments that brought veterans of both sides together in the same location. Southern cities such as

Louisville, Kentucky and Atlanta, Georgia vied to hold the grand spectacle of reconciling

Union and Confederate veterans. The 1895 joint-encampment of the GAR and UCV received considerable attention in the pages of the Blue and Gray. Mixed with Southern boosterism and desire to bridge the “bloody chasm,” Southern locales proved ideal for a joint encampment.106

Utilizing the New South mantra, Southern boosters created an image of progress to attract joint encampments. The cities destroyed during the war, such as Atlanta,

Georgia and Richmond, Virginia, arose from their ashes to create metropolises and hinterlands in the South. Northern investment and tourism noticed the changes. People and money poured into the region creating a boon for Southern industry, manufacturing, and development. Southern boosters did not let these opportunities slip through their fingers. They touted their urban locations as prime real estate, while at the same time sweeping under the rug their racist past and Jim Crow future. Northerners attracted by investment opportunities, temperate climates, and a neatly packaged heritage – the

Confederate Museum, for example – came by trains to visit places such as Richmond.

The ethos of disposable time and income allowed a White, middle-class clientele to visit

106 Morton, Jr., J.W. Blue and Gray: The Patriotic American Magazine, III, No. 4, The Patriotic American Company: Philadelphia, PA: 1894, 235-236. 74 the region. Thus, Southern boosters commodified their built environment and a specific version of their heritage for monetary gain. This phenomenon did not occur on a similar pace in the North. Northern locales already possessed metropolises and urban spaces that included cultural resources. The South, undergoing changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization, felt the need to present itself as a mix of the new with the old. In addition, most battles of the war occurred on Southern soil – a must see for veterans.

When the old soldiers of the Blue and Grey poured into southern locales for joint encampments, they encountered modernized cities with all the amenities and trappings of a northern metropolis. The civic and business leaders of the South recognized an opportunity. With the joint encampment in mind, Southern boosters created a “fairy land” of the new mixed with the old in making places like Richmond and Atlanta desirable.

Visitors gobbled up the South’s “progress” and historical memory in reconciling old bitterness.107

During the 1870s and into the mid-1880s, reconciliation faced an uphill battle.

Old wounds continued to fester between Union and Confederate veterans. However, during the last fifteen or so years of the nineteenth century, the former foes began a process of healing. Joint encampments that occurred in both regions of the United States aided much of this process. Cultural production, such as magazines, and public history institutions, such as the Confederate Museum, facilitated reconciliationist sentiments. By the end of the nineteenth century, both sides experienced a cooling-off in tensions.

America’s first global imperialist foray would further the binding of the two sides together. The Spanish-American War of 1898 helped build reconciliation.

107 Ayers, Edward L., The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007): 334-336. 75 Empire Equals Reconciliation: How the Spanish-American War of 1898 Bridged the “Bloody Chasm”

On the night of February 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously exploded in one of Havana, Cuba’s harbors. The destruction of the U.S.S. Maine caused the death of 266 American sailors. Tensions in Cuba, a Spanish colonial possession, had run high since the Second Cuban Revolution against Spanish rule on the island began in

February 1895. During the ensuing three years from 1895 to 1898, the United States pensively watched the Spanish repression of the uprising in Cuba. Having completed its continental empire by 1895, the U.S. sought colonial markets outside the North American continent and desired a place among the colonial powers of Western Europe. Ostensibly, the U.S.S. Maine arrived in Cuba on January 25, 1898 on a “friendly” visit. Placing a symbol of American sea power in the middle of Spanish held territory signaled to the

Spaniards that the U.S. intended to exercise military force to expel one of the last remaining European colonial powers from the Western Hemisphere. When the Maine exploded three weeks after its arrival in Havana, the U.S. government assumed this was caused by Spain and felt there to be only one course of action left for the United States: war with Spain.108

A U.S. naval investigation followed the destruction of the Maine. The American

Naval Court of Inquiry determined that the American battleship blew up because of a submerged mine on March 28, 1898. With these findings, American pro-war feelings ramped up to a fevered pitch. On April 11, 1898, U.S. President William McKinley asked

Congress for authority to use American military force to expel Spain from Cuba. By the

108 O’Toole, G.J.A. The Spanish War: An American Epic – 1898. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company: 1984): 12. 76 22nd of the month, the U.S. began its “Splendid Little War” with Spain. Early U.S. military successes in the war with Spain occurred on water. The U.S. North Atlantic

Squadron blockaded Cuba in late April 1898. On May 1, 1898, Commodore Dewey commanding the U.S. Asiatic Squadron attacked and destroyed a Spanish fleet harbored in Manila Bay, the Philippines. The initial U.S. military successes sent the country into apoplectic fits over American military superiority and elevated patriotic feelings into a frenzy. Land combat in Cuba began in late June. By early August, Spanish and American officials signed a peace protocol ending hostilities. In the roughly four months of fighting, the U.S. expelled the Spanish from Cuba and gained a global empire through the acquisition of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.109

The short-lived Spanish-American War gained not only the U.S. its overseas empire, but also elicited quite a response from the two main periodicals for Union and

Confederate veterans. The National Tribune and The Confederate Veteran followed the fighting with Spain closely. The National Tribune began covering the conflict in May

1898. In the May 5th issue, The National Tribune chronicled Commodore Dewey’s impressive naval victory in the Philippines. The coverage of Dewey’s victory was nearly ecstatic: “There is a glorious, old-time ring in the news from the Philippine Islands. It is a story of the like of which has not come to our ears for a third of a century, but it sounds marvelously similar to those which electrified the American people in the brave old days…making the Flag the emblem of imperishable glory.” The May 12th edition of The

National Tribune quoted Kaiser Wilhelm regarding Dewey’s triumph in the Philippines,

“There is certainly evidently something besides smartness and commercialism in the

109 Ibid., 12-13. 77 Yankee blood. These fellows at Cavite have fought like veterans.” The National Tribune displayed patriotism and pride in the May 5th edition and backed it up with a pat on the back from a leading European imperialist figure in the pages of the May 12th edition.110

The Confederate Veteran took a less bombastic position concerning the conflict with Spain. However, the magazine made sure to let readers know where it stood on the

Spanish-American War. Early in the war, The Confederate Veteran ran a piece on the

“Patriotism of Confederates.” The printed column included a speech by former

Confederate Major D.W. Sanders given in Indianapolis, Indiana. As his speech drew to a close, Major Sanders contemplated the meaning of reconciliation as war raged with

Spain. For Major Sanders, reconciliation meant a physical and mental peace. The former combatants could put to bed the old animosity of the two decades after the war, in an ironic twist by going to war together. Sanders’ speech, occurring in a northern state capital, put a nice summation on the reconciliationist feelings of numerous Confederate and Union veterans:

“And a curious fact it is that after thirty-three years of peace with our country, great and prosperous, more magnificent in her commercial activities and industrial developments, and grander in all that makes a people worthy of the age and civilization in which they live, you will find that the Confederate soldiers, through the magnanimity of their paroles granted them…have presided upon the supreme bench of the United States, they are Senators and members of Congress of the United States, they are Ambassador and Ministers to foreign countries honored and trusted…events have developed the characteristics of as true devotion, of as absolute reliability for all trusts and authorities imposed by the Government of the United States in the breast of the Confederate soldier as are to be found anywhere in this great land.”

110 The National Tribune, XVII No. 30, 5 May 1898, Washington, D.C.: 2; The National Tribune, XVII No. 41, 12 May 1898, Washington, D.C.: 2. 78 Major Sanders’ speech captured the emotion of reconciliation at the end of the nineteenth century. After the majority of its run devoted to partisan issues between the Union and former Confederacy, The Confederate Veteran began to understand the zeitgeist of the period. Imperialism and war with a declining European power provided the opportunity to close the book on the wounds from the Civil War by bringing, at least symbolically, former Confederates and former Unionists together in battle against a shared enemy.

Furthermore, the war with Spain meant a unity devoted to strong nationalistic and imperialistic aims. Not since prior to the Civil War had Southerners and Northerners to ardently come together under a common flag.111

As the war with Spain reached its nadir for the United States during the summer of 1898, The Confederate Veteran furthered its case of Southern patriotism under one

U.S. flag. The July 1898 edition of the magazine featured a contribution by Colonel S.W.

Fordyce, a Union veteran living in St. Louis, Missouri. According to Colonel Fordyce:

There is now no longer any North, South, East, or West, except as to the geographical division of the country.”

Colonel Fordyce went further, “…while we are divided on political lines as to what policy is best for the happiness and prosperity of the people in times of peace, no partiality will be shown for or against any political party in time of war, and especially that no distinction will be made between the ex-soldiers of the armies that once fought for and against the Union.” Colonel Fordyce’s perspective provided a nice bookend to the reconciliationist feelings sweeping the country as the war with Spain ground to its victorious conclusion. The ex-Federals and ex-Rebels succeeding in Cuba and the

111 Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, VI No. 3, March 1898, Nashville, TN: 111. 79 Philippines presented the perfect bridge over the “bloody chasm.” It helped that the message came from a former Union soldier living amongst ex-Confederates. The speech and its publication in a periodical devoted to Confederate issues demonstrated that the imperial war against Spain provided a final span in the reconciliation bridge.112

Even reunions of veterans from numerous military conflicts became spectacles of reconciliation. After the war with Spain, the U.S. found a few veterans’ groups in its population. Those Mexican-American War veterans, still alive, mixed with Civil War veterans and Spanish-American War veterans as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth century. Union and Confederate veterans met with Spanish-American War veterans at big tent reunions. Reconciliation comingled with nationalism and patriotism at these events. At one 1899 veterans’ reunion in Lebanon, Indiana speakers invoked “Old

Glory” in addressing the mixed audience of veterans. The “gallant vets” who “heroically defended old glory” during the most recent war “are as righteously opposed to the hauling down of the American flag in 1899 as they were in 1861.”113

Well into the twentieth century, veterans of the Civil War and Spanish-American

War continued to meet together. Steubenville, Ohio hosted such an event in July 1913.

President Woodrow Wilson attended the gathering to give remarks regarding the veterans at the reunion. Brother of famed Confederate raider John Morgan made an address to the group. In order to balance out the itinerary, Union veterans gave speeches as well, such as

General Daniel Sickles who lost a leg at Gettysburg. The highlight of the gathering became “tablets made from relics from the battleship Maine” with unveilings in the

112 Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, VI No. 7, July 1898, Nashville, TN: 324.

113 “Old Soldier Reunion,” The Indianapolis Journal, Indianapolis, Indiana, 15 September 1899, 3. 80 Steubenville city museum. The “old timers” in the audience recalled days “when the

Chief Executive’s parents and grandparents were of them…” Scenes such as the

Steubenville reunion brought together various veterans under one banner and fostered reconciliation with a sense of patriotism.114

Perhaps the greatest joint encampment happened in 1913 during the Fiftieth-

Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The Gettysburg battlefield became a large bivouac of Union and Confederate veterans with 50,000 old soldiers attending the encampment, a unique occurrence since the battlefield was located in south-central

Pennsylvania. Six train loads of veterans left New York City June 30th to “invade

Gettysburg” again. Age concerned and dampened the festivities. After fifty years, many of the old soldiers needed aid in moving about and valets assisted quite a few of the veterans. By 1913, the number of Civil War veterans living in the United States had dropped precipitously. The meeting on the Gettysburg battlefield depressed “so many of the old men…by its overpowering proof that they are themselves going toward the end.”

In its June 29th edition, the New York Tribune ran a poignant cartoon depicting two old soldiers standing on Little Round Top, site of fierce fighting during the second day of the

Gettysburg battle. One clad in grey, and the other clad in blue, the two veterans lean on each other looking down on the open battlefield with an American flag flying above them. The aged veterans tenting on the old battlefield achieved reconciliation.115

“Citizens of One Common Country:” Closing the Nineteenth-Century with Tidings of Fidelity

114 “Steubenville Ready to Celebrate Three Wars,” The Washington Herald, Washington, D.C., 20 July 1913, 9.

115 “No Scars Left in this Meeting at Gettysburg,” The Times Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia, 30 June 1913, 1.; “50,000 Civil War Veterans on Field of Gettysburg,” The Evening World, New York City, 30 June 1913, 2.; “Gettysburg” Cartoon, New-York Tribune, New York City, 29 June 1913, 7. 81

Reconciliation and crafting a collective memory of the war between the former combatants proved a fraught endeavor after the Civil War and throughout the 1870s. The postwar turmoil of Reconstruction and lingering acrimony tainted the musings of former foes that wore the Blue and the Grey. However, as the 1880s dawned, a cooling of tensions between Union and Confederate veterans ensued. GAR Posts and UCV Camps began to hold joint enterprises. As one GAR Post commented, on its visit to Richmond in

October 1884, “A nation which has not passed through the fiery ordeal of war knows not of the sacrifice, the heroism, the patriotism which mark and make a nobler citizen…See what war has wrought for us. There is no more North, no more South, no more East, no more West, but North, South, East, and West, are keeping step to the music of one grand

Union.” As the 1890s progressed, a louder chorus of reconciliation bubbled forth. “With tributes of affection from all the States, whose union has been forever cemented by the blood which flowed,” veterans of the Blue and the Grey began to see reconciliation as a uniting effort. Reconciliation and the end of sectionalism seemed the logical step after physical reunion of the country.116

Joint encampments between the major fraternal organizations of each side, the

GAR for the Union veteran, and the UCV for the Confederate veteran, did much to foster reconciliation and break down barriers of misunderstanding. The joint encampments provided the veterans a comfortable environment to share war reminiscences and build a shared historical memory of the war. As the City Council of Fredericksburg noted in

116 Benson, C.H. “Yank” and “Reb,”A History of a Fraternal Visit Paid by Lincoln Post, No. 11, G.A.R., of Newark, N.J. to Robert E. Less Camp, No. 1, Confederate Veterans and Phil. Kearney Post No. 10, G.A.R. of Richmond, VA., October 15th to October 18th, Inclusive. (Newark, NJ: M.H. Neuhut Printer, 1884): 69.; Morton, Jr., J.W. Blue and Gray: The Patriotic American Magazine, II, No. 1, The Patriotic American Company: Philadelphia, PA: 1893, 4. 82 1892, veterans of both sides were encouraged to visit the old Antietam battlefield and

“once again pitch their tents on the old camp ground, and, in imagination, live over the war times.” Larger Southern locales vied with each other to host a joint encampment. In the process, cities such as Atlanta, Richmond, and Birmingham had an opportunity to display their urbanity and burgeoning commercial and industrial bases. For the veteran traveling to a Richmond or Atlanta, the trip provided the opportunity to visit a new locale or connect with trodden ground from the war. Either way, the joint encampment meant big business for Southern boosters and their guests. Conversely, northern locales such as

Chicago recognized the economic benefits of hosting joint encampments as well.117

Periodicals of the GAR and UCV furthered the reconciliationist message while allowing veterans to reminisce on their wartime experiences. Aligned with the GAR, The

National Tribune advocated for federal pensions for Union veterans, but also devoted considerable space to fostering reconciliation. By the 1880s and 1890s, the magazine promoted GAR reunions and joint encampments with their Southern counterpart, the

UCV. The UCV’s national organ, The Confederate Veteran, was a bit contentious at first.

Early in its run, the magazine took a more pro-Confederate stance in advocating for

Southern only issues such as pro-Confederate school textbooks. However, over time The

Confederate Veteran warmed up to the notion of reconciliation. As the nineteenth century closed, the magazine advertised for joint encampments in its pages, even going so far as to publish Union veterans’ impressions of Confederate valor and heroism in the war. In return, The Confederate Veteran lessened its negative stance on Union performance during and after the war. To seal the reconciliationist message, the Blue and Gray arrived

117 Morton, Jr., J.W. Blue and Gray: The Patriotic American Magazine, II, No. 1, The Patriotic American Company: Philadelphia, PA: 1893, 44. 83 in the mid-1890s with a pro-reconciliation bent meant to bring the two former combatants together. The cultural production of these periodicals did much to foster understanding between the two sides and assuage old wounds from the war.

Even with joint encampments and magazine runs, nothing did more at the end of the century to bring Billy Yank and Johnny Reb together than the Spanish-American

War. The short war of U.S. imperialism brought a seismic spasm of patriotism across the country. The war’s ground leaders consisted mostly of former Confederate military leaders. The ranks of troops and sailors filled with former Union and Confederate soldiers, as well as their sons. The spectacular performance of U.S. military forces against a third-rate European power in the Spanish sent the country into fits of nationalism and hyper-patriotism. The Confederate Veteran and The National Tribune seized upon the opportunity to claim that the “Splendid Little War” with Spain healed the old wounds caused by the Civil War. It seemed the contest with Spain sealed the final pieces of reconciliation between the two former foes.

The 1880s and 1890s witnessed a boom in reconciliation activity. Riding a tidal wave of patriotism at the end of the 1890s, Union and Confederate veterans began to link hands across the “bloody chasm” more vigorously. However, defining the memory of the war still had twists and turns. Memorial mania gripped the South during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. By the turn-of-the-century, the Southern landscape became inundated with Confederate memorials of all shapes and sizes. While there was a bonanza of reconciliationist feelings, not all Southerners ascribed to the hand clasping.

The South attempted to redefine the memory of the war through tangible reminders in the built environment. The memorialization of the South and its Lost Cause impacted the

84 memory formation of the war more than joint encampments and cultural production.

White Southerners claimed public space at a rapid pace in the final decades of the nineteenth century in an attempt to literally cement their memory of the war.

85 Chapter 3

Memorial Mania: Claiming Space in the South in the Name of Memory and Reconciliation

The May 29, 1890 morning dawned gracefully over Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy. Over the previous three weeks, residents of

Richmond, totaling 9,000, had pulled long ropes attached to four boxes containing pieces of a statue. The contents of the boxes contained elements of a grand statue to the preeminent hero of the Confederacy: Robert E. Lee. The grand spectacle of the city’s residents hauling marble pieces to a site in suburban Richmond made one journalist proclaim: “all were present, and though lookers on until the ropes came in sight, they caught the infection, and with enthusiastic ‘yell,’ took hold of the hemp” and proceeded to move the massive pieces of the statue to its final resting place. Once located at the site of the future statue, the Richmonders in attendance cut pieces of the rope and took their newfound souvenirs home with them. They celebrated their handiwork and cheered their long-dead leader.118

Later that day, 100,000 to 150,000 people gathered in Richmond to celebrate the unveiling of the Robert E. Lee memorial. Residents of Richmond had decorated the city in bunting, pictures of Lee, and numerous Confederate and U.S. flags. Throughout the city, bands played “Dixie” and other tunes that conjured memories of the Southern cause

118 “Removal of the Statue from the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, May 7th 1890,” Southern Historical Society Papers 17 (1889): 248-262.; Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865-1913. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 100. 86 in the Civil War. The day kicked off with events and a parade of honored guests in carriages, along with militia units, members of the United Confederate Veterans, school groups, and other Southern dignitaries. At the head of the parade of 15,000 to 20,000 people was former Confederate General Fitzhugh Lee. The line of march stretched nearly four miles. After speeches and the playing of “Dixie,” former Confederate General

Joseph E. Johnston approached the statue, and, after a dramatic pause, pulled a rope unveiling the marble tribute to Robert E. Lee. Cannons and muskets fired and a sham battle broke out between mock infantry and cavalry mustered for the occasion. Lee’s statue unveiling was pure spectacle aimed at venerating the father of the Lost Cause.

Those in attendance understood the moment to be one of “combined funeral and resurrection.” In claiming this piece of public space in the former capital of the

Confederacy, Richmonders set a standard to be met by other Southern locales looking to memorialize the dead Confederacy. The Confederacy would live on in marble, granite, and sandstone while at the same time claiming public space for a specific memory of the war: The Lost Cause.119

The Lee monument in Richmond did not mark the apogee of Confederate memorial mania. From 1890 and well into the 1900s, Southerners embarked on a frenzy of memorial building. Historians, such as Karen L. Cox and Gaines M. Foster, argue memorial building allowed Southerners to honor the past while serving as anchors in the present. The edifices erected to the Confederacy in the late nineteenth century up to the beginning of World War I presented touchstones with a past that seemed no more. More

119 “Unveiling Ceremonies of the Lee Monument,” Supplement to the Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, SC, 6 June 1890.; “In Memory of Lee,” The Watchman and Southron, Sumter, SC, 11 June 1890.; Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865-1913. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 101-102. 87 importantly, the granite, bronze, and sandstone monuments and memorials codified on the landscape who was in power in the postwar South. Through the monuments going up all around the Southern countryside, White Southerners imposed on the landscape their memory of the war. The monuments permitted White Southern leaders to inscribe on the landscape of the region political and cultural values associated with the former

Confederacy and buttressed the expanding Jim Crow legal system. In other words,

Confederate memorials served as tangible reminders of who was in power and relegated the region’s African American population to second-class citizenship. The memorial building throughout the South from the 1890s to the eve of WWI also embodied White

Southerners’ attempts at reconciliation with the North. Thus, this chapter argues that in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, White, middle-class

Southerners claimed space for their cause in the Civil War through the erection of monuments. Furthermore, the Southern monument mania served as concrete visuals of reconciliation – the soldier or military leader in allegorical or heroic poses. Veneration of

Confederate generals and the common soldier solidified the Lost Cause ideology in the postwar built environment. Through the consecration of monuments, spaces such as battlefields, cemeteries, and civic space strengthened the White South’s hold on interpretations of the war. Consequently, the Lost Cause embodied in monuments became tangible reminders that both Union and Confederate veterans shared a blood sacrifice from the war.120

120 Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865-1913. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 103.; Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003): 67. 88 What follows is an examination of the evolution of the Confederate monument craze from the late nineteenth century until the eve of WWI. The Southern efforts at memorializing the Confederacy through the building of monuments marked the region as a distinct, yet equal part, of the United States. Certainly, Northern towns and cities erected monuments to the Union soldier in the late nineteenth century. Northern locales erected their own statues and memorials in public spaces. Some were grand, others just a lonely soldier on a pedestal in the town square. However, with more Northerners visiting the South through joint encampments or other travel, the Confederate monument became sites where Union and Confederate veterans marked a shared history from the war. As we will see, monument sites on old battlefields, in cemeteries, and civic space permitted the

South to dominate the historical narrative of the war and its aftermath. The memorial mania Southerners embarked upon permitted reconciliation, as they defined it, to flower as well. The definition of reconciliation pivoted on White, male heroism, valor, and bravery on the battlefield and came to include the role of women in the memory making process. The marble, granite, and sandstone emblems of the Confederacy became shared elements of a historical memory of the war. The monumentation splattered across the

Southern landscape constructed a specific form of reconciliation enumerated above. In the process, except for GAR efforts discussed in chapter two, African Americans were left out of the reconciliation equation in the South. Even though discordant voices rang out in each region against the cluttering of the Southern landscape with memorials and statues, those voices were squelched in the zeitgeist of reconciliation. Space became another element where Southern and Northern folks came together in an ideologized reconciliation.

89 Gathering on the Old Battlefield: How Historic Preservation and Battlefield Memory at Shiloh Fostered Reconciliation

Prior to the Civil War, Americans had consecrated Revolutionary War battlefields, sites, and structures in an effort to memorialize the generation that led and fought in the American Revolution. One notable example included efforts to preserve

George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. Preservation of Mount Vernon began in earnest in 1858 when Lewis W. Washington, a descendant of George Washington, deeded the structure and its grounds to the State of Virginia. Lewis Washington included a stipulation in the deed that the State erect a suitable memorial to the General “to commemorate to rising generations” the ancestral home of the elder Washington. The

State of Virginia dithered with the project and did nothing with the historic site as deeded to the Commonwealth. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the Mount Vernon Ladies

Association entered the picture and with $200,000 in donations took over preservation and care of Mount Vernon. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association hoped that the preserved site would serve as a uniting emblem of a rapidly fracturing nation. While war still came, Mount Vernon’s historic preservation facilitated a movement in the U.S. to save pieces of the country’s cultural heritage. After the war, the preservation of sites associated with the Civil War flowered.121

Merging with the memory and reconciliation movement of the 1890s, the U.S.

Congress moved to preserve major battlefields of the Civil War. In 1890, federal commissions established Chickamauga-Chattanooga as a National Military Park

121 Daily National Intelligencer, Washington, D.C., 5 May 1858; Beasley, Joy. “The Birthplace of a Chief: Archaeology and Meaning at George Washington’s Birthplace National Monument,” in Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape, Shackel, Paul A., ed. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001): 200-202. 90 administered by the United States Army. Four more battlefield sites would follow suit –

Vicksburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and, of course, Gettysburg. Most of the sites chosen were located near large, metropolitan centers either near the eastern seaboard (Chickamauga,

Antietam, and Gettysburg) or along the Mississippi River (Vicksburg). Chickamauga,

Antietam, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg had access to rail or river traffic, significant accommodations for visitors, and other amenities. Shiloh, on the other hand, lay in a rural setting in west-central Tennessee and aside from the Tennessee River adjacent to the

Shiloh battlefield, no major transportation routes ran to the park.

To understand why Congress chose Shiloh, a rural battlefield, as one of the original five National Military Parks requires a brief exploration of the battle. From April

6th through April 7th 1862, Union and Confederate forces engaged in a bloody struggle along the banks of the Tennessee River at place named Shiloh. In a twist of irony,

“Shiloh” is Hebrew for “place of peace.” Prior to the Battle of Shiloh, Union and

Confederate leadership believed the still young Civil War would last only a few months to perhaps a year. After the carnage of Shiloh, leadership on both sides of the divide quickly understood the enormity at hand – the burgeoning war would last far longer than a handful of months. The ensuing battle produced a combined casualty toll of 23,000 killed, wounded, and missing. The horrors of Shiloh haunted the men who fought there for years after the war. The “Sunken Road” and the “Hornet’s Nest” on the Shiloh battlefield became etched in the minds of both Union and Confederate veterans.

Why did Congress choose Shiloh as one of the first battlefields for preservation under the new National Military Park System? The desire for preservation, conservation, and reconciliation blended with the horrors the Blue and Grey veterans experienced at

91 Shiloh to encourage Congressional action. It also helped that Shiloh was one of the early battlefields in the South. Bolstered by veteran activism, Shiloh became a gem of the early battlefield preservation movement in the U.S. Shiloh also presented a tabula rasa on which to create historical memory and reconciliation. Shiloh’s rural nature meant the stakeholders in the preservation process did not face competing claims to the ground like at Gettysburg.122

The impetus to preserve and interpret Civil War battlefields, like Shiloh, moved stakeholders, such as veterans and Congressional leaders, to save the historic sites. The same individuals who argued over sectional imperatives of Reconstruction in the 1870s and up to the 1880s loosened their hardline stances as time ticked against them.

Battlefields, like Shiloh, presented rather pristine opportunities to preserve and conserve their state as it had been during the war and constituted “a resort toward which the steps of students of history will bend more and more as the years go by.” Yet, the looming presence of industrialization and its attendant companion urbanization threatened some of the old battlefields. Most Civil War battles occurred around cities and towns, because the armies utilized and fought over transportation routes. Thus, as the U.S. expanded economically and spatially, growth ate away at the battlefields. If the battlefields were to be saved in totality, their protection needed to occur in the 1890s, before they experienced further deterioration under economic and spatial development.123

122 Smith, Timothy B. The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2008): 2, 115.

123 Society of the Army of the Cumberland: Twenty-Third Reunion, Chickamauga, Georgia, 1892. (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke and Co., 1892): 51.; Perrysburg Journal, Perrysburg, Wood County, Ohio, 22 December 1894, 2.; Smith, Timothy B. The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2008): 6-7. 92 Veteran agitation for a park on the Shiloh battlefield emerged in 1893. Several

Union veterans from the Army of the Tennessee ventured to the battlefield in April of that year to mark the thirtieth-anniversary of the battle. Farmers and workers relayed stories of unearthing skeletons well after the April 1862 battle. The saddened and outraged Union veterans determined that no further disturbances to the graves of fallen comrades would continue, and formulated ideas of establishing a marked battlefield like the ones at Antietam and Chickamauga. By the time the veterans reached their home destination, they convened an organization with temporary officers called the Shiloh

Battlefield Association. As had been done at earlier National Military Parks, the members of the Shiloh Battlefield Association actively sought the cooperation of former

Confederates.124

The Shiloh Battlefield Association moved quickly to muster support for a

National Military Park at the site. The group concerned itself with preservation of the

Shiloh battlefield. The Shiloh Battlefield Association sent delegates to meet with the

GAR and the smaller, but important to the Battle of Shiloh, Society of the Army of the

Tennessee (Union) members. The GAR consisted of the most well-known and respected

Union veterans’ organization. The Society of the Army of the Tennessee held GAR members, but only those that served in the Union Army of the Tennessee, which saw heavy fighting at Shiloh. Both organizations readily lent their assistance. The Association also called on Southern Congressional leaders and former Confederates to help, such as

Representative Joseph Wheeler, a former Confederate general. Wheeler and other

124 Report of the Proceedings of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee at the Twenty-Fifth Meeting Held at Chicago, Ills. September 12th and 13th, 1893. (Cincinnati: F.W. Freeman, 1893): 58-61.; Smith, Timothy B. The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2008): 115-116. 93 Southern Congressional leaders supported the idea of placing Shiloh within the National

Military Park System. After all, the battlefield contained the remains of two thousand

Confederate dead.125

Iowa representative David B. Henderson, a Shiloh veteran, emerged as the logical choice to spearhead federal legislation to preserve the battlefield. By the early to mid-

1890s, Henderson acquired quite a bit of legislative power. He served as Judiciary

Committee Chair and later as Speaker of the House. In addition, Henderson had personal interests in seeing Shiloh become a National Military Park. His brother, Thomas, was a casualty of the battle and lay buried in Shiloh National Cemetery. Henderson quickly crafted a bill and acquired Congressional support for creating Shiloh National Military

Park. Henderson asked for $150,000 in appropriation money for the beginning phases of work on preserving the battlefield (3,000 acres in total). By late 1894, the bill had moved to a floor debate in the House of Representatives. Henderson spoke eloquently of the site, calling it “this great battlefield of Shiloh,” and reminded members of the House that both the powerful GAR and the Society of the Army of the Tennessee strongly supported the bill. Deliberation carried on through the U.S. Senate where the bill finally passed and forwarded for Presidential signature, December 27, 1894. For the first appropriation of

$75,000, Shiloh National Military Park became a reality.126

125 Report of the Proceedings of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee at the Twenty-Fifth Meeting Held at Chicago, Ills. September 12th and 13th, 1893. (Cincinnati: F.W. Freeman, 1893): 59.; Report of the Proceedings of the Society of the Army of the Tennessee at the Twenty-Sixth Meeting held at Council Bluffs, Iowa, October 3rd and 4th, 1894 (Cincinnati: F.W. Freeman, 1895): 126.; Memphis Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee, 5 December 1894, 1.

126 Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. (Washington, D.C.: 1989): 1170.; “Proceedings in House,” Scranton Tribune, Scranton, Pennsylvania, 5 December 1894, 2.; Smith, Timothy B. The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2008): 121-123. 94 Reunions and visitation to Shiloh National Military Park predated the legislation creating the site. However, once the battlefield entered the National Military Park

System, tourism picked up. In addition to GAR and Society of the Army of the Tennessee reunions at the park, veterans of the battle from both the Union and the Confederacy created the National Association of the Battle of Shiloh Survivors. The latter group regularly held their reunions at the battlefield park. Mirroring the park’s creation, the

Shiloh Survivors believed “that Northern and Southern sentiments would commit by a movement” by historically preserving the battlefield site. Samuel Meek Howard, speaking at a 1912 gathering of the National Association of Shiloh Survivors on the battlefield, summed up the feelings of the occasion: “Their memories must remain, For yourselves and for me, The dearest heritage of all, Within the Woods of Tennessee.”127

In addition to veterans visiting the battlefield, excursionists on Tennessee River packets (river steamboats) came to Pittsburg Landing during the summer and autumn. In fact, the river was the only dependable transportation route to the park prior to the construction of the Shiloh-Corinth Road in 1914. Although railroads ran through Selmer,

Tennessee thirteen miles west of the park and Corinth, Mississippi, twenty-two miles south, travelers to the battlefield encountered an arduous journey by road. Because of the limited land avenues to Shiloh, the Tennessee River remained the principal route to the area.128 The Saint Louis & Tennessee River Packet Company conducted the excursions

127 Shedd, Charles, E., Jr. The History of Shiloh National Military Park, Tennessee. (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1954): 26-27.; Howard, Samuel M. Oration by Samuel M. Howard of Gettysburg, South Dakota Fiftieth Anniversary of the Great Battle of Shiloh Held as Pittsburgh Landing, Tennessee April 6, 1912 by the National Association of Survivors. (No Publisher, 1912): 3; “Four Great Battlefields,” Yorkville Enquirer, Yorkville, South Carolina, 2 January 1895, 2.

128 Shedd, Charles, E., Jr. The History of Shiloh National Military Park, Tennessee. (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1954): 27. 95 that stopped at the park. Visitors who disembarked river craft to visit the battlefield were met by local citizens with carriages and wagons offering tours of the park at $.25 per person. The local populace served as the only guides and interpreters the average visitor could find at the park in its early years. Major D.W. Reed, a Union veteran and Historian of the park, conducted groups of veterans’ or important visitors’ tours over the battlefield; however, aside from Major Reed, the park had no official guides or interpreters available for a number of years. The bulk of visitors to Shiloh consisted of veterans from

Midwestern states such as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio. Because of the battlefield’s proximity to these states, they had constituted the majority of men engaged in the April 1862 battle.129

The isolated nature of Shiloh made establishment of inns or hotels near the battlefield problematic. The Tennessee River packets, which brought the majority of the non-local visitation, usually stayed for only a few hours or provided far more luxurious quarters than could be found onshore. However, among the original improvements acquired by the park at its founding was a two-story frame building containing a store with six rooms on the second floor for lodging. The structure was located on the plateau above Pittsburg Landing, the main embarkation point for river traffic. Photographic evidence of Pittsburg Landing reveals the hotel as a quite modest structure – a wood framed, two-story, Plantation Plain architectural style structure with lean-tos on the left and right of the building. Until 1909, the park maintained its headquarters in one of the six hotel rooms. At the time of Shiloh’s establishment, Mr. and Mrs. Sam Chambers

129 Annual Report of the Shiloh Military Park Commission. (No Known Publisher, 1912): 7.; Shedd, Charles, E., Jr. The History of Shiloh National Military Park, Tennessee. (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1954): 27. 96 operated the hotel and store, as well as a livery stable adjacent to the structure. Later proprietors of the hotel included Mr. and Mrs. H.D. Harris, with the W.P. Littlefield family assuming control of the store, hotel, and livery stable after the death of Mr. and

Mrs. Harris. A cyclone in 1909 destroyed the hotel and its outbuilding, killing two of the

Littlefield’s sons and two hotel guests. Rebuilding of the hotel occurred in 1910 and its management assumed by J.P. Snipes. However, a fire on the night of December 23, 1913 destroyed the second iteration of the building. While the park leadership agitated for appropriation to rebuild the hotel, no facilities for overnight lodging were provided.

Tourism to the battlefield continued; however, guests sought alternatives outside the park’s grounds.130

In addition to transportation and housing, concurrent issues consisted of interpretation of the battle, preservation/conservation of the battlefield, and placement of monuments and other ephemera related to the battle. The Congressional Bill that founded the battlefield as a National Military Park stipulated that the Secretary of War determine the commission to manage park affairs. The stipulations placed power into the hands of a three-man team known as the Shiloh National Military Park Commission. The Chair of the Commission possessed powers to bring other individuals into the picture as needed, or in the event of death or disagreement, replace members and workers. On April 2, 1895, the Secretary of War, Daniel S. Lamont, ordered the new commission to assemble at

Pittsburg Landing on the battlefield site. The head of the commission, Cornelius Cadle,

130 Thompson, Atwell. “Improvements on Shiloh National Military Park, Minutes Report”. (No Known Publisher, 14 January 1899).; Annual Report of the Shiloh Military Park Commission. (No Known Publisher, 1915): 9.; Shedd, Charles, E., Jr. The History of Shiloh National Military Park, Tennessee. (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1954): 27; Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004): 43. 97 began working almost immediately on preparing the park. While the site possessed little in the way of infrastructure, Pittsburg Landing served as a suitable location to base operations and get mail flowing to the commission. Cadle utilized the War Department to successfully petition the Post Office Department to increase mail service to Pittsburg

Landing to six days a week. War Department officials began the flow of money to the commission. Cadle set about preparing payroll paperwork and bought needed items such as stationary, furniture, and horses. Of course, the commission purchased a typewriter for correspondence.131

Cadle placed Major D.W. Reed, Shiloh National Military Park Commission historian, in charge of interpretation of the Battle of Shiloh at the park. Reed was born in

Cortland, New York in April 1841. His family moved to Iowa before the Civil War.

When the conflict broke out, Reed left his placement at the Upper Iowa University in

Fayette, Iowa. He and several classmates formed a company, which later became

Company C of the Twelfth Iowa Infantry Regiment. A veteran of the 1862 battle, Reed worked diligently to present an objective account of the Shiloh battlefield, including the proper disposition of Union and Confederate forces during the battle. Reed insisted on highly accurate troop locations, an effort lauded by veterans of both the Blue and the

Grey.132

131 Smith, Timothy B. The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2008): 123-125.

132 Clark, Charles B. and Bowen, Roger B. University Recruits – Company C: 12th Iowa Infantry Regiment, U.S.A., 1861 – 1865. (Elverson, PA: Mennonite Family History, 1991): 34.; Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004): 36-37. 98 The triumvirate most associated with Shiloh’s development as a National Military

Park became complete in May 1895. Atwell Thompson, an Irish immigrant with an engineering degree from Oxford University in England had just wrapped up his work with Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. When the need for an engineer-in-chief opened at Shiloh, Thompson applied for the position. Despite

Thompson’s fiery, and at times combative personality, the Chickamauga leadership enthusiastically wrote letters of recommendation for the Shiloh position. Cadle, the

Shiloh Chairman, received the endorsements along with Thompson’s application. Cadle deemed Thompson “as well equipped as almost any other man” in the profession.

Thompson received the appointment on May 1, 1895. Thompson’s hiring brought some blowback from the GAR. Members of the veterans’ organization felt the role should have gone to a U.S. citizen, as well as a veteran. In 1895, there were a number of Union veterans that possessed engineering degrees. In the GAR’s estimation, these folks were more suited for the engineering post at Shiloh. Cadle countered the criticism noting that

Thompson was well qualified for the role and had become a naturalized citizen in 1892.

Cadle also pointed out to the critics that he employed veterans as laborers at the park.

With Thompson’s hiring, Cadle and Reed were set to begin interpreting and preserving the Shiloh battlefield. In an effort at a balanced interpretation of the battle, a Confederate veteran of Shiloh, Colonel Robert F. Looney, held the post of Confederate interpretation at the park. Including an ex-Confederate on the team reinforced the message that the process of preservation and interpretation would include reconciliationist sentiments.133

133 “Annual Reunion at Shiloh,” The Columbia Herald, Columbia, Tennessee, 16 April 1897, 4.; Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004): 38-40. 99 From its beginnings, the main functions of Shiloh National Military Park consisted of physically preserving the battlefield, interpreting the battle historically, and marking the grounds to explain the interpretation. Cadle and his team faced a ticking clock in preserving and interpreting the battlefield. Thirty years after the battle, nature and human activity changed the appearance of the site. However, in the mid-1890s enough documentation existed on troop dispositions during the battle to present an accurate interpretation of the engagement. Topographical clues still existed as well to aid in understanding the battle’s outcome. Physical reminders presented some clues; the other, veterans, began thinning out quickly by the park’s opening. The young soldiers of

April 1862 were now aging veterans. As Shiloh veterans aged and passed from the scene, the ability to interpret the battle from first-hand accounts diminished. Cadle and his team had to act fast if the park was to receive the best preservation and interpretation possible.134

D.W. Reed met the challenge for historical accuracy in interpretation head-on.

Reed did not work in a vacuum. He utilized veterans serving on state monument commissions appointed to erect monuments on the battlefield. States took on the role of interpreting the battle for individual state units. Reed also had the deft ability of Atwell

Thompson at his disposal. Thompson’s surveying work left Reed with a solid understanding of the topography of the park and Reed emerged as the chief historian on the battle. Having this resource proved invaluable to Chairman Cadle. Cadle felt confident in letting Reed and Thompson work with the various stakeholders in crafting the historical narrative of the battle as well as correctly placing monuments and military

134 Ibid., 55. 100 pieces such as cannons in the park. Once the land acquisition for the park finalized, Reed and Thompson set out to mark and interpret the site.135

After consultation with the U.S. government’s official records of the war and veteran input, Reed set about marking the battlefield. With Cadle’s input, he settled on iron tablets and markers for historical interpretation of the battle. Large tablets denoted movements of large bodies of troops, square for the first day of battle and oval for the second day. The Shiloh National Military Park Commission settled on camp tablets in a pyramidal shape similar to a tent found when the troops camped between engaging the enemy. The Shiloh team worked diligently to get signage in place before the 1896 spring excursion season commenced. Confederate tablets, both for movements and campsites, would be painted white and trimmed in red. Tablets for the two major Union armies involved at Shiloh would be yellow for the Army of the Ohio and blue for the Army of the Tennessee. Reed chose smaller signs to denote roads or historical points of the Shiloh battlefield such as the Peach Orchard, Bloody Pond, and the Hornet’s Nest.136

Cadle and his team tackled the massive project of ordering and erecting the tablets in a reasonable manner. Cadle requested permission from the War Department to hire an iron master to cast tablets without a bidding process. This move cut down on time to completion and saved the Shiloh leadership team considerable headache. When Cadle received approval from the War Department, he contracted the Chattanooga Car and

Foundry Company to cast the permanent tablets. With a model of the tablets, Thompson

135 Ibid., 56.; Reed, D.W. Shiloh National Military Park Commission. The Battle of Shiloh and the Organizations Engaged. Compiled from the Official Records by D.W. Reed, Historian and Secretary, Under the Authority of the Commission. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903): 111-112.

136 Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004): 63. 101 traveled to Chattanooga to oversee the casting process personally and answer questions the company might have concerning appearance. Thompson found himself in charge of letter size, capitalization, and spacing on each tablet after Reed wrote the text and the

Secretary of War approved it. The process went smoothly since Thompson was onsite in

Chattanooga and communicating directly with Reed. By the end of the 1890s, most tablets were completed and being erected at the park.137

Cadle, Reed, and Thompson worked on securing artillery pieces while the tablets went through production. In November 1896, Cadle requested 215 cannon tubes from the

War Department. By the end of March 1897, 188 of the artillery pieces arrived at Shiloh aboard the steamer The City of Paducah. In all, Shiloh National Military Park received close to 250 cannon tubes from five different arsenals: New York Arsenal in New York

City; Rock Island Arsenal in Rock Island, Illinois; Watervliet Arsenal in Watervliet, New

York; and Indianapolis Arsenal in Indianapolis, Indiana. By late 1903, all cannon were in place on the battlefield at a cost of $9,750 for the War Department. Shiloh National

Military Park found itself ready for the placement of state monuments that had troops engaged in the April 1862 battle. Cadle, Reed, and Thompson’s collective work prepared the battlefield for historic interpretation.138

137 Shedd, Charles, E., Jr. The History of Shiloh National Military Park, Tennessee. (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1954): 40-41.; Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004): 63.

138 “Shiloh National Military Park Commission Daily Events,” July 13 and August 10, 1901, January 2, 5, 17, 18, 22, February 10, March 22, November 17, and December 27, 1902: 34-35, 59-60, 150. Shiloh National Military Park.; Shedd, Charles, E., Jr. The History of Shiloh National Military Park, Tennessee. (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1954): 40-41.; Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004): 65-67. 102 In addition, the 1894 enabling legislation for Shiloh National Military Park stated

“that it shall be lawful for any State that had troops engaged in the battle of Shiloh to enter upon the lands of Shiloh National Military Park for the purpose of ascertaining and marking the lines of battle of its troops engaged there.” States, both North and South, enthusiastically responded to the legislation’s stipulation for the placement of state monuments. In the early 1900s, state after state began appointing commissions to locate troop positions and to erect monuments. The enabling legislation required that, while individual states could place monuments of any size and shape at any location, the process had to meet the approval of the Secretary of War, who heeded the advice of

Cadle, Reed, and the Shiloh Commission.139

Once granted approval from the battlefield commission, states present at the April

1862 engagement formed their own commissions to erect monuments on the battlefield.

For example, in 1903, the State of Indiana appropriated $24,429.68 for the erection of monuments at Shiloh. The Indiana State Commission expected the Shiloh Commission to add $1,500 to the work of completing Indiana related monuments. Furthermore, the

Indiana Shiloh Park Commission decreed that all monuments to the state’s participation in the battle be of equal size – “8 feet 2 inches square, height 16 feet 6 inches, weight

27,000 pounds each.” The Indiana state commission contracted with the Muldoon

Monument Company of Louisville, Kentucky to complete work on the monuments.140

139 Public – No.9 AN ACT To Establish a National Military Park at the Battlefield of Shiloh, Section 6, 1894.; Congressional Record, 53rd Congress, 3rd Session, 27, pt. 1:19-20; Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004): 73.

140 Coons, John W. Ed. Indiana at Shiloh; Report of the Commission. (Indianapolis: Press of William B. Buford, 1904): 261. 103 The State of Iowa differed little from Indiana in its monumentation on the Shiloh battlefield. The state’s monument commission placed two monuments at Shiloh, one in

1896 and the other in 1902. Unlike Indiana, Iowa went a little deeper in the pocketbook for their monuments. The total appropriations for each Shiloh monument came to the sum of $50,870.28. In 1906, the Iowa General Assembly allocated $7,500 for the Governor of the state and Iowa’s monuments commission to make a single trip visiting monument dedications where Iowa regiments served during the war. The Illinois Central Railroad provided the Governor and his entourage a special train at reduced fares named the

“Governor’s Special.” The traveling group included an Iowa military band and stopped at

Shiloh during 1906.141

Cadle and his team acquired Army surplus cannons and cannon balls to serve as general monuments on the Shiloh battlefield. Individual states went further in monumenting their troops who participated at Shiloh. Iowa was quite active in placing monuments on the battlefield. The state placed eleven regimental monuments at Shiloh.

Most of the eleven consisted of a base with pedestal capped by an irregular pediment.

The main Iowa monument was a bit more elaborate. The Iowa State Monument, dedicated November 23, 1906, was a stepped pedestal with a pedimented cenotaph containing a column rising from the cenotaph adorned with a bronze eagle. On one side of the monument, climbing the steps was Columbia, the female representation of the

United States. The eagle and Columbia mark the sacrifice by Iowa’s sons to the United

States during the Battle of Shiloh. The granite and marble composition of the monument

141 Abernethy, Alonzo. Dedication of Monuments Erected by the State of Iowa Commemorating the Death, Suffering, and Valor of Her Soldiers on the Battlefields of Vicksburg, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Shiloh and in the Confederate Prison at Andersonville. (Des Moines: Emory H. English, State Printer, 1908): 17. 104 testified to the solidity of Iowa’s soldiers during the battle. The Iowa State Monument meant to elicit in the viewer a sense of sacrifice and grandeur.142

The park’s interpretation and preservation continued into the twentieth century.

For the year 1913, the Shiloh National Military Park Commission requested $40,500 from the War Department. By 1913, the park consisted of 3,546 acres with twenty-seven miles of gravel roads and six concrete bridges. The park counted 780 cast iron tablets – marking points of interest, battle lines, and campsites. Of the tablets, 388 marked Union lines and positions with 185 for Confederate forces. Through the previous fiscal year

(1912), Congress had appropriated $715,900 for the park’s improvement and preservation. The Commission’s objective with the aforementioned sum of money consisted of presenting a landscape of memory bereft of bias in narrating the action on the field in April 1862.143

In order to build an equitable historical narrative of the battle, the Shiloh National

Military Park Commission included former Confederates.144 At the turn-of-the-century, the park’s commission included more Confederate representation on its board.

142 Ibid., 203, 243.

143 The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., 30 July 1913.

144 Brock, Alonzo Robert., Ed. Southern Historical Society Papers. Volumes 31-32 (Richmond, VA: Southern Historical Society Papers, 1903-1904): 131.; Reed, D.W. Shiloh National Military Park Commission. The Battle of Shiloh and the Organizations Engaged. Compiled from the Official Records by D.W. Reed, Historian and Secretary, Under the Authority of the Commission. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903): 6; Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004): 34, 38. The first ex-Confederate representative was Robert F. Looney. Looney served as Colonel of the Thirty-Eighth Tennessee Infantry Regiment. During the battle at Shiloh, Looney led a charge that managed to capture 1,000 Union prisoners including a Union General, Benjamin M. Prentiss. After the war, Looney returned to Memphis, Tennessee and resumed practicing law as he had before the war. Looney left the legal profession in 1870 and stumped for Democratic candidates and managed to serve as a delegate to the Chicago National Convention in 1884. On the Shiloh Commission, ex-Confederate Captain James W. Irwin joined Looney as the two ranking Confederate veterans on the commission. After Looney passed away in 1899, Irwin provided input for the marking of Confederate positions during the battle and monument placements after 1895. 105 Confederate representation at Shiloh meant not only a more balanced telling of the story, but also made the battlefiled a site of reconciliation. For the historical actors involved in

Shiloh’s creation, reconciliation came to mean the shared sacrifice on the battlefield in

1862. The inclusion of ex-Confederates assured the telling of the battle’s story would include both sides’ perspectives of the engagement. The park’s commission, along with the monumentation springing up at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, created a landscape devoid of sectional imperatives. As we will see, pro-Confederate groups began pushing for Confederate memorials on the battlefield’s grounds. The memory pieces of granite, stone, and marble, coupled with the diligent work to present the battle historically, aided in the memory and reconciliation formation of Shiloh during this period. The former combatants visiting the National Military Park in

Tennessee often commented on how well maintained each sides’ actions were narrated.

To that end, up to 1900, the commission had spent $150,000 on the battlefield. The 1900 improvements meant to interpret the park for “posterity.”145

The Shiloh National Military Park Commission invited ex-Confederate and ex-

Union representatives to monument unveilings on the park’s grounds. In June 1902, the

State of Ohio dedicated thirty-eight monuments on the battlefield to state regiments that participated in the 1862 battle. Colonel Luke W. Finlay of the Fourth Tennessee

Regiment attended the ceremonies. Colonel Finlay’s role consisted of representing the

145 “Shiloh Park Commission,” The Weekly Corinthian, Corinth, Mississippi, 24 January 1900, 1. In addition to Cadle and Reed, the Commission in 1900 added Major J.H. Ashcraft of Paducah, Kentucky and the Honorable Josiah Patterson of Memphis, Tennessee. Ashcraft and Patterson served in the Confederate Army during the war. Their inclusion in proceedings brought a greater Confederate presence to the park’s preservation and interpretation. During the meeting, Cadle, Reed, Ashcraft, and Patterson hammered out plans for the fiscal year 1900. In it, the cadre of men instructed the chief engineer, still Albert Thompson, to begin marking more battle lines and camps with the tablet template already deployed. The idea of this meeting and Atwater’s marching orders meant to bring a more balanced telling of Shiloh’s story. 106 Confederate veterans of the battle and the Confederate dead buried in the park. After the unveiling ceremonies, Finlay made a few remarks followed by an artillery salute. The inclusion of Confederate veterans, along with a greater Confederate presence on the commission, added to the reconciliationist tone of the park’s narrative. For Shiloh, unlike

Gettysburg, the driving impetus was inclusion of both Union and Confederate movements and clashes during the battle. Historian John R. Neff points out that Gettysburg suffered from a slanted interpretation towards the Union. According to Neff, Confederate troop dispositions on the Pennsylvania battlefield received short shrift during that park’s early evolution. Ex-Confederates fought tooth and nail to receive a balanced representation on the Gettysburg battlefield, at times causing consternation between the former participants and the park’s governing commission. Often, Northern interests staunched such efforts.

Yet, in Tennessee, Shiloh National Military Park’s development consisted of an equal representation of Blue and Grey veterans.146

The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) agitated for Confederate monuments on the Shiloh battlefield. By the turn-of-the-century, the UDC became a powerful force in the South for all things Confederate. The women of the UDC sought to recognize the sacrifices Confederate soldiers and military leaders made at Shiloh in 1862, and to promote their version of the Southern agenda during the war. To that end, the

UDC planned to place a monument – and succeeded – to the ranking Southern General,

Albert Sidney Johnston, killed in battle at Shiloh. By April 1907, the UDC petitioned the

Shiloh National Military Park Commission for the erection of a monument to

146 “Monuments Dedicated,” The Jennings Daily Record, Jennings, Louisiana, 6 June 1902, 3.; Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004): 212.

107 memorialize all Confederates killed in the battle. In the UDC’s estimation, “feeling that love for the South and loyalty to the men who bravely fought and nobly died for right and principle demand that a fitting memorial to all Confederate soldiers should be placed” on the battlefield “and made forever glorious by their achievements” undertook the work of memorializing the Confederate sacrifice to “tell to posterity this wonderful story.” The

Shiloh Commission obliged the UDC, even going so far as to preserve the tree stump where General Albert Sidney Johnston reputedly fell. The memorialization and preservation efforts of the UDC and other ex-Confederates added to the narrative landscape of Shiloh’s historical memory.147

The construction of memory, and its byproduct reconciliation, were not the only elements involved in the creation of Shiloh National Military Park. A sense of nostalgia permeated the park during monument dedications and veterans’ reunions. As the nineteenth century gave way to the first decade of the twentieth century, the boys and young men who fought at Shiloh in 1862 found themselves as aging old men. The changes wrought in American society in the intervening forty-plus years left the men a bit estranged from the general populace, an estrangement that bred a sense of nostalgia.

According to historian David Anderson, the concept of nostalgia derives from the Greek words nostos (a longing to return home) and algos (pain). The nostalgically remembered past – the war years – stood in stark contrast to a cognitively dissonant present. The desire to reconstruct the past – army and camp life coupled with moments of sheer terror born of battle – drove the old, White men to gather on the Shiloh battlefield to relive what they considered the most important moments of their lives. The fact these reunions cut

147 The Weekly Corinthian, Corinth, Mississippi, 23 May 1907. 108 across former combatants’ experiences made the events even more nostalgic. Here on

“this great battlefield of Shiloh” the veterans who once wore the Blue and the Grey could find a common solace on a blood soaked field not readily available in their day-to-day lives. Little did it matter that what they experienced over two days in 1862 was mostly forgotten. The Shiloh reunions provided these men an escape from the realities of contemporary U.S. society. Thus, nostalgia mingled with historical amnesia to create a historical landscape in rural west-central Tennessee.148

Historical memory, reconciliation, and nostalgia coalesced on the Shiloh battlefield serving as a didactic space to patriotism. In the early decades of the twentieth century with the U.S. experiencing mass immigration, urbanization, and industrialization, landscapes of memory such as Shiloh morphed into spaces to educate the public on

American patriotism. For the Shiloh battlefield, patriotism represented military service and sacrifice to the nation-state. In this manner, Shiloh in the early twentieth century buttressed notions of Americanism for a shifting demographic population. Even President

Theodore Roosevelt encouraged natural and historic spaces to become ones of didacticism. In Roosevelt’s estimation, part of the process involved teaching “patriotism to the rising generation” through natural and historic sites. The 1907 forty-fifth reunion of

Shiloh survivors, Blue and Grey, admonished veterans to bring their wives and kin to

Shiloh “because we know of no better place where a lesson of patriotism and fidelity to duty and to country could be impressed upon our sons and daughters than upon this celebrated battlefield…” Shiloh National Military Park presented an environment in

148 “A Strong Memorial,” Ottumwa Semi-Weekly Courier, Ottumwa, Iowa, 28 July 1903, 3.; Lowenthal, David. “Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory,” Geographic Review, 65, No. 1 (January 1975): 4-5.; Anderson, David. “Down Memory Lane: Nostalgia for the Old South in Post-Civil War Plantation Reminiscences,” The Journal of Southern History 71, No. 1 (February 2005) 106-107. 109 which “patriotic citizens” could “see and hear” true Americanism spewed forth. For the survivors of Shiloh, the 1907 gathering presented an opportunity “to increase” attendees’

“patriotism, intensify their love for their country and its institutions, and continue in their hearts that undying love” for the United States.149

In 1910, General John T. Wilder of Tennessee succeeded Cadle as Chairman of the park’s Commission. With Cadle’s resignation, a changing of the guard occurred at the park. Cadle oversaw Shiloh’s development from its inception in 1894 through the first decade of the twentieth century. In that time, Shiloh National Military Park saw its most expansive development and its greatest interpretive and historic preservation work. Cadle nurtured the park through its development from an isolated, bramble ridden natural space to one worthy of the country’s admiration in historic preservation work. Cadle, with the help of Reed and Thompson, worked tirelessly to present an unbiased interpretation of the battle. For Cadle and his team, this meant narrating accurately troop movements, battle developments, and the engagement’s final outcome. Because of this, Shiloh became a splendid site of memory for the veterans, both Blue and Grey, who visited the park. Shiloh emerged from its germination as a piece of legislation to a site worthy of veneration. Cadle and his team went to extreme lengths in presenting a balanced narrative of Shiloh’s April 1862. Because of the diligent work involved in Shiloh’s development as a National Military Park, visitors to the site experienced a nostalgic landscape devoted to patriotism and reconciliation.150

149 “Gather on Field of Battle,” Ottumwa Tri-Weekly Courier, Ottumwa, Iowa, 16 February 1907, 2.

150 The Sunday Evening Star, Washington, D.C., 30 January 1910, 3.; Smith, Timothy B. This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2004): 129-130. 110 Shiloh National Military Park manifested reconciliation through its maintenance committee and the reunions of Blue and Grey held on the old battlefield. Well into the twentieth century, the former combatants met at Shiloh to commemorate the shared heroism, bravery, and horror both sides witnessed during the 1862 battle. Reconciliation came to mean for the old soldiers a shared sacrifice born through combat. The preservation and conservation of the battlefield in its 1862 iteration only furthered the reconciliationist impulses for each side. Furthermore, the marking of the battlefield and attendant monumentation on the grounds helped assuage the bitterness during the two decades following the war. Through the inclusion of both Union and Confederate veterans on the park’s committee and allowing each side to place monuments on the battlefield marked Shiloh as a site of reconciliation. More so than any of the original five

National Military Parks, Shiloh’s evolution distinctly included each side’s interpretation of the battle. In maintaining the park’s 1862 appearance with appropriate narration of

Union and Confederate dispositions during the battle, Shiloh came to represent a site devoted to reconciliation.

National Military Parks represented only one strand of spatial memory making.

With the majority of combat occurring in the South, those killed in action ended up in the region’s cemeteries, or buried on or near battlefields. Concurrently, the U.S. Army’s

Quartermaster Department began efforts to place, at first, Union dead in a system of cemeteries that became the National Cemetery System. Over time, Confederate dead found their way into the national system. What began at first as divergent efforts at commemorating the dead in devoted spaces to each side merged over time into a shared sense of sacrifice manifesting reconciliation in cemeteries throughout the South. In a

111 sense, reconciliation included more than just battlefields. Reconciliation happened around headstones.

Cemeteries: Securing Memory of the Civil War Through Commemoration and Monumentation

Cemeteries have been a part of the American landscape since colonization along the eastern seaboard, and before through American Indian burial practices. Originally,

European colonial cemeteries consisted of small graveyards associated with a church.

This process of cataloguing the dead applied to both the North and the South. However, with immigration and urbanization accelerating in the first third of the nineteenth century, older graveyards experienced spatial constraints. In essence, only so many dead could find a resting place in a graveyard slowly being hemmed in by urban development. In

1831, Mount Auburn in Boston opened. Modeled after Père Lachaise in Paris, France,

Mount Auburn’s spatial design and space allowed for the placement of dead outside cities and relieved pressure on church graveyards. With Mount Auburn’s opening, a “Rural

Cemetery” movement exploded. Cities experimented with Rural Cemeteries just outside city limits. These cemeteries, deploying curvilinear paths, natural topographical features, logical plotting, and statuary constituted the first U.S. attempts at creating a rational environment to house the deceased. Rationality of a rural cemetery lay in the platting, pathing, and in the statuary and headstones used. In Mount Auburn’s case, the large cemetery used the elements aforementioned and codified them through strict guidelines on how burials proceeded. Rural cemeteries dotted the American landscape from cities as large as Boston to as small as Grand Rapids, Michigan. By applying rationality to

112 landscape design and the emergence of graveside statuary, rural cemeteries became park- like, didactic, and sites of mourning.151

The industrialized warfare of the Civil War brought immense changes to how cemeteries accommodated the mass slaughter of soldiers. Rough estimates conclude that

750,000 soldiers died during the Civil War, with one-third from combat and two-thirds of the total from disease. Thus, the bucolic rural cemeteries of the first half of the nineteenth century saw an explosion in inhabitants. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust outlined the concept of the “Good Death” in Antebellum America. The Good Death stipulated that when a person died, a ritual of remembrance and commemoration around family and kin occurred. It was a set piece manual, across sectional dimensions, in dealing with the body, commemoration, and burial. As Faust argues, the sheer scale of death wrought by the war blew apart the concept of the Good Death. The presence of enormous numbers of dead necessitated the eradication of time-honored traditions regarding death. Therefore, the pastoral spaces of rural cemeteries became virtual cities of the dead. In the early stages of the war, Union and Confederate dead found final rest on or near battlefields.

However, after the massive amounts of casualties at the Battle of Shiloh, merely interring those killed in action on or near the battlefield became less expedient. If available, repatriation home occurred, but this was not always the case. As the war dragged on, the sheer numbers of dead overwhelmed burial details. For example, at Shiloh, Union burial parties placed slain Confederate soldiers in unmarked trenches. If burial parties had the time, cemeteries on, or near sites of battles, sprang up. For those affluent enough,

151 Dilley, Thomas R. The Art of Memory: The Historic Cemeteries of Grand Rapids, MI. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014): 4-10.; Steven A. Bare, “The ‘Rural Cemetery’ Movement in America” (lecture, Fort Meigs Bentley Lecture Series, Perrysburg, Ohio, April 24, 2018). 113 families requested remains shipped home for placement in the cities’ or towns’ major cemeteries.152

Most of the Civil War’s fighting occurred in the South. In most instances, far from home, Union troops buried their comrades killed in action or on the operating table in marked graves, usually in a blanket or makeshift coffin. If feasible, Union soldiers killed in battle were embalmed and shipped home. On the other hand, Southern soldiers killed in battle faced a different situation. As mentioned, at times they were placed in unmarked burial sites with fragile markers or mass graves marked as “Confederate

Dead.” If near a Southern city, Confederate dead were buried in that location’s larger cemeteries. For example, during the early years of the war, and near its conclusion,

Richmond, Virginia experienced heavy fighting. Confederates killed during engagements during the Seven Days’ Battle of the Union’s Peninsula Campaign of 1862 and the battle for the city during 1865 found final rest in Hollywood Cemetery and Oakwood Cemetery.

Both sites became large repositories of Confederate soldiers killed around Richmond, as well as those killed in farther off battles.153

The number of Southern soldiers killed during the Civil War changed the nature of cemeteries in the South. The idyllic park-like settings of the Rural Cemetery

Movement morphed between 1861 and 1865. Industrialized killing brought with it an enormous amount of dead that needed space for burial. During the period, Southern cemeteries, such as Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, experienced an explosion in

152 Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004): 21-24.; Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. (New York: Vintage Books, 2008): xiii.

153 Blair, William. Cities of the Dead: Contesting Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004): 55-56. 114 population. What were once sites for recreation and education, quickly became sites of memory and mourning on a grand scale. As a result of the scale of death, over 10,000

Confederate soldiers were buried in Hollywood Cemetery. Richmond was not an exception. Atlanta, scene of brutal campaigning by Union and Confederate forces during the summer and fall of 1864, experienced a surge in internments at its most rural cemetery, Oakland Cemetery. Much like Hollywood in Richmond, the city of Atlanta consecrated a whole section of Oakland to Confederates killed during Union General

William T. Sherman’s drive on the city.154

Southern public cemeteries, such as Hollywood or Oakland, became bivouacs of

Confederate dead during, and after the war. The mass influx of cemetery residents turned these cemeteries into what late nineteenth century Americans termed “cities of the dead.”

With population change, mourning practices and the use of cemetery space changed as well, and the large, public cemeteries became sites of remembrance and mourning.

Citizens of cities or towns with large public cemeteries flocked to the sites to honor and memorialize the Confederates buried within the grounds of the cemetery. Even as early as

June 1866, white residents of Richmond gathered in Hollywood Cemetery to pay homage to the Confederate dead. A Richmond women’s association formed with the title

“Hollywood and Oakwood” to “care and renovate of the soldiers’ graves in those cemeteries.” No horses or carriages were permitted inside the cemetery so that children

“were able to move about with perfect safety, and in deference to a wish generally expressed, no addresses or speeches were delivered.” The men and women of Richmond

“young, rich and poor” made their way to Hollywood Cemetery to pay respects. By the

154 Zaworski, Robert E. Headstones of Heroes: The Restoration and History of Confederate Graves in Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery. (Atlanta: Turner Publishing Company, 1998): ix-xii. 115 middle of the day, “when all had gone to glance once more at the last home of the

Confederate dead, the very houses of Richmond seemed asleep, and the whole beautiful city appeared to be as deserted as the fantastic creation of a dream.” As if the hero worship of Confederate dead in Hollywood Cemetery was not enough, the Richmonders attending the early June 1866 spectacle in the cemetery likened the dead to “Israelites” of the “South.” The Confederate martyred dead in Hollywood Cemetery took on an almost

Biblical quality and Hollywood became the sepulcher of their sacrifice.155

In 1893, the Confederacy’s “great Chieftan,” Jefferson Davis’ remains were disinterred and transferred from New Orleans, Louisiana to Hollywood Cemetery in

Richmond for re-internment in Hollywood. Former Confederate leaders believed Davis’ remains served the pro-South agenda better if they were interred in the Confederacy’s former capital. Amid great pomp and circumstance, Davis left New Orleans via funeral cortege traveling on a train to Atlanta and then on to Charlotte, North Carolina. From there, he made his way to the Confederacy’s former capital. Earlier in the transition from

New Orleans to Richmond, at a stop in Mobile, Alabama, thousands gathered at the station and “crowded the funeral car, trying to get near the dead hero, as he lay in silence amidst the heartfelt offerings of his weeping friends.” In Atlanta, 2,000 Confederate veterans gathered at the station to pay their respects. On the way into Charlotte, the train carrying Davis’s remains met “bonfires blazing, cannon boomed, and loud ‘God bless you!’ rang out from the sorrowful crowds as the cars flew by.” In Raleigh, North

Carolina, 20,000 people came out to express “their true patriotic souls.” When Davis’s body finally reached Richmond, he was permanently laid to rest in Hollywood Cemetery.

155 “The Confederate Dead,” The Daily Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia, 1 June 1866, 2.; “To the Israelites of the South,” The Daily Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia, 9 June 1866, 1. 116 Representatives from “every state in the South, and many in the North, all bearing emblems of love and respect for the memory of the eminent statesman, orator, patriot and soldier” aided in Davis’s burial. The Davis re-internment in Richmond coincided with

Confederate memorial activity springing forth in Richmond during the 1890s. For the

White leaders of Richmond, it made sense to bring their wartime President back to the former capital of the Confederacy and place him in the city’s preeminent cemetery. This reburial linked Davis with former U.S. Presidents and American Revolution leaders buried in Hollywood. With Davis finding his final resting place in Richmond, the dead

Confederacy placed itself on par with previous generations of American patriots.156

Southern cemeteries, like Hollywood, morphed into didactic spaces meant to educate and lionize the Confederacy’s blood sacrifice. With the influx of Confederate burials, these public spaces became more than mere sites of memory. The large public cemeteries in urban areas evolved into grand sites of mourning, coupled with educative properties regarding the Southern cause during the war. What once began as idyllic settings for reflection and recreation emerged as gathering places to honor the

Confederacy and its hero worship. When prominent Confederates, such as Jefferson

Davis arrived, Southern cemeteries turned into sites that White Southerners venerated. In the process, the Confederacy’s Lost Cause memory became codified in the cemetery.

During May 1890 ceremonies at Hollywood Cemetery, 40,000 people crammed into the space to pay their respects to the Confederate dead buried there. Confederate battle flags waved proudly during the proceedings where prominent former Confederate military officers gave addresses. The May 1890 spectacle in Hollywood underscored the

156 “Ex-President Jefferson Davis,” The Grenada Sentinel, Grenada, Mississippi, 3 June 1893, 4.; “Echoes from Richmond,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 1 June 1893, 2. 117 veneration and educative power of the cemetery. Those in attendance not only mourned the Rebels buried in Hollywood, the crowd’s rituals of remembrance – grave decorating and speeches – also educated younger generations on the Confederacy’s heritage.

Cemeteries, such as Hollywood, represented the first public spaces where the physical remains of the Confederacy received praise and memorialization. The ceremonial landscape of the Southern cemetery announced itself as a space where the Confederacy was not forgotten.157

As public spaces, Southern cemeteries acquired layers of meaning in their postwar evolution. Southern cemeteries remained sites of memory and mourning, but also became gathering places to commemorate and educate on the Confederacy through collective memory. White Southerners utilized cemeteries to keep the memory of their failed bid at independence alive, as well as link the Confederacy to other notable past American epochs. Indeed, sites like Hollywood Cemetery received more statuary in the postwar environment honoring the Confederacy. In 1869, Richmond constructed a ninety-foot pyramid of undressed James River stone to honor the Confederate dead buried in the cemetery grounds. The pyramid marked the sacrifice of “Southern heroes who sleep of death in that beautiful ‘city of the dead.’” The Hollywood pyramid and arrangement of

Confederate graves in a spatially logical manner marked the cemetery as a site of education. American Revolutionary leaders, such as Patrick Henry, and two U.S.

Presidents, James Monroe and John Tyler, all made their residence in Hollywood

Cemetery. In adding edifices and memorials honoring the Confederacy, visitors to the

157 “Virginia News,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 31 May 1890, 2.; Blair, William. Cities of the Dead: Contesting Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004): 1. 118 cemetery could make the linkage of the Confederacy to the U.S.’s founding and its presidential leadership. In this manner, Hollywood served the purpose of marking the

Southern cause as one worthy of the American Revolution and the Republic’s early leaders.158

The cemetery also became space to reinforce specific public behaviors and prescribe ideals related to the White South’s former Confederacy. In other words, the large public cemeteries of the South touted a pro-Confederate version of the war while at the same time consecrating what the Confederacy stood for. The heroism, devotion, valor, and bravery of the Confederate soldier received considerable attention within the cemetery. Furthermore, the supposed bid at independence over “states’ rights” allowed those touting Confederate heritage to obfuscate the true meaning of the war. The regulations regarding visitors and attendant mourning practices aligned with the racial legal codes of the city. Jim Crow laws meant Blacks were banned from the cemetery.

White women took on the majority of care for the vast Confederate spaces in the large public cemeteries. Hollywood Cemetery became a site where White Southern women aided in the production of Confederate memory. During a “bazaar” held near the cemetery grounds in April 1893, women of the Hollywood Memorial Association set-up tables representing each state of the Confederacy, with one for the “solid south.” Women participating in the Confederate bazaar were “either native born or a descendant by marriage in the state she represents.” Further outlining the Confederate aspect of the bazaar was the fact that it “is to be essentially a confederate gathering.” In this manner,

158 The Stark County Democrat, Canton, Ohio, 16 February 1882, 2.; The Anderson Intelligencer, Anderson Court House, South Carolina, 10 June 1896, 1.; Halbwachs, Maurice. “From The Collective Memory,” in The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffrey K, Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2011): 140-145. 119 White Southern women became the co-creators of Confederate collective memory. White men and women congregated in Hollywood to honor the White Confederate dead, while at the same time buttressing a White pro-Confederate memory of the war. The ceremonies of White remembrance would only strengthen as the 1880s and 1890s saw a flowering of Lost Cause ideology embodied in Confederate Memorial Day.159

States of the former Confederacy generally recognized Confederate Memorial

Day from early April to early May. Dates of observance varied from when Lee surrendered to Union General Grant at Appomattox Court House in early April 1865 to when Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson died in May 1863. A year after the cessation of hostilities, White, Southern women in Columbus, Georgia formed the

Columbus Ladies’ Memorial Association (CMLA) in April 1866. The CMLA charged itself with maintaining and decorating Confederate grave in Columbus, Georgia on

Confederate Memorial Day. Soon, Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAs) sprang up across the South. Each LMA took it upon their organization to consecrate the Southern sacrifice through work in local cemeteries. Quickly, LMAs merged with Lost Cause ideology espoused by Confederate veterans and their former political and military leaders. In 1868, 10,000 people were present in Atlanta for Confederate Memorial Day activities, including Union General George Gordon Meade. The ceremonies lasted from

“two to six P.M.” along the avenue leading to Oakland Cemetery. The “immense throng” was imposing and “the scene” defied description. During Reconstruction, Southerners

159 “Fair ‘Rebels,’” Daily Public Ledger, Maysville, Kentucky, 27 February 1893, 3.; Blair, William. Cities of the Dead: Contesting Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004): 1.; Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004): 12-13. 120 commemorated Confederate Memorial Day in mass numbers, albeit under the watchful eye of Union occupation forces. The process exploded as Reconstruction gave way to the

1880s through the early twentieth century.160

The LMAs springing up across the South represented what historian Leeann

Whites describes as responses to “the raw, abraded ends of their attachment to their fallen husbands, fathers, and sons, out of the massive carnage that the Civil War represented for them, they committed themselves to perpetuate what they at least, still had to perpetuate, the binding tie of ‘mother love.’” As Confederate women took up caring for the

Confederate dead after the war, they also worked to keep alive the memories of why so many sacrificed themselves at a failed bid for independence. When the LMAs gave way to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in the 1890s, the memorialization work did not end. Indeed, a newer generation of women raised on Confederate heritage took up the mantle of commemoration. As Whites contends, “white women of the UDC asserted the honor and valor of their defeated dead” would continue to live on through the built environment.161

By the 1880s, the Southern bid at independence emerged as a strong theme of remembrance at Confederate Memorial Day festivities in cemeteries. White Southerners touted the “blood” sacrifice of their cause – failed independence – as “glorious and tender memories…not dead.” As mentioned earlier, linking the Southern cause to the American

Revolution continued. Pro-Confederate sympathizers attempted to claim independence

160 Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003): 4.; “From Georgia,” New Orleans Republican, New Orleans, Louisiana, 12 May 1868, 1.

161 Whites, Leeann. Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2005): 87-101. 121 from tyranny just as the original Founders of the Republic had. The soldiers who died for the Confederacy “were of the same kith and kin as those who fought” at Cowpens, King’s

Mountain, and Yorktown during the Revolution. Indeed, Southerners felt “that our fallen comrades were not less patriotic or entitled to less honor” than those who fought in the

Revolution or the Mexican-American War. The old soldiers of the Confederacy who survived the ordeal of the Civil War “were heroic and unfaltering in war, they became the most law abiding, enterprising and useful citizens in time of peace.” The suggestion that the living and the dead Confederates constituted a noble citizenry rang like music to the ears of those in attendance at Confederate Memorial Day services. For, the “true

Confederate has always has been faithful to the conditions implied in his parole and set a good example, and can take the honest Union soldier by the hand like a man feeling that he is an equal in the Union and for the Union” because “reconciliation had long been deferred.”162

Into the 1890s and 1900s, public cemeteries containing the remains of

Confederate soldiers still proved to be a strong draw. Confederate veterans, often of the

UCV, marched through Southern locales on the way to the local cemetery containing the greatest number of Confederate dead. The ex-Confederates became emblems of pride for a Southern city or town. As they marched, Confederate tunes, such as the “Old North

State,” rang out from crowds lining the parade route. At times, the local military academy and public services, such as the fire brigade, paraded as well. Once inside the cemetery, solemn services occurred with a few notable speeches by local dignitaries. Reconciliation often became a joint theme of the occasion. For 1895 Memorial Day activities, the GAR

162 “Memorial Day,” The Public Ledger, Memphis, Tennessee, 1 May 1882, 2. 122 invited members of the UCV to Chicago for the unveiling of a monument to dead

Confederate POWs from Camp Douglas (outside Chicago) buried in the city’s Oakwoods

Cemetery. Chicago opened itself and its wallets for the joint endeavor. Citizens of

Chicago bore the expense of the visitors’ visit through subscriptions, and the UCV sent a large contingent to Chicago. According to newspaper reports, the shared Memorial Day activities were “the greatest meeting of officers of the armies of the North and the South that has ever occurred.” In Winston, North Carolina, Confederate and Union veterans marched in unison, along with current naval and military reserves, at the 1895

Confederate Memorial Day festivities. After the ceremonies, the Blue and Grey veterans decorated the graves of 300 Confederate dead. Thus, public cemeteries became sites of reconciliation as well.163

From the end of the Civil War and up to the 1890s, Northerners and Southerners practiced parallel ceremonies to honor those killed during the war. Early after the war, the parallel practices of remembrance and commemoration suggests both sections struggled to find common ground for remembrance. However, as noted earlier, joint efforts of remembrance occurred. Yet, the two sections practiced separated exercises, in their respective regions, even while holding shared memorial efforts. For Northerners, the fixed date occurred in late May with the title “Decoration Day.” For example, the Detroit,

Michigan GAR Post No. 384 held their 1898 Decoration Day ceremonies on May 30,

1898. Eighty members of the Detroit Post participated in a parade down Woodward

Avenue in the city stopping at the Soldiers Monument. At the monument, the Post

163 “Notes,” Evening Star, Washington, D.C., 9 May 1895, 7.; “Blue and the Gray Will Meet,” Kansas City Daily Journal, Kansas City, Missouri, 14 May 1895, 1.; “Boys in Grey Remembered,” The Washington Times, Washington, D.C., 11 May 1895, 2. 123 commander halted the GAR contingent and instructed them to “present arms” at the base of the monument. After the parade, members of Detroit Post No. 384 gathered at

“comrade Marvin Prestons store, there discussed a bountiful lunch, mingled with wet goods and cigars.” At the end of the day’s festivities, “America was sung and all departed.” For Union veterans, much like their Southern counterparts, Decoration Day consisted of a mix of martiality, solemnity, and frivolity.164

As discussed previously, in the South, the practice of commemorating the

Southern blood sacrifice became known as Confederate Memorial Day. However, in the mid-1890s, more voices called for honoring both dead on a single day. Agreement on a date came slowly; but Northerners and Southerners began to see eye-to-eye on honoring their collective dead on a single day. The calls for a unified Memorial Day took on nationalistic tones. While Congress recognized the Fourth of July and Christmas Day as legal holidays, states North and South were left to their own devices in determining a day of respect for Civil War dead. As reconciliationists encouraged that “general animosities

[be] overcome” by the close of the nineteenth century, a national holiday seemed appropriate as a time of laying “aside the cares and thoughts of routine life, and as one man, on one day, cover the sepulchers of their departed heroes with tributes of affection from all the States, whose union has been forever cemented by the blood which flowed” from both the Blue and the Grey. A national holiday movement aligned with reconciliation. According to one reporter’s admonition, the “thousands of veterans of the gray are sleeping under Northern skies, and tens of thousands of blue veterans rest in the fair Southland. Each and every grave should be sought out and cared for by the

164 “Decoration Day, GAR Detroit Post 384,” Scrapbook, 30 May 1898, Razelmond A. Parker Collection, Box 1, Detroit Public Library. 124 Americans in whose keeping it may be.” For the editor of the reconciliationist publication, the Blue and the Gray, animosity could not linger long in the presence of the

“lily, and the fragrance of the rose and heliotrope” on the graves of Union and

Confederate veterans. As one newspaper report put it, a national Memorial Day meant

“the legislative enactment of a country successful in war and desiring to honor the memory of brave soldiers who died on its behalf.” The day’s purpose was to honor both

Union and Confederate dead under one banner.165

African American approaches to Memorial Days, both North and South, ranged from indifference to indignation. During Reconstruction, black voices, particularly in the

South, cried loudly about the African American Civil War experience. According to an

African American newspaper out of New Orleans, “if the assistance of our race in the late war was of any account, we ought to secure recognition from our white friends who, however strong and determined, could not have won victory without us.” The Shreveport

South-Western took African American indignation further: “had the result of the war been reversed, and the Southern people been called upon to decorate the graves of their dead, her colored slain would not have been neglected.” Both newspaper accounts suggested

African American contributions to the Northern war effort found little audience early after the war. As Reconstruction passed and the nineteenth century drew to a close,

African American voices gained more prominence in the North. Indeed, in 1895, the

Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment received a monument on Boston Common.

Further along, African American Union troops found internment in Arlington National

165 Morton, Jr., J.W. Blue and Gray: The Patriotic American Magazine, II, No. 1, Philadelphia: The Patriotic Publishing Company, 1893: 3-4.; Morton, Jr., J.W. Blue and Gray: The Patriotic American Magazine, III, No. 5, Philadelphia: The Patriotic American Company, 1894: 242.; “Memorial Day Celebration,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 24 May 1895, 3. 125 Cemetery. And, in the pages of The National Tribune, the main organ of the GAR,

African American vets voiced their concerns over recognition in Memorial Day activities.

However, in the South, the recognition earned on the field of battle in service to the

Union war effort was squelched. With reconciliation at its height during the final two decades of the nineteenth century, the southern African American population faced Jim

Crow and rampant lynching. The reconciliationist parades of Blue and Grey through

Southern cities and towns were predominately conducted by White veterans.166

By the turn-of-the-century, reconciliation mixed with sentimentality in the large, public cemeteries of the South. The recently concluded war with Spain, in which ex-

Confederates served under the “Stars and Stripes,” gained a friendly audience in the region. The veneration of Confederate dead joined with honoring Southerners killed during the Spanish-American War. The first soldier slain in the conflict was a Southerner from North Carolina – a fact not lost on those who worshiped the Confederacy. The selection of Fitzhugh Lee and Joseph Wheeler, former Confederate general officers, as

Major Generals of U.S. forces during the late nineteenth century imperial foray signaled that the U.S. accepted reconciliation. The crowning touch to reconciliation came from

President McKinley who ordered the disposition and care of Confederate dead in military cemeteries. As dead returned from battlefields in Cuba and the Philippines, they found a welcome embrace by both Northerners and Southerners. These new “residents” of the large “cities of the dead” across the South (and at Arlington National Cemetery)

166 New Orleans Semi-Weekly Louisianan, 15 June 1871, 2 and 22 June 1871.; Shreveport Southwestern, 2 July 1871, 2.; “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Episode 9 of The Civil War, produced by Ken Burns and Ric Burns (Florentine Films/WETA-TV, 1990). 126 comingled with Confederate dead and became a romantic linkage of those who fought for the Lost Cause.167

Cemeteries, such as Hollywood in Richmond, became tourist attractions for visitors coming in from northern locales. Southern boosters, like William Dallas

Chesterman, touted cemeteries as worthy of visitation in their respective cities. In

Richmond, the Confederacy’s safekeeping within Hollywood’s grounds became fodder for tourists. Thus, Hollywood Cemetery served as both a site of memory and mourning, and as commoditized space. Coupled with a trip to the Confederate Museum in

Richmond, the Northern visitors immersed themselves in Lost Cause mythology through a visit to Hollywood. These spatial emblems of the Confederacy permitted the Richmond boosters to cloak the Lost Cause in legitimacy. A visitor to Richmond would be hard pressed to argue with the taxonomic arrangement of artifacts in the Confederate Museum and the landscape of memory embodied in Hollywood Cemetery. Richmond utilized its built patrimony to tout a specific memory of the war that placed emphasis on a mythology created by the region. By the end of the nineteenth century, landscapes of memory, such as cemeteries, served as touchstones for a shared remembrance and commemoration of the dead who fought for both the North and the South.168

A strange reconciliation twist occurred with the 1898 interment of Varina Anne

“Winnie” Davis in Hollywood Cemetery. Winnie Davis was Jefferson Davis’ second

167 “Spanish War Veterans,” Virginian-Pilot, 20 May 1900, 2.; Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865-1913. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987): 146-153.

168 Chesterman, William D. The James River Tourist, A Brief Account of Historical Localities on James River, and Sketches of Richmond, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. (Richmond: Everett Waddy, Printer, 1889): 17; William Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914, (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004): 96-97. 127 daughter, and born in the Confederate White House, one year before the end of the Civil

War. Davis often accompanied her father Jefferson Davis on book tours where he promoted the Lost Cause. Because of Davis’ work with Confederate veterans’ groups, she received the nickname “The Daughter of the Confederacy” from John Brown

Gordon, a Confederate General during the war and the Governor of Georgia in the 1880s and 1890s. In July 1898 while summering in Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, Winnie became deathly ill. Winnie died on September 18, 1898. Because of Davis’ Confederate lineage, her burial in Hollywood Cemetery only seemed natural. Her remains made the repatriation trip south from Rhode Island shortly after her death. GAR members of the

Sedwick Post in Wakefield, Rhode Island offered to bear Davis’ body from the

Narragansett Pier hotel, where she passed, to the train depot in the city. Citizens of

Richmond expressed great pleasure over the GAR’s “spontaneous tribute of the men in blue to one whom the soldiers of the late confederacy loved so well.” Upon arrival in

Richmond, Winnie Davis’s cortege traveled to Hollywood Cemetery where, “thousands lined the streets, in forming the procession, which was several miles long. Bells tolled all over the city and the last sorrowful journey to Hollywood through the principal streets of the capital of the Confederacy was the most imposing seen” since Jefferson Davis’ re- internment in Hollywood Cemetery. Varina’s funeral cortege and internment, as historian

Joan Cashin notes, “was a public spectacle” with a Grant family member escorting the coffin to Richmond. The GAR offering in Rhode Island, the inclusion of a General Grant heir, and the spasm of sorrow in Richmond, demonstrated that through the death of the

128 Confederacy’s daughter, reconciliation ideology around the headstone became complete.169

Southern cemeteries, such as Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, served the dual function of spaces of memory making and mourning, and as didactic environments to the

Lost Cause. The deployment of Confederate memorials, and statuary in cemeteries like

Hollywood and Oakland, in Atlanta, inscribed on the landscape the tenets of the

Confederacy’s cause. Visitors to these cemeteries met visual reminders of the

Confederacy’s misbegotten efforts at independence. Whether the Confederate pyramid in

Hollywood, or the Lion of Lucerne in Oakland, the same message came through these monuments: the Lost Cause deserved veneration for the heroism and sacrifice of the region’s people. Consequently, the large, public cemeteries of the South became spaces prescribing certain class behaviors (decorum and respect) for a certain segment of society

(Whites). Over time, the cemeteries of the South attracted the attention of Union veterans visiting cities like Richmond and Atlanta. From the end of Reconstruction onwards, more and more Union veterans flowed into southern metropolises. In their visits, they encountered cemeteries meant to instruct, as well as provide opportunities to mourn and remember. As the Lost Cause gained ascendancy as the dominant memory of the war at the end of the nineteenth century, the Southern cemetery served as a focal point for carrying this memory forward.

169 Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003): 14-15.; “Men in Blue Bear Casket” and “Body Rests in Hollywood,” The Camden Chronicle, Camden, Tennessee, 30 September 1898, 2.; Cashin, Joan. First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008): 306-307. 129 Battlefields and cemeteries constituted two elements in claiming space for a shared memory of the Civil War. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Southern civic space emerged as an additional location for the building of memory and reconciliation. This is not to say Northern locales did not claim civic space for memory creation. They certainly did. However, the monument craze in Southern civic spaces outpaced Northern monument building by a wide margin. In the process, the

South’s version of the war’s memory – the Lost Cause – gained a preeminent position.

Over time, this memory of the war was codified through Southern civic space and merged with reconciliation. As Northerners visited Southern locales more frequently through joint encampments and such, they came face-to-face with the Confederacy written in stone. Instead of pushing back, the majority of Northern visitors embraced the

Southern interpretation of the war. In essence, both sides embraced the South’s version of the war’s historical memory.

The Public Sphere: Claiming Civic Space in Memory of the Lost Cause

On May 24th 1894, the unveiling of a Confederate monument occurred in the city of Alexandria, Virginia. According to reports, the monument “is inscribed with the names of those Alexandrians, whose homes never saw them again, but the hearts of whose fellow-citizens will enshrine them forever.” The monument cost $31,189 in 1889. The

1890s were not the only decade witnessing a boom in monument activity in the South.

The Confederate monument in New Orleans, Louisiana’s Crestwood Cemetery had gone up in 1867 at a cost of $25,000. The Crestwood monument “is of white marble, surmounted by a figure of a Confederate infantryman ‘on guard.’”170

170 Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, Supplement to April 1894 Edition, April 1894, Nashville, TN: 52. 130 Confederate monuments like those in Alexandria and New Orleans were not uncommon. Throughout the region, Southerners erected memorials and monuments of various shapes and sizes in civic spaces. Much like the grand spectacle of the Lee

Memorial’s unveiling in Richmond, Virginia in May 1890, each town and city that built a monument did so in honor of the Confederacy, and subsequently the Lost Cause.

“Memorial Mania” gripped the South, especially as the 1880s and 1890s emerged.

Concurrently, reconciliation blossomed during the same period. It was no mere coincidence Southerners claimed civic space for their memory of the war with little blanching from Northerners. The reconciliationist sentiments gaining steam as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth squared nicely with the stone and bronze emblems of the Lost Cause. Union and Confederate veterans (and their women’s auxiliaries) came to a shared understanding that the horror of 1861 – 1865 demonstrated

American military might and manhood regardless of the causations of the war. Aiding in the process, Southern newspapers and periodicals recounted the Confederacy’s built legacy in grand detail. The process of monumentation throughout the region coincided with the Lost Cause’s ascension and Jim Crow’s rise. As Southern municipalities enacted white supremacy through legal channels, they claimed public and civic space as their own through the frenzy of monument activity as the nineteenth century drew to a close. As an inscription on a monument in Clarksville, Tennessee’s courthouse square attested, “The brave will honor the brave, Vanquished none the less.” Even in defeat, Southerners still clung to the righteousness of their cause as inscribed on the civic landscape of the region.171

171 Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, Supplement to April 1894 Edition, April 1894, Nashville, TN: 52. 131 According to Architectural Historian James M. Mayo, monuments and memorials are “social and physical arrangements of space and artifacts to keep alive the memories of persons who participated in a war sponsored by their government.” War monuments and memorials perform a public service through emphasizing the sacredness of commemoration through sacrifice during war. In addition, the built reminders of service to one’s country create identity in a shifting social or built environment. By imbuing monuments and memorials with layered meanings, people anchor themselves in changing societal tides through commemoration of a past event. The memories evoked by monuments and memorials allow people to place particular sentiments on a piece of the public landscape. Consequently, the war monument, or memorial, becomes a site of patriotism to a cause or country. In the case of the South, war monuments and memorials, whether in cemeteries or civic space, to the Confederacy filled the need for the White populace of the region to commemorate the sacrifice of a vanquished cause.172

Historian and geographer David Lowenthal argued, “the past is a foreign country.” If we invert Lowenthal’s dictum, for Southerners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “present was a foreign country.” Fin-de-siècle Southern society experienced massive change from the 1880s to the eve of America’s entry into

World War I. Industrialization and urbanization reached the South in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Because of this, the agricultural lifestyle of the South took a hit. Add African American migration out of the South in the 1910s, and the region found itself in flux. The monumentation boom of the period attempted to assuage the anxieties

172 Mayo, James M., “War Memorials as Political Memory,” Geographical Review 78, No.1 (January 1988): 62-70.

132 White Southerners felt. By trying to idealize the past, the White South sought to ameliorate the conditions of a disliked present. In the process of rearranging their civic built environment, White Southerners tried to provide sanctuary from the present by idealizing the past through monuments and rituals of remembrance.173

Long after its defeat, the Confederacy in marble and granite dotted the South’s civic landscape. Monuments and memorials to the Confederacy’s military valor appeared shortly after the end of the Civil War. At first, cemeteries served as the main repositories of Confederate memory stones. However, during the 1880s and well into the twentieth century civic space witnessed a boom in memorial and monument activity. The frenzy and pace of monument creation reached a fever pitch from 1880 to 1915. Publications, whether the local newspapers or The Confederate Veteran, touted the monumentation and advertised monument outfits providing the finished materials. Marble works sprang up across the South to meet the demand. Often times, these marble works utilized their recent creations to demonstrate their craftsmanship in creating the ideal Confederate marble emblem. For example, the Theodore Markwalter Marble Works in Augusta,

Georgia touted their proficiency in providing quality marble products. The Augusta outfit possessed “several hundreds of new designs in the most modern styles. Monuments furnished cheaper than ever before in this market.” If a potential municipal client felt leery of the quality of craftsmanship offered by the Theo. Markwalter Marble Works, they could view “the best workmanship, similar to that of the Confederate Soldiers

Monument recently erected” by Augusta organization.174

173 Ibid., 70.

174 “Theo. Markwalter Marble Works Advertisement,” The Abbeville Press and Banner, Abbeville, South Carolina, 4 February 1880, 3. 133 Funding for Confederate monuments came largely from subscription and donation drives, headed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The UDC became the main arbiter and keeper of Confederate culture and heritage. While the United

Confederate Veterans (UCV) played soldier at reunions and encampments, the UDC took on the serious business of addressing the Confederacy’s memory through granite, stone, bronze, and marble landscape pieces. The UDC funded Confederate monumentation in a piecemeal manner. Sometimes, $240 would come into monument coffers from a lecture or such; other times, investments in municipal bonds yielded larger sums of money.

Whatever the mode of gathering funding for a Confederate monument, the UDC’s process became a “keeper of the hearth” affair. The women of the UDC claimed and recognized their importance to maintaining Confederate heritage and took great pains to keep it alive in the built environment while demarcating in stone citizenship claims.175

Confederate monument cornerstone layings often attracted quite a crowd. The civic celebrations regarding Confederate monuments included orators who waxed eloquent on the heroism and bravery of the Confederacy’s blood sacrifice, often times using their speeches as opportunities to buttress Confederate heritage. B.F. Jonas, orator for the March 1886 laying of the cornerstone for Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s Confederate monument attempted to capture the zeitgeist of the occasion. Jonas began his speech with calls to remember: “In memory, I see again these regiments and battalions starting for the front…the recollection of loved faces and brave hearts of many who were marching in the ranks, and who are absent from our gathering to-day, who will respond to life’s roll call no more forever…” Jonas drove his point of the Confederacy’s blood sacrifice home:

175 “The Confederate Monument,” The Commercial, Union City, Tennessee, 9 June 1905, 2.; R.A. Brock, Ed., “The Grey Granite Obelisk,” Southern Historical Society Papers, 31 (Richmond, Virginia: 1903): 10. 134 “we erect this monument in their honor, that all people in time to come may know that the soldiers of the Confederate cause are not without love and honor and reverence in the land which gave them birth.” For those in attendance, Jonas’ words rang a familiar refrain. The sacrifice for the Lost Cause could only be honored through the rightful claiming of civic space.176

Confederate Memorial Mania extended to United Confederate Veteran’s (UCV) reunions. Richmond, Virginia hosted the 1896 Grand Encampment of the UCV June 30th through July 2nd. By the mid-1890s, the former capital of the Confederacy possessed numerous monuments to the Lost Cause, including the grand Lee Memorial unveiled in

1890. The city invited Confederate veterans to visit Richmond’s Confederate monuments.

The Southern Railway, which ran through Anderson, South Carolina, offered a “neat and attractive circular” to those UCV members residing in Anderson. The tourism pamphlet produced by the railway included ornamented “cuts of the Confederate monuments in the capitol of the Confederacy and with a Confederate flag.” For the rate of $8.50, participants traveling from Anderson to Richmond owned the circular and passage to and from the Virginia metropolis. Cashing in on the marble legacy of the Confederacy allowed the Lost Cause to keep in the forefront of the White South’s memory of the war.

For as one monument inscription noted in another Southern locale: “It is the magnanimous verdict of mankind that he who lays down his life for a cause he deems just is a hero.”177

176 “Confederate Monument at Baton Rouge,” The Louisiana Democrat, 10 March 1886, 2.

177 “Local News,” The Anderson Intelligencer, Anderson, South Carolina, 15 April 1896, 3.; Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 1 , January 1896, Nashville, TN: 17. 135 Whether marble, granite, or bronze, the Southern landscape became dotted with built reminders of the Lost Cause. To bring this into focus, between 1880 and 1919, 117 monuments went up in Virginia alone. In comparison, in Michigan, seventy-four monuments were erected during the same period. The increase in monument and memorial activity in the South, during the nearly forty years from 1880 to 1915, aligned with a rise in the Lost Cause’s popularity. The South proudly flaunted the tenets of Lost

Cause memory through the ubiquitous erection of monuments throughout the civic landscape. In the process, this space became one controlled and dominated by a whites- only memory of the war. White Southerners, both male and female, utilized the erection of Confederate monuments to not only claim public space, but to tout their version of the war as the only correct one for the region. African Americans, already relegated to second-class citizenship status, found their voices squelched. Indeed, in 1896, the

Inspector-General of the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans of Virginia floated the idea of an “old-time, faithful negro” monument in Richmond. In speaking to a group of

Confederate veterans, the Inspector-General claimed the idea “was applauded, and support was promised when the time comes.” To fashion an acceptable memory of the war, Southerners needed the “faithful negro” in marble to counterbalance the Confederate soldier in granite.178

Commemoration of the Lost Cause through statuary centered on the individual soldier. To the pro-Confederate crowd, the lone soldier stood for steadfast loyalty, devotion, heroism, and valor in the face of overwhelming odds. Therefore, the

178 Brown, Thomas J. The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents. (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004): 24.; “Confederate Monuments,” The Richmond Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia, 12 April 1896, 1. 136 Confederate Private became the main choice of statuary throughout civic space in the

South. On the whole, figurative monuments and allegorical statues received strong backing by Ecolé des Beaux Arts (located in Paris, France) trained sculptors throughout the country. Prior to the 1880s, the preferred statue was the Confederate sentinel at post.

As the 1880s gave way to the 1890s, Southerners began to agitate for a more active pose for their Confederate soldier. A committee in Covington, Kentucky stipulated in 1894 that it would not accept a statue of a soldier “at parade rest, or one that looks as if he were ashamed that he was a soldier.” For the Confederate sympathizer, a granite or marble soldier in motion represented the Lost Causes’ vitality. He was the manhood of the White

South in stone. Whether at rest or active, the Confederate soldier in marble or granite became a clear design choice to shape city landscapes and convey a particular narrative of the South’s Civil War.179

A reading of Confederate monuments provides great insight into the thought processes chosen when erecting a monument. Most statuesque Confederate soldiers represented what the White South wanted to believe about their soldiers: battle hardened purveyors of Federal forces’ destruction. As mentioned previously, the lone Confederate

Private in battle kit became the preferred method of monumentation. The composition of the Confederate Private, at post or in action, conveyed messages of strength, masculinity, and honor: major traits of the Lost Cause tenets. The Private never faced south (this would indicate retreat from Union forces), except for an example in Tampa, Florida, and was always “at the ready.” The figure represented men in the prime of their youth, never disabled or injured. An example in Okolona, Mississippi, presented the Confederate

179 Brown, Thomas J. The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents. (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004): 30-31. 137 Private saluting with his right hand and his rifle “at ease” in his left hand. More often than not, the Private stood on a pedestal or obelisk shaft rising into the air. Sometimes, monuments deployed female figures, usually in a cemetery. The female figure allegorically watched over the manhood of the South buried in the sod of Southern and

Northern cemeteries. The female statuary in mourning contrasted sharply with the steadfast rigor of the Confederate soldier in stone. For example, the “Hope” Monument in

Washington Cemetery outside the Antietam battlefield watched over the remains of 2,447

Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery. Whether male or female monuments, the sculpted pieces helped set the narrative of the White South’s war of independence.180

The Confederate soldier on a marble or granite pedestal around the Southern urban landscape, according to one pontificator, meant to elicit in the viewer the feeling “a land without monuments is a land without memories.” For the South, the Confederate soldier monuments springing up between 1880 and 1915 claimed civic space for the blood sacrifice of White Southern manhood during the war. Such monuments insisted that the South “gave the world the sublimest illustration of courage, patriotism and self sacrifice it ever had, when the manhood of the south marched at the call to arms.” The

Southland venerated the Confederate soldier as a symbol of bravery and patriotic spirit meant to “lead men so quickly into the ranks, around our common flag.” Cities and towns across the South made clarion calls to erect monuments to the Confederate soldier because “the generation that knew the Confederate Soldier is rapidly passing.” The

180 Steven A. Bare, “In the Line of Duty: Service and Military Memorials in Downtown Tampa” (Walking Tour, Do the Local Motion!, Tampa, Florida, April 24, 2013).; “Okolona Confederate Monument,” The Columbus Weekly Dispatch Pictorial and Industrial Edition, Columbus, Mississippi, 28 August 1905, 11.; Soderberg, Susan C., “Maryland’s Civil War Monuments,” The Historian (1995): 531-535.

138 ordinary Confederate soldier, perfectly placed in a town square or urban civic space, claimed that space for the “patriotism” and “bravery” of the Lost Cause.181

Whether through regional organizations, such as the United Daughters of the

Confederacy (UDC), or through local associations, Southern women played a pivotal role in the creation of Southern monumentation. For the most part, the UDC became the driving force behind commemoration of the Southern urban landscape. Composed of

White, middle- and upper-class women, the UDC took it upon themselves to agitate and drive the funding for monumentation to the Southern cause during the war. They spearheaded efforts in cities large and small in the erection of Confederate monuments.

Aside from caring for destitute Confederate veterans and agitating for “correct” histories of the war in Southern textbooks, the UDC worked to establish monuments to fallen

Confederate soldiers. As UDC chapters grew through the 1890s and into the twentieth century, the South witnessed a corresponding growth in monument activity. The UDC conducted monument campaigns across the region through fund-raising efforts. The ideological choice became the lone Confederate soldier, standing sentinel above a pedestal. Often times, the UDC combined forces with the United Confederate Veterans in fund-raising efforts. However, the task of agitating for and building the monuments fell to the UDC. These women of elite status in Southern society utilized their power and influence to create a built memory of the Lost Cause.182

181 “Monument to Confederate Soldier,” The Rich Hill Tribune, Rich Hill, Missouri, 6 June 1907, 1.

182 “The U.D.C. Convention,” The Semi-Weekly Messenger, Wilmington, North Carolina, 19 November 1901, 6.; 182 Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003): 49-51. 139 The impetus for the UDC’s work centered on patriotic mobilization. The UDC, through its monumentation drives, wanted neo-Confederate nationalism linked to rising

U.S. nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century. The UDC sought to set the terms of debate regarding reconciliation through the erection of monuments to the South’s male soldiers and veterans. In the process, as historian Francesca Morgan points out, “the UDC embodied nationalism also in contending that the Confederacy had possessed the cultural uniformity of a nation.” It mattered little that the culture and nationalism of the

Confederacy amounted to treason. By aligning the South’s version of the war – the Lost

Cause – to general U.S. nationalism and martial culture, the UDC successfully won the hearts and minds of Northerners, particularly Union veterans.183

By the end of the nineteenth century, southern businesses saw great opportunity in the erection of Confederate monuments. Often times marble companies marketed directly to the UDC, recognizing their actions and leadership. Two such examples were the

McNeel Marble Company in Marietta, Georgia and the Hill City Marble Works in

Vicksburg, Mississippi. The McNeel Marble Company boasted of covering “the entire

Southern States and can ship the most massive monuments to any point in this territory.”

McNeel’s advertisements actively sought out the UDC and appealed to chapters across the region to utilize the McNeel services when constructing Confederate monuments. Hill

City Marble Works practiced the same marketing strategies. At an April 25, 1893 monument unveiling in Vicksburg, Hill City’s design was the chosen one for the

Confederate monument in the city. In coupling business needs with monumentation

183 Morgan, Francesca. Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005): 27-31.

140 desires, Southern marble companies aligned themselves with the commemoration practices of the UDC. Consequently, efforts by UDC chapters permitted the erection of

Southern marble companies’ works across the region’s landscape.184

Inscriptions on monuments lasted long after the speeches ended. Monument inscriptions captured what the White Confederacy wanted remembered: heroism, sacrifice, fidelity (to the Southern cause), and valor. Monument inscriptions dotting the

South told a narrative of White Southern war aims merging with historical memory. A simple monument inscription in Moore’s Creek, North Carolina captured the White

South’s hero worship’s embrace: “And never heroes entered heaven’s portal/Thro’ fields of grander strife.” A forty-five foot obelisk located in Washington Square, Charleston,

South Carolina bore the inscription: “To a sentiment of honour and the call of duty/and in pledge of their sincerity they made/The last sacrifice, they laid down their lives/officers and men/They were of the very flower of this ancient city/her young hope and fair renown.” Both examples highlight the desire of White Southerners to define the terms of memory of the war in the late nineteenth century to the first fifteen years of the twentieth century.185

The historical narrative inscribed on the Southern landscape through Confederate monuments, particularly the individual soldier, told a story of the White populace’s war

184 Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003): 51.; “Hill City Marble Works Advertisement,” The Greenville Times, Greenville, Mississippi, 10 February 1894, 10.; “The Defenders of Vicksburg, A Monument to Their Memory Unveiled at Vicksburg, Mississippi, April 25, 1893,” Brock, R.A. Ed., Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. XXI (Richmond: Southern Historical Society, 1893): 183.

185 “Confederate Monument for Smith County,” Carthage Courier, Carthage, Tennessee, 4 November 1915, 1.; Brock, R.A. Ed., Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. XXXII (Richmond: Southern Historical Society, 1904): 290-291.; Brock, R.A. Ed., Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. XXXI (Richmond: Southern Historical Society, 1903): 10-11. 141 of independence in the tradition of the nation’s founders. Southern towns and cities erected monuments in great numbers between 1890 and 1915. Monuments were meant to not only convey the historical narrative of “bravery” and “heroism” of the Confederate soldiery, but also to “be a thing of beauty and a joy forever (to every Southern heart).”

The lasting imagery of the standing sentinel soldier in a town square or urban space meant that the while the Confederacy was no more, it lived on through the built environment of the region. The tug on Southern heartstrings allowed the women and men of the White South to claim civic space in the memory of the Confederacy’s cause. For while the Confederacy’s “ grandeur lay in ruins… but, like the language of our own

Lamar has enabled us all” the claiming of the built environment for the Lost Cause solidified its preeminence in Southern memories of the war.186

The White South’s memorial mania at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century codified a specific memory of the Civil War with a specific sense of reconciliation attached. The Lost Cause and reconciliation hinged on a shared, pan- regional White remembrance of the war. The South’s war to win the hearts and minds of

Northerners succeeded through the erection of stone emblems to shared heroism, valor, and bravery. Visitors to towns and cities throughout the region came face-to-face with this built legacy. Whether prominent Confederates such as Robert E. Lee, or Jefferson

Davis, or the lone Confederate soldier, the monumentation throughout the region clearly espoused whose memory of the war was meant for preservation. The South’s civic landscape became space meant to educate while remembering the Confederacy. Even the

186 “Okitebbah Camp No. 1311 U.C.V. In Regular Session Assembled,” The Starkville News, Starkville, Mississippi, 2 May 1913, 1.

142 nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., acquired a Confederate monument. In 1912, the cornerstone of a Confederate monument was laid in Arlington National Cemetery. The erection of a Confederate emblem in the preeminent U.S. military cemetery signaled a shift in remembrance. With the laying of the cornerstone and subsequent completion of the monument in Arlington, the former combatants shared the same hallowed ground.

Memory making and reconciliation merged through these granite and marble emblems.187

“What Have They Meant:” Remembrance and Reconciliation Through Space

The year 1913 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Gettysburg, along with Shiloh, was one of the original five National Military Parks. More than 53,000 Union and Confederate veterans, their families, and dignitaries converged on the battlefield for the battle’s reunion. Woodrow Wilson, the first U.S. President from the

South to be elected since the war, gave a speech. His own scholarly work, Division and

Reunion, 1829-1889, positioned him as an expert on the sectional tensions before and after the war. Wilson touched on the healing that occurred between the former combatants in the fifty years since the war. In his estimation, the intervening fifty years meant “peace and union and vigour, and the maturity and might of a great nation.” The peace signaled a national healing, the two sections found themselves “again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten…now clasping hands and smiling into each other’s eyes.”188

Wilson captured the zeitgeist of the period. Over time, Gettysburg, much like

Shiloh, symbolized both a space of memory and one of reconciliation. Wilson’s speech

187 “Monument to the Confederate Dead,” Norwich Bulletin, Norwich, Connecticut, 12 November 1912, 6.

188 Link, Arthur S., Ed. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 28 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966-1994): 23-26. 143 invoked memories of the war, while at the same time declared reconciliation to be complete. Battlefields, such as Shiloh and Gettysburg, served as shrines of memory through their preservation, conservation, and monumentation on the historic site. In a similar vein, the cemeteries of the South also became shrines of memory. Their multifaceted functions as sites of memory making and mourning, as well as didactic environments aimed at educating people about the cause of the Confederacy, became environmental reminders of the Lost Cause. The erection of monuments in mass quantities in civic space throughout the South furthered the codification of White

Southerners’ memory of the war. The battlefield, the cemetery, and civic space served as physical linkages to a specific memory of the war.189

A minority of White Southerners at the turn-of-the-century questioned the

Confederate Memorial Mania, and memory of the war, occurring across their built environment. Walter Hines Page of North Carolina attacked the Old South in an 1882

Century article. In his musings, Page felt the Old South represented an indolent, violent, and generally unpleasant place. For Page, the passing of the Old South would usher in a more economically viable region aligned with a rising sense of national importance.

Progress and commercialism promised more for the region than clinging to older traditions. In 1915, North Carolina editor Clarence Poe remarked that most of the

Confederate monumentation popping up across Southern courthouse squares did little to

“make anybody’s heart beat faster” or give “any child a vision of the spirit, heroism, and pathos of our Civil War period.” Poe argued that Confederate monumentation had little bearing on the generations born after the war as it related to historical memory of the war.

189 “Confederates. Tuesday a Memorable Day in History of Local Veterans of the ‘Lost Cause,’” The Evening Bulletin, Maysville, Kentucky, 4 June 1902, 2. 144 It did, however, make civic spaces hostile to African Americans prior to and after World

War I. Yet, the memorialization that flowered so greatly during the late nineteenth to early twentieth century died down around World War I. Continuing to build monuments to a generation passing seemed a superfluous waste of time and resources. While some

White Southerners felt the monumentation not a worthwhile endeavor, their voices did not elicit much pushback to cluttering the built environment with Confederate statuary.190

While a number of discordant voices sprang up against it, monumentation across the Southern landscape came to stay. The various monuments and memorials to the Lost

Cause codified, in granite and marble, the White South’s memory of the war. The

Confederate Soldier, whether in town squares, urban spaces, battlefields, or in cemeteries, embodied the true meaning of the Lost Cause. The men “who had imperiled their lives and property for the Confederacy” consecrated the Confederate monument. For White

Southerners, the principles of the Lost Cause were “divine and eternal.” By casting them in granite, or marble, and dotting the emblems all over the Southern built landscape, signified the Confederacy’s future as “glorious.” Whether that glory skewed the historical record did not matter. The built patrimony of the Confederacy literally cemented its place in Southern memory.191

Furthermore, into the twentieth century, another historical memory-making vehicle occurred with more frequency. Sponsored by GAR Posts or individual states,

Union veterans embarked on pilgrimages to other GAR Posts or to sites of memory in the

190 Cooper, John M. Jr. Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American, 1855 – 1918. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977): 76 – 81; Clarence Poe to Benjamin Sledd, 21 September 1915, Clarence Poe Papers, North Carolina Department of Archives and History.

191 “Samuel Elliot White,” Fort Mill Times, Fort Mill, South Carolina, 9 March 1911, 4. 145 South. These historical memory trips encouraged Union and Confederate veterans to continue to reconcile. While some sites, such as the Andersonville Prisoner of War Camp in Georgia, elicited mixed feelings among the travelers, historical accounts of the journeys received generally positive reviews. The events at times mixed business with a trip down memory lane. More often, the pilgrimage evolved into a final opportunity for veterans of both sides to cement their legacy of the war, while at the same time assuaging any final bitterness. In the process, the pilgrimage represented another attempt at reconciliation, as one century gave way to the next.192

192 “Civil War Veteran Make Pilgrimage,” The Washington Herald, Washington, D.C., 29 June 1913, 3. 146 Chapter 4

The Pilgrimage: Travels of Memory, Travels of Reconciliation

Seventy-five members of Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Post No. 384 of

Detroit, Michigan fell in line at 9:30AM August 13, 1897. The Parke Davis & Co.’s band preceded the veterans of GAR Post No. 384 as they made their way through downtown

Detroit to the Michigan Central train depot. When the veterans reached the depot, they found approximately thirty members of the local Women’s GAR Auxiliary awaiting the men. The women were to accompany the veterans on the journey to the Thirty-First GAR

National Encampment in Buffalo, New York. The men and women boarded a train consisting of five sleeper cars, two-day coaches, a smoking car, and one baggage car.

When the train pulled out of the station, the occupants were on their way to Buffalo to

“gain new laurels to place in the shrine holding the records of its former brilliant triumphs, in Detroit, the beautiful and peerless city of America’s inland seas.”193

The recorder of the event, a member of GAR Post No. 384’s travels, termed the trip a “pilgrimage.” Utilizing a term usually reserved for religious travels presents an interesting opportunity for study. In the late nineteenth century, Union veterans of the

American Civil War began secular pilgrimages to fellow Grand Army of the Republic

(GAR) Posts, encampments, or to sites of memory in the South such as Shiloh. The secular pilgrimages became historical memory making vehicles, as well as opportunities to reconcile with former foes. As Union veterans travelled north and south, they

193 “History of Buffalo Pilgrimage,” Grand Army of the Republic Detroit Post No. 384, Scrapbook, Box 1, Detroit Public Library. 147 interacted with various stakeholders in the historical memory-making process. In addition, the journeys through pilgrimages represented an opportunity to solidify memories of the war and build bridges across war’s the bloody chasm.

This chapter explores how the secular pilgrimage aided in historical memory formation, and consequently reconciled the former combatants. However, memory formation and reconciliation became only two elements of the pilgrimages purpose. The chapter argues pilgrimages constituted more than memory-making devices (which were surely present). The pilgrimage bound Union veterans to state entities and meant business opportunities from the visitors to urban and rural locations. Furthermore, the chapter argues Union veterans found a modicum of emotional healing through pilgrimages.

Finally, the chapter argues pilgrimages tied Union veterans to a national community excluding newly arriving immigrants, along with complicating African American contributions to Union victory. In the process, the chapter examines how the term pilgrimage applied to late nineteenth century Union veterans’ travels with a focus on the term’s deployment in the cultural lexicon at the end of the century and into the twentieth century. In addition, reasons for travel and funding for these trips are addressed. The chapter further explores the actual pilgrimage and who participated in these journeys.

Finally, the chapter explains how pilgrimages reinforced historical memory of the Civil

War and aided in the process of reconciliation. Special attention is paid to the former

Confederate prisoner of war (POW) stockade, Andersonville, in southwest Georgia.

Union veterans used these trips to commemorate sites of memory and mourning, such as

Andersonville. Using GAR Post No. 384’s journey to Buffalo as a microcosm of a larger

148 Union veterans’ cultural phenomenon, the pilgrimage signified something far greater than merely visiting a different locale.

Definition and Deployment of the Pilgrimage during the Nineteenth Century

What is a pilgrimage? According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term “pilgrimage” is of French origin. While the exact date of the term’s usage in the

English language is difficult to pinpoint, it appears to make its first appearance around

1275 in French. Originally, a pilgrimage consisted of “a journey (usually of long distance) made to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion; the action of practice of making such a journey.” However, around 1515, the definition of a pilgrimage morphed.

In 1515, pilgrimage came to mean “a journey undertaken to a place of particular significance or interest, especially as an act of homage, respect, etc.” Utilizing the latter definition, Union veterans’ travels, whether to National Encampments, sites of memory and mourning, or fellow GAR Posts, fit the more secularized definition of a pilgrimage.

They consisted of journeys undertaken to places of significance or interest, either to pay respects, forge memory, or further reconciliation. Therefore, this chapter uses the latter

OED definition.194

Deployment of the term “pilgrimage” in a secularized manner appeared early in the nineteenth century. For example, in the March 25, 1800 edition of the Gazette of the

United States & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, a story appeared of a Howell’s description of his pilgrimage to the Spanish city of Valencia. According to the account, the pilgrim encountered “the strongest folks, the sweetest wines, the smoothest oils, and the beautifulest females of all Spain.” The traveler compared Valencia to Madrid,

194 Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Ed., s.v. “pilgrimage,” accessed May 23, 2018, http://0- www.oed.com.carlson.utoledo.edu/view/Entry/143868?rskey=5AMqi8&result=1#eid. 149 claiming the former possessed the “finest courtesans” than the latter city. Based on the reading of the article, clearly this particular pilgrim did not visit Valencia for religious purposes. The traveler made a secular trip. Union veterans conducting pilgrimages secularized the process in the same manner as Howell did. The Union veterans on a pilgrimage took in the sights, sounds, and culture of a destination without imputing religious connotations to the endeavor; however, the veterans’ travels did have a purpose.

As we will encounter, the overarching purpose of a Union veterans’ pilgrimage became travels of setting aside old antagonisms and reuniting with former foes for the betterment of the U.S. nation-state and consecrating their standing as patriotic citizens worthy of veneration.195

As the mid nineteenth century dawned, Americans increasingly used “pilgrimage” to signify travels within urban areas. The February 13, 1840 edition of the New York

City Morning Herald described an exhibition of European paintings at a studio in the city. The forty-fifth painting within the exhibition, titled “Guardian Angel,” became

“worth a little pilgrimage for the pleasure of beholding it.” In this particular instance, the idea of a pilgrimage was more than merely traveling abroad to visit the sites of a

European city. The Morning Herald article made travels within New York City itself a pilgrimage. Antebellum Americans increasingly used pilgrimages as a marker of excursions within their urban environments. By visiting an art gallery with exquisite

European paintings, mid-nineteenth century New Yorkers gained an air of sophistication and a modicum of education on their urban pilgrimage. In essence, the pilgrimage meant more than a mere excursion within the city. For these New Yorkers, the intercity

195 Gazette of the United States & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 25 March 1800, 2. 150 pilgrimage served the dual purpose of refinement honing and didacticism. Union veterans traveling to sites of memory much later in the century would couch their pilgrimages in similar terminology. Their travels South became excursions of memory making and education of those who traveled with them.196

The secularization of pilgrimages also meant travel outside the urban environment. One such location was Monticello, New York. Only an eight-hour ride via the Erie Railroad from New York City, Monticello was home to the Wiggins’ Hotel.

During the summer, New York City residents made their way to upstate New York to escape the heat and pressures of the city. The Wiggins’ Hotel was a terminus of the

“dusty pilgrimage from the city.” In this particular example, the travelers to upstate New

York conducted their pilgrimages as a respite from the increasing issues associated with an urbanizing and industrializing New York City. Visitors to the hotel found enlarged rooms “well ventilated and furnished for the comfort of the guest.” Positioning the

Wiggins’ Hotel as a destination on a pilgrimage to Monticello, New York meant

Antebellum Americans further fashioned secular meanings to trips of leisure. Eventually, the pilgrimage’s meaning morphed into travels associated with trips to sites of memory.

A pilgrimage to Monticello served as a start to associating trips of remembrance mixed with travel, thus imputing significance to an otherwise quite ordinary recreational excursion.197

The previous sampling of newspaper accounts regarding pilgrimages demonstrates that Americans during the nineteenth century deployed the term either to

196 “European Paintings,” Morning Herald, New York City, New York, 13 February 1840, 3.

197 “Wiggins’ Hotel, Monticello, Sullivan County, New York,” The New York Herald, New York City, New York, 25 May 1855, 7. 151 mean travels, abroad, within the urban environment, or to get away from the city. The secularization of the term in American culture reveals a desire to describe a cultural phenomenon. Pilgrimages, near and far, signified a transition in the consumption of travel. For Americans moving through the nineteenth century, the use of pilgrimage imbued trips of leisure, or remembrance, with semi-religious connotations. The travelers, or pilgrims, moved through space and time while taking in the sights, sounds, and culture of the trip. In the process, pilgrimages at the end of the nineteenth century and into the first decade and half of the twentieth utilized the travels as opportunities at showing stakeholders in the memory making process the qualities of character, sacrifice, honor, and duty to the U.S. nation-state.

Ethnographers John B. Gatewood and Catherine M. Cameron posit that pilgrimages to sites of memory, such as Gettysburg, become “numen seeking” events.

Gatewood and Cameron deploy their terminology in a modern day sense through recording how contemporary visitors to Gettysburg experience a range of emotions and affective qualities. A numen seeker visits a historic site or museum hoping to transcend the present by leaping back into the past to discover the lives, feelings, and hardships of people in earlier times. As Gatewood and Cameron conceptualize numen seeking, it possesses a very modern flavor. However, if we apply numen seeking to the Union veterans conducting pilgrimages, we find the individuals desired to transcend the present and make a connection with their past lives during the war. They hoped to engage with a past that pushed their sense of time to its limits, formed empathy with the living and the deceased, or elicited awe or reverence as in the presence of something holy or mystical.

As we will see with the Andersonville POW stockade, the Union veterans on a

152 pilgrimage to the site in southwest Georgia felt a mix of emotions and stupefaction through their engagement with the historic site.198

The historical record does not clearly elucidate how or why Union veterans chose to call their various travels pilgrimages. However, in utilizing the OED definition of a pilgrimage combined with its secularized deployment throughout the nineteenth century,

Union veterans’ use of pilgrimages is not difficult to understand. The pilgrimage, in essence, means a trip. In this case, the travels marked a secular voyage that had intellectual, symbolic, and emotional meaning. By 1890, more newspaper accounts recorded the travels of Union veterans as pilgrimages. The term took on more meaning, such as numen seeking, as these veterans made their way to Civil War sites and cities in the South. Furthermore, in time, the pilgrimage came to include not only veterans, but kin as well. As pilgrimages grew in sophistication, more stakeholders, such as kin, became included in the process. Union veterans’ kin marked a turning point in pilgrimages. By including family in the pilgrimage, supporters, such as states, trumpeted the ideology of sacrifice and remembrance to the Union cause as one not only for those who fought, but the family members as well. Pilgrims came to understand more was at play than mere reminiscences and memory making. The pilgrimage phenomenon at the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century buttressed notions of fidelity to the

U.S. nation-state, and bound the pilgrims to a specific version of American patriotism – one reserved for those who served and their progeny. Union veterans made pilgrimages to pay homage, commiserate, or mourn fallen comrades. Pilgrimages, particularly for the veterans, solidified their bonds of comradeship with the living and the dead. They took

198 Gatewood, John B. and Cameron, Catherine M., “Battlefield Pilgrims at Gettysburg National Military Park,” Ethnology 43, No. 3 (Summer, 2004): 208-210. 153 advantage of the journey to not only visit a new location, but to buttress their notions of sacrifice with people that understood them, whether friend or foe during the war. Union veterans felt the process of a pilgrimage meant more than merely traveling someplace else.199

Travels for Various Reasons: The “Why” of the Veterans’ Pilgrimages

As noted earlier, GAR Post No. 384 termed its trip to the 1897 GAR National encampment in Buffalo, New York a “pilgrimage.” While in Buffalo, Post No. 384 spent time playing soldier, that is the veterans attempted to recreate military camp life – tents, military type rations, parades, martial drills, games – with fellow GAR members from other Posts. To some degree, as we witnessed with encampments, the faux military life excluded the actual horrors of combat. In Buffalo, the veterans of Post No. 384 marched with other veterans, participated in parade drills, and even presented a review for

President McKinley. McKinley traveled to Buffalo to deliver the keynote address at the

GAR event in the city. In his address, McKinley heaped praise on the GAR members as defenders of the flag and “whose defenders are true patriots.” As a Union veteran,

McKinley understood his audience. He linked the GAR members as citizens and patriots.

In doing so, he commanded thunderous applause from the Union veterans in the audience. The old “Boys in Blue” felt their wartime sacrifices solidified them as worthy heirs to the mantle of citizen-soldiers, as well as patriots. In closing his speech, McKinley linked the Confederate Army and Union Army as reconciled brothers, a familiar refrain at the end of the nineteenth century. McKinley’s presence at the National Encampment did not sum up the pilgrimage. When not playing soldier, the men of Post No. 384, and other

199 “Echoes of the War,” St. Paul Daily Globe, St. Paul, Minnesota, 31 May 1890, 2. 154 GAR members, dispersed and enjoyed frivolity. They toured the city, attended veterans’ gatherings, and visited Niagara Falls. Veterans attending the 1897 National Encampment conducted themselves with a mix of business and pleasure. When not engaged with official GAR activities, they spent time in leisurely pursuits. The veterans partook of lunches, dinners, and “liquid refreshments.” The essence of the Buffalo pilgrimage became a spectacle of soldierly exploits mixed with platitudes to their prowess as warriors.200

The soldierly playtime occurring during the 1897 GAR National Encampment included martial airs. Not only did the old veterans partake in frivolity, they marched and conducted military style drills from their days in the Union Army. A vast crowd of

Buffalo residents gathered to witness the GAR members conduct these drills. Applause met each movement of the veterans, “cheering to the echo” of the marching and

“presenting of arms.” The old veterans in Blue basked in the ovations; each military-style maneuver met with more cheers. In this regard, Post No. 384’s 1897 Buffalo pilgrimage reframed and rewrote memories of their wartime experiences, while at the same time claiming their standing as patriotic citizens who saved the Republic.201

Not surprisingly, visiting a different locale was an important aspect of the pilgrimage. The opportunity to leave their local communities and experience a new environment attracted pilgrims to the journey, much like their wartime service drew them away from home to train and face combat in the South. To that end, stakeholders and

200 “History of Buffalo Pilgrimage,” Grand Army of the Republic Detroit Post No. 384, Scrapbook, Box 1, Detroit Public Library.; “Veterans in Camp,” Willmar Tribune, Willmar, Minnesota, 31 August 1897, 2.

201 “History of Buffalo Pilgrimage,” Grand Army of the Republic Detroit Post No. 384, Scrapbook, Box 1, Detroit Public Library. 155 railroad companies created special travel itineraries for pilgrimages. The railroads, in particular, recognized the pecuniary benefits of reduced rates for pilgrims. They often reduced fares and utilized their finest cars, particularly Pullman Palace and Tourist

Sleeper cars. The destinations along the way also recognized the potential income. The

1897 sojourn by GAR Post No. 384 included stops along the way to Buffalo. One such notable stop was the St. Thomas train station in Ontario, Canada. The men of Post No.

384 enjoyed an “excellent dinner” at the train station, which was festooned in American flags. In 1914, New York survivors of the Confederate prisoner of war (POW) stockade at Andersonville, Georgia traveling from New York City to the POW camp in southwest

Georgia stopped in Richmond, Virginia on the first day of its journey. In Richmond, the

Union ex-POWs ate breakfast and lunch at the Jefferson Hotel, with the afternoon to their

“inclinations” after the latter meal. Visiting the sights of a new place (St. Thomas) or an old haunt (Richmond) meant the Union veterans on their respective pilgrimage partook in leisurely travel while reframing the memories of their wartime experiences. In a sense, businesses commodified the historical memory process.202

Experiencing different scenery appealed to Union veterans on a pilgrimage.

Through visiting different locales with comrades, or attending ceremonies at a historic site, pilgrims solidified the memories of their wartime exploits and strengthened their standing as important citizens worthy of veneration. In addition, the pilgrimage process provided opportunities for reconciliation. Sites like Richmond or Andersonville contained deep connections for the old soldiers visiting those locations. Richmond, and particularly

202 “On to Buffalo,” People’s Voice, Wellington, Kansas, 19 August 1897, 6.; “History of Buffalo Pilgrimage,” Grand Army of the Republic Detroit Post No. 384, Scrapbook, Box 1, Detroit Public Library.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 28-29. 156 Andersonville, were sites of large POW stockades. For those Union veterans incarcerated in either place, the memories of their time as a POW dripped with memory and mourning. Furthermore, visiting the POW stockades allowed the veterans to educate kin on the wartime sacrifices the old soldiers made, even if incarcerated. Richmond’s urban fabric held the dual function of site of memory, as well as reconciliation. Travel itineraries for Richmond allowed the Union veterans to experience the southern urban center on their own. Often times, few people interfered with the sightseeing the old soldiers accomplished; other times, Southern boosters helped. As they made their way to the former site of Libby Prison or Belle Isle in Richmond, the former POWs, according to the official history of the pilgrimage, “pathetically” took in what remained. Once again, the possible numen aspect of the journey overcame the former prisoners of the stockades.

Painful memories mingled with stupefaction of what the veterans encountered at each site. In this manner, the scenery at POW sites elicited strong emotions from the pilgrims, much different than leisurely activities, such as visiting Niagara Falls.203

Perhaps the most critical aspect of a pilgrimage consisted of trips to sites of memory and mourning. The Andersonville POW stockade was one such locale. For ex-

POWs, visiting their former prison site, emotions ran high. Civil War POWs camps were notoriously horrendous places. For Union veterans to treat a renowned site of mourning as worthy of a pilgrimage told a unique tale of woe. Later in this chapter, the

Andersonville pilgrimage is explored more thoroughly. Suffice it to note now, the pilgrimage elicited quite the affective responses from the pilgrims. Other pilgrimages were less known. In May 1890, Union veterans marched through the streets of St. Paul,

203 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 29. 157 Minnesota making their “yearly pilgrimage” to decorate the graves of fallen comrades who “died in defense of their country’s flag” across St. Paul’s numerous cemeteries. The

GAR veterans marched with “ladies, distinguished visitors, and those gentlemen participating one way or another in the day’s proceedings.” The mixture of travelers signified that memory and mourning became more than mere veterans’ territory. The fact the procession included women and non-GAR members gave the marching horde more legitimacy. By including women, the pilgrims marching through St. Paul cut across gender lines through mourning those lost during the war and the subsequent years.204

Pilgrimages to sites of memory and mourning related to the war established the secular travels as moments of affective numen seeking. The former POWs traveling to sites imbued with great tragedy often wandered around the stockade, if preserved, in sort of a daze. At times, they did not comprehend what had happened there, or even why they were there (other than a cool trip sponsored by an individual state). Once on the grounds of a former POW camp, the former inmates felt a sense of estrangement from the proclamations of patriotism and citizenship. Were soldiers incarcerated for surrendering in combat worthy of veneration? The question picked at discontinuities between glory and honor in combat. As if POW sites were not enough, even the surreal entered the picture. Major George Tate of Lenox, Massachusetts conducted a yearly pilgrimage to

Gettysburg to visit the grave of his left leg, shot off during the 1863 engagement. Since

1863, not a year passed where Major Tate did not make the pilgrimage “to Gettysburg to lay flowers on the grave of the lost member.” Whether Major Tate’s yearly journey to

204 “Echoes of the War,” St. Paul Daily Globe, St. Paul, Minnesota, 31 May 1890, 2. 158 Gettysburg to visit his lost leg or trips to a preserved POW camp, the pilgrimage often broke free of the bonds of comprehension.205

Capitalizing Memory: Funding the Pilgrimage

Pilgrimages required money to occur. Capital for the various journeys came from a myriad of unique sources. GAR membership dues constituted one funding source.

While businesses did not invest directly in pilgrimages, as noted with railroads, they provided reduced fares and discounts for pilgrims. Cities found pilgrimages a booster’s bonanza. Described further below, municipalities went all out to attract pilgrims to their city. Perhaps the greatest investment vehicle came from state money. Iowa ($249,370) and New York ($20,000), two prominent examples, poured significant money into 1906 and 1914 pilgrimages, respectively. The appropriating of state taxpayer funds meant pilgrimages were more than leisurely travels. With individual states supporting pilgrimages, the funding of expeditions tied the pilgrims to state apparatuses and furthered the idea the pilgrims exemplified fidelity to the nation.206

As mentioned above, GAR posts relied on membership dues and other funding drives for pilgrimages. For example, the state encampment of GAR posts in Michigan occurred in Grand Rapids, Michigan on January 15, 1880. Members of Posts throughout the state collected money from members, as well as investment vehicles. The GAR Posts in Michigan placed money in municipal bonds and savings deals to raise money. In

205 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 29.; “Visits the Grave of His Left Leg,” Albuquerque Citizen, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 21 August 1909, 1.

206 Abernethy, Alonzo. Dedication of Monuments Erected by the State of Iowa Commemorating the Death, Suffering, and Valor of Her Soldiers on the Battlefields of Vicksburg, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Shiloh and in the Confederate Prison at Andersonville. (Des Moines: Emory H. English, State Printer, 1908): 17.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916):15. 159 addition, members of Michigan’s numerous GAR Posts demonstrated fiscal creativity in order to raise money for pilgrimages. Their efforts for the month of December 1879 garnered $138,221.53. GAR members across Michigan used the money to make their pilgrimages to Grand Rapids. For an 1880 National Encampment in Chicago, Illinois,

GAR members from all points in the U.S. utilized membership and fundraising money to make their way to the metropolis. For a pilgrimage to the 1885 National Encampment, the national organization of the GAR contracted a publisher out of Chicago, Illinois to produce the poems of noted Civil War period poet, Mrs. Kate Brownlee Sherwood of

Ohio. Sherwood’s poems were popular during the war. While not reflected in the pilgrimages’ ideology, Sherwood’s poems contained Unionist motifs the veterans remembered from their wartime service. For $1.00, or a $1.50 for a gilded edition, GAR members and other interested parties could own the collected edition of poems. The multilayered fundraising efforts signified creativity and collaboration from both the male and, at times, female GAR women’s auxiliaries. Pilgrimages were pricey. In order to conduct one, an “all hands on deck” approach worked best.207

Local economies and business ventures benefited from pilgrimages. The Vermont

GAR state encampment in 1890, held in Rutland, Vermont, included special train and hotel rates. State GAR Post members purchased tickets on the Boston and Maine

Railroad and the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad. Once in Rutland, various hotels offered reduced rates for GAR members. The Bardwell House offered visitors a room at $1.50 per day, the Bates House at $1.50 per day, the Berwick $1.50 per day, the

207 “News of the Week,” The Lake County Star, Chase, Michigan, 8 January 1880, 2.; “G.A.R. Encampment,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, 28 January 1880, 7.; “Mrs. Sherwood’s Poems,” The National Tribune, Washington, D.C., 14 May 1885, 6. 160 Globe at $1.00 per day, Farmers at $.81 per day, and the Central at $.81 per day. The reduced transportation and accommodation costs signaled local proprietors were willing to work with GAR members to bring business into Rutland. GAR pilgrimages meant pecuniary benefits to a local economy.208

Pilgrimages coincided with the maturation of industrial capitalism in the U.S. As noted earlier, cities and towns pursued veterans’ pilgrimages in the same manner they did religious conventions, political party meetings, and any other type of large group gathering. The pilgrimage represented a booster’s dream and commercial opportunity.

For boosters, pilgrimages presented an opportunity to show off the “shiny” parts of the city and its civic prowess. For local businesses, pilgrims meant easy cash grab opportunities. GAR leaders collaborated with business and civic leaders in an effort to align the needs of the pilgrims with the business and civic imperatives of the host city or town. In the process, capitalism entwined with historical memory-making and patriotic impulses.209

City boosters and businesses often rolled out the red carpet for GAR pilgrimages.

For the 1900 GAR National Encampment held in Chicago, Illinois, the city appropriated

$25,000 for a “magnificent court of honor” for the visiting veterans. The court of honor stretched a mile down Michigan Avenue in the city, from Van Buren to Twelfth Street with “great arches at either end.” Parades held during the week of the National

Encampment marched down the court of honor with dignitaries such as President

William McKinley in attendance. In addition, schoolhouses throughout Chicago provided

208 “Grand Army of Vermont,” Orleans County Monitor, Barton, Vermont, 20 January 1890, 1.

209 “G.A.R. Clans Gather,” Evening Star, Washington, D.C., 11 August 1906, 3. 161 “free quarters” for the veterans visiting the city. The 1900 Chicago GAR extravaganza also featured organizational meetings by various auxiliary outfits: the Woman’s Relief

Corps, Ex-Prisoners of War, Ladies of the GAR, Daughters of Veterans, Army Nurses

Association, Loyal Home Workers, and Naval Veterans. No expense was spared in creating a festive atmosphere for the pilgrims.210

GAR Post membership rolls did not constitute the only funding sources for pilgrimages. States often got in on the act with public tax funds. For a planned 1914 pilgrimage by Union veterans living within the state, New York appropriated $20,000 for the erection of a monument at Andersonville Prison in Georgia and travel for pilgrims to the former POW stockade to witness the event. The New York State legislature codified into law the sum of $20,000, April 30, 1913, which permitted Andersonville survivors living in New York to travel with family and kin to the southwest Georgia historic site.

The historical record indicates previous attempts at funding a New York based pilgrimage met defeat via executive fiat. However, Senator A.J. Palmer, the pilgrimage commission chair, continued agitating for state funding. His work produced the April

1913 law and the establishment of the commission as a state government entity. The following year, 1914, witnessed the pilgrimage by Andersonville survivors to the former

POW stockade. The money appropriated for the monument and subsequent travel marked a turning point in funding pilgrimages. As Union veterans’ ranks thinned out in the early twentieth century, the impetus to memorialize their sacrifices increased. The New York legislature, through its passing of the enabling legislation, acted on the belief that monumentation and pilgrimages fell under the jurisdiction of states. While GAR Posts

210 “G.A.R. Encampment,” Evening Times-Republican, Marshalltown, Iowa, 23 June 1900, 1. 162 would continue to raise funds for pilgrimages, the insertion of a state – New York in this case – in the process announced that veterans conducting a pilgrimage received state money. For those traveling to Andersonville, the enabling legislation tied veterans’ memory making to state efforts at recognizing their wartime service and sacrifice.211

Pilgrimages occurring in the first decade-plus of the twentieth century found a receptive audience from Northern state lawmakers. GAR lobbying and recognition by state entities of Union veterans in their populations propelled the impetus to fund pilgrimages. The 1906 Iowa journey and the 1914 New York pilgrimage received significant amounts of state money. Instead of providing healthcare, long term housing

(states did have soldiers’ homes) needs, and employment support, Iowa and New York chose to spend money on shipping veterans and their kin to points in the South under the guise of monument unveilings and trips to “shrines of patriotism.” Linking the state to veterans’ sense of patriotism solidified the bond of sacrifice to a state, such as Iowa or

New York. Surely, these pilgrimages provided some emotional closure for the veterans in attendance. However, neat little trips to the South superseded the pressing needs of veterans in the early twentieth century.212

The Pilgrimage’s Historical Actors and Their Activities

Early in the pilgrimage process, GAR veterans organized most journeys. As explained earlier, the Union veterans made their way to various locations and put on

211 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 15-19.

212 Abernethy, Alonzo. Dedication of Monuments Erected by the State of Iowa Commemorating the Death, Suffering, and Valor of Her Soldiers on the Battlefields of Vicksburg, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Shiloh and in the Confederate Prison at Andersonville. (Des Moines: Emory H. English, State Printer, 1908): 17.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916):15-19. 163 martial drills once in a city or town. The spectacle of martial maneuvers in Southern locales elicited quite the response from the audience. Much like drills in Northern towns and cities, White Southerners witnessing the event whooped and hollered at the Union veterans drilling. The parading and drilling Union veterans receiving adulation from

Southern Whites signified the bridge of reconciliation was nearly complete. Only a few decades before, Northerners “invading” the region again would be labeled

“carpetbaggers,” or worse. Now, as the nineteenth century closed and the twentieth century dawned, the Union veterans were hailed, welcomed, and embraced. Women and kin also got in on the soldier play. The Women’s Relief Corps, a female GAR auxiliary, accompanied Union veterans on pilgrimages. The Women’s Relief Corps held separate events in which the male veterans participated and mimicked wartime camp life when wives followed marching armies. Often times, the Women’s Relief Corps held bonfires or special events outside the main GAR activities associated with a pilgrimage. The inclusion of the Women’s Relief Corps in pilgrimages by GAR members gave the men a female audience. Inclusion and exclusion of women marked boundaries of male martial showmanship. While women still remained outside the martial aspects of the male centered sphere of the pilgrimage, Union veterans saw the Women’s Relief Corps as an instrumental part in the process. In a way, these activities mirrored the gendered roles played during the wartime experience with women following soldiers to camps.213

African American Union veterans conducted pilgrimages, but not into the South.

Those veterans who served in the United States Colored Troops regiments complicated the reconciliationist tenor of pilgrimages. Because of racism and violence in the former

213 “G.A.R. Elects New Officers,” The Cairo Bulletin, Cairo, Illinois, 19 August 1904, 1. 164 Confederacy, African American GAR members made their pilgrimages only to National

Encampments occurring in northern cities. Pilgrimages to the South became dicey affairs.

Still, African American Union veterans conducted pilgrimages, as long as the site was above the Mason-Dixon Line. Colonel James Lewis, a prominent African American from

Louisiana and state senator is one who made an annual pilgrimage to the GAR National

Encampments. For the 1898 GAR National Encampment, held in Cincinnati, Ohio, Col.

Lewis traveled from Washington, D.C. to the metropolis along the banks of the Ohio

River. Interestingly, Col. Lewis served as the only African American in charge of public improvements in New Orleans, Louisiana after the war. Political friends and foes “alike testify to the thoroughness of his work and the freedom from scandal of his official acts, which, by the way, involved several hundred thousand dollars.” However, no matter Col.

Lewis’ exemplary deeds in New Orleans after the war, he did not travel into the South on pilgrimages to southern locales. African American Union veterans understood the risk involved in traveling below into the region. According to historian Barbara Gannon, while some white GAR members agitated against going south for pilgrimages to encampments, the majority of the organization felt otherwise.214

Aside from examples such as Colonel Lewis, pilgrimages were whites-only affairs. White Union veterans, women’s auxiliary corps, and kin made the pilgrimages either to GAR events or to cities and towns in the South. For the 1914 New York veterans’ Andersonville pilgrimage, the crowd consisted of White veterans and their kin.

At stops in the South, White Confederate veterans and members of the United Daughters

214 “Heard in the Lobbies,” The Times, Washington, D.C., 29 August 1898, 3.; Gannon, Barbara A. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011): 180-185. 165 of the Confederacy (UDC) honored the Union sojourners. Indeed, at a stop in Danville,

Virginia during the Andersonville pilgrimage, a large crowd of Confederate veterans and

UDC folk posed for photographs with the Union veterans. The Whites only journeys into the South solidified the memory making process as one of Whites benefiting Whites.

Ultimately, reconciliation evolved into an understanding between the White veterans and kin of both sides sharing in a shared historical memory of the war.215

Some dignitaries, political officials, and elites accompanied the pilgrims; however, the bulk of the travelers were of the middling sort. For the 1906 Iowa pilgrimage touring the South, for example, Iowa’s governor attended the various events.

Examining the list of “Personnel of the Official Party” for the Iowa expedition south reveals a mixed bag of U.S. and Iowa state senators, judges, Union veterans, men, and women. Some were related to each other by marriage or birth; others related to a deceased Iowa veteran. The Iowa pilgrimage strengthened the importance of the veterans as citizen-soldiers and solidified the middle-class pilgrims as the best exemplars to represent the state and Union veterans.216

Dignitaries and veterans utilized pilgrimage stops to deliver speeches. Often times, the exhortation to preserve the “Union…and the responsibilities of true American citizenship…” rang out to a crowd already enthused from what was said. Other times, the pilgrims witnessed speeches by local dignitaries, U.S. Senators, or veterans themselves.

At a stop in Vicksburg, Mississippi on the 1906 Iowa journey, Captain John F. Merry

215 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 72-73.

216 Abernethy, Alonzo. Dedication of Monuments Erected by the State of Iowa Commemorating the Death, Suffering, and Valor of Her Soldiers on the Battlefields of Vicksburg, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Shiloh and in the Confederate Prison at Andersonville. (Des Moines: Emory H. English, State Printer, 1908): 17-21. 166 gave a rousing speech on Iowa’s sacrifice to the Union effort. In the speech, Merry noted how Iowa troops made saving the Union possible. In a crowd of Iowans mixed with

Vicksburgers, Merry used his platform for some good, old-fashioned boosterism too:

“Iowa has increased in population until today it has more than 2,000,000 of the happiest and most prosperous people on the face of earth. Its commercial, industrial, educational and agricultural development has been phenomenal…” Aside from Merry’s interesting boosterish remarks, most speeches at pilgrimage stops skewed towards the patriotism and citizenship of the living and the dead. Speakers tied the heroism of the fallen to the historicity of the site. In the process, the consecrated ground marked the spot where patriots fought and died. Other times, veterans merely recalled what they experienced. In other words, what the travelers heard ran the gamut of Americanism nation-state pride to merely reminiscences.217

Pilgrims utilized the preeminent transportation technology of the late nineteenth century: trains. Railroad companies practically tripped over each other to attract a pilgrimage’s business. Whether lines ran east-west or north-south, the railroad easily became the main travel apparatus of the pilgrimage. The Michigan Central Railroad ferried GAR Post No. 384 to Buffalo, New York for the 1897 National Encampment. For the 1914 pilgrimage of New York veterans to Andersonville, Georgia, the Pennsylvania

Railroad conveyed the pilgrims south. The Pennsylvania Railroad gave each

Andersonville pilgrim cards indicating “the train and car and berth to which he was

217 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 74-75.; “Dedication of Memorial,” Ottumwa Tri-Weekly Courier, Ottumwa, Iowa, 17 November 1906, 2.; “Emblem for Hoosier Veterans,” The Indianapolis Journal, Indianapolis, Indiana, 8 October, 1892, 2.; “Governor’s Party Returns,” Audubon County Journal, Exira, Iowa, 6 December 1906, 4. 167 assigned.” The Pennsylvania Railroad took diligent care in making sure each veteran possessed a reasonable berth and accommodation. This particular railroad company recognized the money making potential and publicity from the Andersonville pilgrimage.

Pilgrimages readily became huge capitalist enterprises from transportation, lodging, food, and entertainment upon arrival.218

Pilgrims even utilized the automobile in pilgrimages. During the 1904 National

Encampment in Boston, Massachusetts, GAR delegates made a “pilgrimage to Lexington and Concord in automobiles.” In this manner, pilgrims made pilgrimages within pilgrimages. Certainly, visiting the historic sites related to the Revolutionary War tied nicely to the saving of the Union veterans in Blue performed from 1861 – 1865. By visiting Revolutionary War sites, the Union veterans on the mini-pilgrimage attempted to claim their rightful place as warriors of the Republic. In essence, both the pilgrims and transportation industry formed a symbiotic relationship in conducting pilgrimages.219

Sights along the journey marked the uniqueness of a pilgrimage. As Union veterans made their way to National Encampments or further south, they encountered scenery that at times was familiar and other times new. Communities at each stop made sure the veterans felt welcomed and comfortable. At times, cities festooned themselves in bunting and American flags. Other times, local dignitaries and civic boosters met the travelers. Boosters recognized the visiting veterans, family, and dignitaries meant an opportunity to pump their municipality. If the itinerary included stops in the South, the local chamber of commerce and civic leaders made sure their city sparkled for the

218 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 27-28.

219 “Blackmar is Chief,” Perth Amboy Evening News, Perth Amboy, New Jersey, 19 August 1904, 4. 168 visitors. To that end, cities prepared their grandest accommodations for the pilgrims. At a stop in Richmond, Virginia, the New York pilgrims on the 1914 journey to

Andersonville, Georgia stayed at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond. The hotel made pre- arrangements before the travelers arrived, “faithfully carried out and the physical comfort of the entire company was satisfactorily attended to.” The hotel served breakfast in its

“upper corridors and it seemed indeed as if the entire facilities of the great hostelry were at our disposal.” For the pilgrims on the trip to Andersonville, Richmond prepared itself as if royalty were arriving.220

The historical actors involved in a pilgrimage ate well. At overnight stops, Union veterans found themselves treated to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The pilgrimage sponsor footed the bill for the various feasts. Taking care of the pilgrims and making sure their bellies were full further tied the sojourners to the sponsoring state. For the 1897 pilgrimage made by GAR Post No. 384, an elaborate lunch was served at the Genesee

House in Buffalo, New York. Throughout the 1914 pilgrimage to Andersonville, the New

York pilgrims were constantly fed morning, day, and night. While on trains, the pilgrims utilized dining and salon cars for sustenance. The railroad companies and stopping point localities spared no expense in making sure the pilgrims supped. Dining in the South meant the famous “Southern Hospitality.” The objective of these ornate meals was to prove old wounds festered no more. Indeed, the dining of GAR comrades strengthened bonds between them and the local populace where stops occurred. More often than not, local dignitaries or members of the local UDC chapter joined the pilgrims in eating. In a sense, the “breaking of bread” between the pilgrims and former Southern partisans

220 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 28. 169 solidified the bonds of reconciliation. Dining with the former enemy, both male and female, helped assuage old bitterness and meant the time had come to bury the past.221

Pilgrimages to GAR National Encampments included opportunities to interact with local citizens. Indianapolis fashioned itself a “Mecca” for the 1893 National

Encampment held in the city. For the 1897 Buffalo National Encampment, the members of GAR Post No. 384 took in the scenery, including tourist attractions such as Niagara

Falls. The GAR veterans often put on martial demonstrations for the local populace. The members of GAR Post No. 384 marched, “displayed arms,” and conducted parade ground exercises for the 1897 National Encampment in Buffalo. Citizens of Buffalo turned out for the activities and eagerly cheered on the old veterans. Whether in Indianapolis or

Buffalo, the aging Union veterans presented a spectacle that delighted the host city’s citizens.222

The local population, particularly in the South, recognized pilgrimages as an integral part of the reconciliation process. United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and UDC chapters welcomed the pilgrims at each stop in the South. The two Southern organizations aimed to aid Union veterans as they travelled through the region. During the 1914 New York pilgrimage, UCV and UDC chapters adorned Union graves at a small, former prison cemetery in Danville, Virginia. In fact, UCV members in Danville ferried the Union veterans around town in automobiles. The Danville UCV and UDC chapters participated in remembrance activities at the cemetery and displayed “the

221 “History of Buffalo Pilgrimage,” Grand Army of the Republic Detroit Post No. 384, Scrapbook, Box 1, Detroit Public Library.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 34.

222 “Emblem for Hoosier Veterans,” The Indianapolis Journal, Indianapolis, Indiana, 8 October, 1892, 2.; “History of Buffalo Pilgrimage,” Grand Army of the Republic Detroit Post No. 384, Scrapbook, Box 1, Detroit Public Library. 170 heartiest cordiality” towards their visitors. The women of UDC “camps vied with each other to greet us with their blessings on our way.” In Danville, the New York pilgrimage became an exercise in reconciliation.223

The pilgrimages’ historical actors held various reasons as to why they went on the trip. Some members of the expeditions revisited sites and ground they knew as soldiers.

The non-veterans of the entourages exalted in a once in a lifetime trip. For all who embarked on a pilgrimage, whether to a GAR National Encampment or to sites of memory in the South, the travel, the hospitality rolled out at each stop, and the unique itineraries marked an opportunity to bring closure to the war. Trips to locations like

Richmond and Andersonville bookended the memories of the war for the veterans in attendance. Furthermore, visiting old haunts aided in reframing those memories of the war. Speeches at stops helped solidify the veterans as heroes who helped save the

Republic while at the same time reinforcing their sense of patriotism and citizenship in a turbulent time. Those who had not served during the Civil War, experienced different scenery they would not have back home, while gaining an education in what being an

American meant. Utilizing the era’s premiere travel technology made the pilgrimages possible. Without trains, trolleys, and automobiles, pilgrimages could not occur. Finally, individual states funding pilgrimages bound the pilgrims to their respective home state while affirming their relationship with a shared community. Yet, with all these historical processes at play, the main impetus for a pilgrimage was creating historical memory and laying one more plank in the reconciliation bridge.224

223 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 31.

224 Ibid., 31. 171 Crafting Historical Memory and Reconciliation Through the Pilgrimage

More than anything, a pilgrimage served as a vehicle for historical memory creation and an opportunity at reconciliation. As Union veterans crisscrossed the North,

Midwest, and South, they strengthened bonds of fidelity with fellow Union veterans, rewrote historical memory of the war with Southerners, or reconciled with their White, former foes. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the old “Boys in Blue” recognized that time was against them. Pilgrimages became a way to shore up memories of the war and bury bitterness with their former adversaries. At the same time, the Union veterans on a pilgrimage took advantage of the opportunity to play soldier for Northern, and more importantly, Southern audiences. Through martial airs and drills, the two sides came to a common understanding that while they fought for different reasons, they experienced a similar wartime situation. For those conducting a pilgrimage, particularly veterans, the trip provided a fitting historical reframing to their experiences during the war, and the proceeding thirty to fifty years. In essence, pilgrimages were unique opportunities to remember, rewrite the historical record, mourn, and reconcile.225

The ticking life clock in Union veterans furthered the desire for pilgrimages to solidify reconciliation around notions of heroism in battle and shared experiences during the war. As the twentieth century crept forward, fewer and fewer Union veterans were alive to take part in National Encampments and other fraternal activities. Pilgrimages occurred into the twentieth century; however, the pressing desire to solidify the historical memory of the war become paramount. Therefore, desires to make pilgrimages South to visit UCV chapters, as well as sites of memory, emerged. Veterans of both sides in the

225 Ibid., 13-14. 172 war understood that their time to reconcile dwindled the farther the new century advanced. A 1904 newspaper account sounded a warning that GAR membership was perilously low. For as the account stated, veterans of both sides “can only hand down the memory of those days as a heritage to a younger generation…” Pilgrimages permitted the rewriting of memories as long as there were veterans alive to make the journeys.226

Historical memory reframing became a large agenda item of a pilgrimage. In addition, the travels also included overt acts of reconciliation. Pilgrims attending the 1904

GAR National Encampment in Boston, Massachusetts witnessed reconciliation spectacles between the former combatants. The old belligerents marched together and sat together at speeches and public ceremonies. GAR Edward A. Kinsey Post No. 13 invited distinguished former Confederates to Boston to partake in reconciliation activities. The

Southerners invited to the 1904 National Encampment expressed “the deep gratification which exists through the South at the friendly act of a Northern Grand Army post.”

Southerners invited to the 1904 Boston event allowed the former foes to “break bread” in an effort at reconciliation. Sharing a meal healed old wounds and helped reframe shared memories of their collective wartime experiences. The 1914 New York veterans’ pilgrimage to Andersonville, included “program” elements at stops in the South where

“the former combatants” could mend old wounds, such as flower laying on Union graves in cemeteries. Reconciliation served as a driving force of pilgrimages, predominately by the actions of Union veterans when meeting with Confederate veterans.227

226 “No Recruits for the Grand Army,” Dakota Farmers’ Leader, Canton, South Dakota, 11 September 1908, 1.

227 “G.A.R. Encampment Opens at Boston,” The Jackson Herald, Jackson, Missouri, 25 August 1904, 7.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 16. 173 Pilgrimages included rituals of remembrance. These rituals consisted of activities and exercises solidifying the pilgrims’ sense of collective identity. At times, rituals of remembrance only included simple ceremonies such as laying flowers at gravesites.

Other times, the rituals of remembrance became more complex as when Union and

Confederate organizations met and engaged in joint activities like marching, or monument unveilings with politicized speech giving. Thus, rituals of remembrance blurred with reconciliation efforts and memory creation. Pilgrims on their journey often made stops at sites of memory or mourning, such as the aforementioned POW stockades.

During visits to these locations, the travelers engaged in exercises that furthered their connection with the past. These activities ran the gamut of martial parades, decorating graves at a local cemetery, and commiserating over the war with friends and former foes.

The former belligerents’ joint historical memory reframing occurred over meals, joint drills, or simply chatting. At times, the pilgrims gathered at a hall or similar space and listened to speeches by veterans or political dignitaries such as U.S. Senators. All the events and exercises strengthened the bonds of memory of the war, while at the same time consecrating the blood sacrifice of those, from both sides, killed during hostilities.228

One of the most poignant stops of a pilgrimage occurred at cemeteries containing the remains of Union soldiers. At times, a pilgrimage to a local cemetery occurred to

“bedeck the graves of departed soldiers.” Even in localized acts of remembrance, the pilgrimage served as memory vehicle and mourning ritual well into the late nineteenth century. Decoration Day in the North became the preferred day to remember the Union

228 “History of Buffalo Pilgrimage,” Grand Army of the Republic Detroit Post No. 384, Scrapbook, Box 1, Detroit Public Library.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 35, 37, 45. 174 fallen. Usually occurring in late May, Decoration Day allowed veterans and civilians to memorialize the departed soldiers. Pundits pontificated on the importance of honoring the soldierly dead. Often, Decoration Day included orations to the fallen, monument decorating, and adorning the graves of the dead with “earth’s fairest gifts.” The speeches given marked the occasion as one befitting a grateful nation “honoring the patriotism” of those who died in battle. The public pronouncements of U.S. martial valor reinforced

U.S. patriotism, encouraged veneration of elder veterans, pumped up military enlistment, and served as a passive endorsement of U.S. military and imperialistic efforts of the late

1890s.229

In an influential work on military cemeteries, historian George Mosse argued, the national cemetery came about from the “cult of the fallen soldier.” Mosse’s research focused on the formation of German military cemeteries during World War I and after during the Weimar Republic. According to Mosse, national cemeteries reinforced notions of patriotism, sacrifice to the nation-state, and served as an exhortation to the living to honor the martial dead. Deploying Mosse’s framework links the creation of National

Cemeteries in the U.S. following the Civil War to the “cult of the fallen soldier.” Indeed,

Mosse argued the systematic burial of Civil War dead in National Cemeteries created a sequestered space of national worship. Thus, the American National Cemetery system units became sites for the veneration of the “cult of the fallen soldier.” Furthermore,

National Cemeteries’ design principles adhered to the Rural Cemetery Movement discussed in the previous chapter. The use of topography, natural materials, and stone walls meant to elicit in the visitor a communion with nature while eschewing the mass-

229 “Calvary Cemetery Services,” St. Paul Globe, St. Paul, Minnesota, 30 May 1897, 2. 175 produced commodity culture of modernity. The park like setting of a National Cemetery was meant to instruct the visitor to contemplate the sacrifice of those entombed.

Naturally, the National Cemetery System in the U.S. brought home the myths and symbols of sacrifice to the nation-state.230

The inevitability of death drove Union veterans to visit cemeteries, whether more localized, or units of the National Cemetery System. The National Cemetery System emerged in the late 1860s through the efforts of the Union Army’s Chief Quartermaster

General, Montgomery C. Meigs. Meigs believed that Union dead deserved a system of federally supported cemeteries devoted strictly to those who died in the war. The units of the National Cemetery System became veritable “cities of the dead” with the massive numbers of Union casualties contained in each unit. As the twentieth century opened, fewer and fewer GAR members were around to make pilgrimages to the “cities of the dead.” With numbers dwindling in the early twentieth century, GAR members found the units of the National Cemetery System logical destination points for pilgrimages.

Sometimes, the State National Guard escorted the old vets to the state National Cemetery.

If located in the South, the local UCV chapter aided the Union veterans on their sojourn to National Cemetery sites. Once inside the cemetery grounds, the GAR members placed flowers on the graves of their deceased brethren. At times, the pilgrims found small

American flags planted on graves. In a sense, National Cemetery units became de facto locations for rituals of remembrance.231

230 Mosse, George L. “National Cemeteries and National Revival: The Cult of the Fallen Soldiers in Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, No. 1 (January 1979) 1-20.

231 Sammartino, Therese T. A Promise Made – A Commitment Kept: The Story of America’s Civil War Era National Cemeteries. (Washington, D.C.: Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration, 1999): 10-11.; “Memorial Day,” The Cairo Bulletin, Cairo, Illinois, 31 May 1906, 3.; State 176 Monument unveilings also served as termination points for pilgrimages. The immense number of Civil War veterans’ monuments cropping up during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade and a half of the twentieth century propelled pilgrimages. Monument unveilings allowed the local community to honor the sacrifices of the veterans and reinforce notions of patriotism. In addition, monuments buttressed notions of sacrifice to individual states, or the U.S. as a whole. Unveiling a monument to Union veterans brought out a large crowd, as well as members of the GAR.

For the Memorial Day unveiling of the Soldiers and Sailors’ Memorial Monument in

Riverside Park, New York City, a large crowd of Union veterans and citizens witnessed the monument’s unveiling. GAR members from around the United States traveled to New

York City for the monument’s dedication. Flags throughout the city flew at half-mast and bunting adorned buildings around the city. The GAR John A. Dix Post of New York City carried a ceremonial U.S. flag and marched through Manhattan to Riverside Park.

Ceremonies lasted a few hours with the culmination being the monument’s unveiling.

Feelings of patriotism coalesced with memories of those who died in the name of the

Union. In closing remarks, a Mr. Dix uttered, “this great State has always sought to embody in her all that is ideal…” in patriotism and governance. Speeches, such as Mr.

Dix’s, at monument unveilings reinforced fidelity to the nation-state, and the preeminence of American nationalism in the turn-of-the-century United States.232

Like pilgrimages to historical sites, pilgrimages to monument unveilings presented opportunities at reconciliation. At times, Union veterans gathered to witness a

of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 31.

232 “Memorial Day Observances,” New York Tribune, New York, New York, 31 May 1902, 1-2. 177 monument unveiled and listen to speeches by Confederate veterans extolling the virtues of all who fought in the Civil War. At a 1914 monument unveiling in Brooklyn, New

York, New York City Mayor Mitchel made remarks during the ceremony. In his speech,

Mayor Mitchel noted how he “was the son of a Confederate veteran and the nephew of two other Confederates.” Mayor Mitchel showered praise on soldiers of both sides noting, “it took the great war to cement the Union.” The pilgrims in attendance, both

White, and curiously, African American, burst into cheers interrupting Mayor Mitchel a number of times. The spasm of patriotism from both former belligerents demonstrated that monument unveilings presented opportunities for reconciliation. While the monument is no longer extant, the racial composition of the crowd cheering on a son of the South, delivering a monument unveiling speech in the North, meant the reconciliation impulse cut across racial lines.233

In the South, as well, reconciliation flowered around monument unveilings. GAR and UCV members felt the need to reconcile, and monument unveilings provided the opportunity. On the eve of World War I, the aging Civil War veterans of both sides understood the time for achieving reconciliation presented itself. For a 1912 monument unveiling in Columbus, Mississippi, dignitaries from Chicago, along with U.S. Army

National Guard units from Ohio and Fort McPherson, Georgia, attended the event. The fact U.S. military personnel mingling with Civil War veterans at a monument unveiling in the Deep South signaled national reconciliation a close to complete project. The involvement of the military nation-state with the Civil War veterans promoted specific citizenship ideals. In this particular example, the mingling of veterans, and contemporary

233 “G.A.R. Cheers Mayor as Confederate Son,” The Sun, New York, New York, 31 May 1914, 12. 178 U.S. military, personnel solidified the link of service to the nation-state from the Civil

War to the modern serviceman. The Union pilgrims still alive witnessed their memory reframing of the war codified in marble and granite, with clear linkages to sacrifice to the

U.S. nation-state, in a city deeply entwined with secession.234

On battlefields and at historic sites, monument unveilings occurred over many years by numerous organizations, either individual state sponsored or one of the major veterans’ fraternal groups from each side. The monuments sprung up at sites of memory, creating a well-worn patina on the landscape. Pilgrims traveling to historic sites over time witnessed monument unveilings to the memory of those who fought and died at the historic location. Once on site, pilgrims engaged in memory making exercises designed to strengthen the sinews of historical memory. The pilgrims solemnly proceeded to the designated location of the monument. Then, they heard speeches by dignitaries of the individual state sponsor, or federal government. The monument, usually draped in an

American flag, awaited its unveiling. Once the pomp and circumstance concluded, the flag covering the monument was removed and more solemn spectacles occurred. The motif of the exercises included the oft-repeated language of “heroism, sacrifice and patriotism.” The dignitaries honored the pilgrims and then some type of meal, such as barbecue, was served.235

By the 1910s, the number of Union veterans had decreased rapidly. Pilgrimages to cemeteries, or historic sites, either local or in the South, took on urgency. The declining

234 “Outline of Program for the Encampment,” The Columbus Commercial, Columbus, Mississippi, 8 August 1912, 1.

235 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 34-36. 179 rolls of GAR Posts confirmed the sense of urgency. In May 1907, for example, aging

Union veterans made their way to Arlington National Cemetery to mark Memorial Day ceremonies. Only one-sixth of the original membership of D.C.’s GAR Joe Hooker Post were alive to make the journey to the famed hallowed ground. Here the old soldiers mixed with veterans of the Spanish-American War to swap stories, hear eulogies, and decorate graves. If visiting a National Cemetery Unit in the South, UDC and UCV chapters helped the old Union veterans decorate the graves of deceased comrades with flowers and flags. For those Union veterans still amongst the living, the pilgrimage to a

National Cemetery unit became a bucket list item.236

“A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism:” The Andersonville Experience

Visits to urban locales, cemeteries, and monument unveilings were only a fraction of a pilgrimage’s final destinations. Often times, the end point of a pilgrimage was a site of memory or mourning. Historians have dissected Andersonville’s notoriety and its impact on those POWs who came through its gates. Most scholarly production focuses on the attempts of the captives to find meaning in the tragedy they experienced. However, little scholarly production concerns pilgrimages to the infamous Confederate POW stockade. Andersonville saw a flourishing of monumentation and memorial activity during the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century. The monuments that went up, initiated and paid for by individual state entities, honoring Union POWs held at Andersonville also generated a considerable number of pilgrimages to the site.

Those pilgrims visiting southwest Georgia came to a rural location from all points in the

236 “Few Remain,” The Marion Daily Mirror, Marion, Ohio, 31 May 1907, 2.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 31. 180 North. One rail line, the Central of Georgia Railroad, carried pilgrims to Andersonville.

Once there, memories and emotions ran high amongst the pilgrims. Andersonville’s notorious reputation truly made the site one of memory and mourning.237

Andersonville opened operations as a POW camp in February 1864 with the first

500 Union prisoners arriving that month. By March 1864, the population of

Andersonville swelled to 6,488 Union POWs. From the start, the prison was unfinished, poorly managed, and lacked food, water, and equipment. Confederate authorities sited

Andersonville on the Stockade Branch creek for fresh water access; however, the bakery and cookhouse located upstream polluted the small creek rather quickly. By the summer of 1864, contagious diseases, inadequate hospital facilities, poor sanitation, overcrowding, and deficient rations led to rampant illness and death among the prison population. Lack of shelter and supplies, coupled with poor sanitation, compounded the growing death toll. The prison population hit 32,000 men in August 1864. When the prison closed in April 1865, more than 12,000 Union POWs had died.238

The large number of dead from their incarceration at Andersonville forced efforts to establish a National Cemetery unit on the stockade’s grounds after the war. During the prison’s operation, Major Dorence Atwater, a Union prisoner from the 2nd New York

Cavalry, kept the hospital register and managed burial details. During Maj. Atwater’s tenure of managing burials, only one percent of the deceased’s graves were marked

237 Cloyd, Benjamin G. Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010): 2-3; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 35.

238 National Park Service, Southeast Regional Office. Andersonville National Historic Site, Andersonville, Georgia, Cultural Landscape Report. (Northbrook, Illinois: Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., 2015): 25-30. 181 “unknown.” After the war, Union Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs issued

General Order No. 70, establishing a National Cemetery unit at Andersonville. By 1890, the cemetery’s final form and function took shape. Up until World War II, the U.S.

Army, along with the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal, continued work on the cemetery’s management and Andersonville’s subsequent designation as a National

Historic Site. In 1970, the National Park Service took over management of

Andersonville.239

Interestingly, states did not begin monumentation on the Andersonville site until the early twentieth century. In April 1903, Rhode Island dedicated a monument to Rhode

Islanders interred in Andersonville’s National Cemetery Unit. Rhode Island’s governor at the time, Lucius F.C. Garvin, delivered remarks. When the ceremony concluded,

Governor Garvin made a stop in Atlanta as a distinguished guest of Georgia Governor

Terrell. Governor Garvin made the stop separately than the Rhode Island citizens who traveled with him. While the historical record does not include the details of the governors’ meeting, we can surmise a Northern governor paying a visit to a Southern governor during a journey to unveil a monument at the infamous Andersonville site suggested reconciliationist motives. While the former combatants debated the abysmal prison conditions during, and following the war, the meeting of two governors in the early twentieth century signified an attempt at reconciliation, aside from the prison’s equation with horrid POW conditions.240

239 Ibid., 31-42.

240 “The Monument at Andersonville,” The Semi-Weekly Messenger, Wilmington, North Carolina, 5 May 1903, 2. 182 Other Northern states with troops interred at Andersonville ramped up their monumentation efforts as the twentieth century crept forward. In 1904, the Iowa state legislature appropriated $11,000 for a monument to its soldiers who experienced the horrors of Andersonville. In 1905, the State of Michigan allocated $6,000 for a monument to Michiganders who went through Andersonville. The 1907 the Indiana state legislature appropriated $10,000 to a monument for Hoosiers incarcerated at

Andersonville. The flurry of state monument activity at Andersonville signaled the time was nigh to honor those, who either passed through the prison, or were buried there. The sums spent on monuments at Andersonville demonstrated a sense of urgency on the part of state legislatures to mark the site of memory and mourning. Enacting legislative language mentioned the “delicate” and “pathetic” nature of Civil War POW stockades.

The legislative impetus for monumentation at a site like Andersonville, with attendant pilgrimages to the sites, signaled the time had come to memorialize those who lived and died in a complex situation. Those who perished at Andersonville did not die in a soldierly manner. They died as a prisoner, not as a combat casualty. Because of this, monumentation came late to Andersonville, as opposed to battlefields like Shiloh. The

National Cemetery unit at Andersonville received quite a bit of monument activity in the early part of the twentieth century. Therefore, most of the monuments went in and around the National Cemetery at Andersonville.241

241 “Commission Goes to Andersonville,” Audubon County Journal, Exira, Iowa, 13 October 1904, 4.; “Quarter of a Million Saved,” The Owosso Times, Owosso, Michigan, 14 July 1905, 2.; “Monument at Andersonville,” The Richmond Palladium, Richmond, Indiana, 9 March 1907, 2.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 13-15. 183 Pilgrimages to Andersonville coincided with the monument activity occurring in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. For the 1906 unveiling of the Iowa monument at Andersonville, 150 former POWs from the state made the pilgrimage to southwest Georgia. In October 1907, former Connecticut prisoners incarcerated at

Andersonville and members of the Connecticut Monument Commission traveled to the historic site to dedicate a monument to the memory of 314 Connecticut prisoners who died at Andersonville. The Connecticut pilgrims dedicated the monument in the National

Cemetery unit at Andersonville, and then made their return journey back to Hartford,

Connecticut. The pilgrimage experiences of the Iowans and Connecticut folks marked an

Andersonville visit as an end of life need to honor those who did not make it out of the stockade.242

Perhaps the best-documented pilgrimage to Andersonville consisted of the one undertaken by the State of New York for GAR members in 1914. The state chipped in

$20,000 for the pilgrimage, and state monument to the Andersonville dead and survivors.

For $60, survivors could bring guests along for the trip. Over 200 pilgrims trekked to southwest Georgia for the unveiling of a New York monument to the dead and surviving

New Yorkers incarcerated at Andersonville during the war. According to a newspaper account of the expedition, “a wonderful trip” was on the “lips of the two hundred patriotic members” of the Andersonville pilgrimage. In order to make the Andersonville survivors comfortable, New York requisitioned a physician, Dr. Ford (a veteran himself), and a registered nurse, “Miss Julia A. Littlefield, of the Homeopathic Hospital of Albany

242 “Monument at Andersonville,” The Globe-Republican, Dodge City, Kansas, 22 November 1906, 2.; “Andersonville Monument,” The Daily Morning Journal and Courier, New Haven, Connecticut, 24 October 1907, 7. 184 and of the Red Cross Society…” On the night of April 26, 1914, the pilgrims departed

New York City at 9pm via the Pennsylvania Railroad. The party’s accommodations included two trains of Pullman cars with dining cars attached for the five-day/five-night journey. As they departed New York City, the pilgrims made themselves at home in the

Pullman cars for the trip south.243

The first stop on the New York pilgrimage was Richmond, Virginia. The train carrying the pilgrims arrived in Richmond during the early morning hours of April 27th.

After breakfast in Richmond, automobiles and busses conveyed the pilgrims to the

Richmond National Cemetery outside the city. The Richmond National Cemetery unit contained the remains of Union POWs who died while imprisoned in Richmond’s numerous prisons. The pilgrims participated in a memorial service to the 6,529 Union dead within the National Cemetery. After the morning exercises at the cemetery, the pilgrims returned to Richmond with a clear afternoon itinerary. A few of the former

POWs made their way to sites of the former prisons where they were incarcerated (Belle

Island and Libby Prison). Except for a few children curiously watching the pilgrims move around Richmond, the group did not encounter any bystanders or gawkers.244

The second and third stops on the New York pilgrimage were Danville, Virginia and Salisbury, North Carolina. In Danville, the pilgrims made their way to Danville

National Cemetery. The graves of New Yorkers who died in Danville’s prison were festooned with flowers and small New York State Flags. The Danville chapters of the

UCV and UDC greeted the New Yorkers, and all partook in another memorial service.

243 “The Trip to Andersonville,” Belding Banner, Belding, Michigan, 10 June 1914, 11.

244 Ibid.,11.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 28-29. 185 The reconciliationist impulse overtook the pilgrims with the official history of the New

York pilgrimage noting, “our dead were not indifferent to the hearts of the good people among whom they are destined forever to lie.” The train arrived in Salisbury the same day around 4pm. A band of Salisbury Boys met the pilgrims and played music for the travelers. In Salisbury, the New Yorkers visited the National Cemetery there marking the occasion with more memorial services. The Salisbury National Cemetery, “although not large…it has been preserved, as have all the national cemeteries throughout the South, with the greatest care.” At 6pm, the pilgrim’s train departed Salisbury with its next stop

Andersonville, Georgia.245

On April 29, 1914 the New York pilgrims arrived at Andersonville at 8am sharp.

A U.S. military band met the travelers at the station, with one pilgrim remarking, “When

I came here in ’64 they didn’t meet me with a band.” The expedition made its way to the

National Cemetery where the New York state monument awaited unveiling. The weather in southwest Georgia cooperated perfectly for the day, “nature had lavished all her charms to make of that spot, that was once so grim and ruthless, to-day a place of beauty, where trees and lawns, paths and monuments, flowers and flags adorned it.” For the

Andersonville survivors in attendance, the preceding fifty years and governmental efforts at preservation of the historic site brought “cheers for the living and tears for the dead.”

The former prison and its grounds became a site of memory and mourning for the survivors.246

245 Ibid., 30-34.; “The Trip to Andersonville,” Belding Banner, Belding, Michigan, 10 June 1914, 11.

246 Ibid., 11.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 34-35. 186 The New York pilgrims spent April 29th in Andersonville. Speakers gave brief speeches, one by New York U.S. Senator A.J. Palmer, a veteran himself. After a prayer of benediction by a former Andersonville POW, one of the female kin of a former

Andersonville POW, Miss Mackenzie, sang a popular wartime song, “Tenting on the Old

Camp Ground.” Late morning exercises consisted of addresses by ex-Andersonville

POWs with “no others being permitted to participate in them.” The addresses by

Andersonville survivors signified that they shared of bond of memory through their incarceration at the stockade. Andersonville survivor and Commissioner of the pilgrimage, John Mackenzie, delivered an address prior to the monument unveiling. In his speech, he recalled the pain and horrors of his POW experience. Then, he pivoted his speech from reminiscences to reconciliation: “The war is over, thank God, and we are all comrades and we are all friends, and my prayer to Him who rules everything is that we shall ever be comrades and friends.” In the process, Commissioner Mackenzie brushed aside the horrors he witnessed at Andersonville, choosing instead to focus on the healing properties of reconciliation. After 12pm, the unveiling of the New York monument occurred. After a barbecue on the stockade grounds, a cup procured in Richmond “was brought forth…and which was presented” to the Chairman of the Monument Commission as a token “of the love and esteem of his comrades.” The members of the pilgrimage filled the cup with water from Providence Spring, one of the preserved prison water sources.247

At the Andersonville New York monument unveiling, speakers invoked reconciliation. The opening prayer, delivered by Reverend J.H. Robinson, remarked, “we

247 Ibid., 36-37, 111-112. 187 rejoice this day that their sufferings and their dying were not in vain, but though for years there was a rent nation, that is not a rent flag to-day, but the stars and stripes float over us all, and North and South and East and West honor the old flag.” Secretary of the New

York Monument Commission, Joseph L. Killgore, carried on the reconciliation theme.

According to Secretary Killgore, “the feeling of the ex-Confederates should tell to all of us that the war is over and that the sanctity of our flag is safe; that its future is secure, and that no hand, whether domestic or foreign, can ever be successfully raised against it.”

Applause met Secretary Killgore’s admonition.248

After the official ceremonies, the Andersonville survivors milled about the stockade grounds trying to locate spots where they had once slept. Memories of their time at Andersonville flooded over the ex-POWs. As they mingled about the preserved historic site, the Andersonville survivors became overcome with emotion. Some wept, while others stood in silence taking in the scenery. The ex-POWs reached a zenith of numen seeking, transcending the present and communing with the past. Even though that past was one of horror and privation, the affective qualities of the Andersonville site overcame many of the former POWs. The women’s GAR auxiliary, the Women’s Relief

Corps, along for the pilgrimage, aided the old veterans in their emotional state. The women took on the role of consoler when emotions failed the Andersonville POWs. After the unveiling of the monument in the National Cemetery, the U.S. Army band present played “America.” The playing of a nationalistic tune finalized the process of transformation, from merely survivors of Andersonville, to individuals accorded their rightful place as worthy citizen-soldiers. Finally, after a prayer of dedication and a

248 Ibid., 87, 96. 188 benediction, a lone bugle sounded “Taps,” the proceedings closed for the day and the monument “was left in the care of the nation forever.”249

The New York pilgrims left Andersonville on the evening of April 29th. The return itinerary included a stop on April 30th at Chickamauga National Battlefield with a short stop at Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The entire party of pilgrims drove through the Chickamauga battlefield in automobiles. After touring Chickamauga, the automobiles ferried the group to Chattanooga and Lookout Mountain. The travelers stopped at each monument marking where New Yorkers had fought during General

Sherman’s drive on Atlanta in the summer of 1864. For the trip up Lookout Mountain, the pilgrims exited the automobiles and took special trolleys up the mountain. The highlight of the stay in Chattanooga/Lookout Mountain was the New York Peace

Monument.250

The New York pilgrims began their journey back to New York City on the evening of April 30th. Washington, D.C. was the next stop. One train arrived earlier than the second, which gave the pilgrims on the early arriving train a few hours in the U.S. capital. Once the second train finally made its stop in D.C., both trains made the final run to Pennsylvania Station in New York City. They arrived in New York City together on

May 2, 1914. The pilgrims passed from car to car saying their “good-byes” and then all

249 “The Trip to Andersonville,” Belding Banner, Belding, Michigan, 10 June 1914, 11.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 37.

250 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 38. 189 dispersed into the New York night. In total, the pilgrimage to the “shrines of patriotism” covered 2,500 miles with no accidents and no discomfort to any of the pilgrims.251

The New York pilgrimage demonstrated an act of memory with a kernel of reconciliation mixed in. During speeches at the Richmond National Cemetery, speakers extolled the virtues of both Federal and Confederate. Both sets of veterans shared a common bond of sacrifice, though they fought for different reasons. The feelings elicited by reconciliation brought the former foes to a common ground eschewing the real reasons for the war. No longer did animosity exist between the two sides. Indeed, the visits to cemeteries and battlefields, such as those around Richmond, “soldiers of North and South lay across each other in one red burial, when we stand as we do to-day upon fields now humming with the sounds of peace amidst these monuments marking their last resting- place for patriot pilgrims.” Certainly, historical memory was at play in Richmond and further on in the pilgrimage; however, reconciliation between the former combatants was not far from the minds of the pilgrims in attendance. The inclusion of Blue and Grey in the memorialization process marked “patriots under one flag.”252

At the stops in Danville, Virginia and Salisbury, North Carolina, the mayors of both towns spoke to the pilgrims. Each mayor echoed the same refrain: the burial of all animosities and antagonisms from the war. The New York pilgrims heartily applauded each statement of reconciliation. The Danville mayor went further. He remarked, “for among those names recorded in history there is not one entitled to more praise and credit

251 “The Trip to Andersonville,” Belding Banner, Belding, Michigan, 10 June 1914, 11.; State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 38.

252 Ibid., 46-47. 190 than these who silently sleep in our town and whose souls, we trust, have found peace in the better world.” It helped that the Danville mayor uttering reconciliationist tones also served as the Commander of the Danville UCV chapter. The Salisbury mayor opened the city’s “buildings and our streets and our parks and our homes…we all welcome you.”

Times certainly had changed in Danville and Salisbury, both locations of great suffering for the pilgrims in attendance.253

The organizers of the Andersonville pilgrimage took the stance that through a bond of military sacrifice, the New York pilgrims were indelibly linked to the people of the South. Both parties shared in Mosse’s cult of the fallen soldier. The blood sacrifice entombed in National Cemeteries dotting the way to Andersonville signified more than historical memory bonding the two sides together. Mnemonic devices might go up in cemeteries and around historic sites, such as Andersonville, but the act of pilgrimage in the waning years of their lives connected the ex-POWs to the White Southern populace and landscape. The hospitality the New Yorkers encountered on the journey to southwest

Georgia showed that a shift in perception between “Rebel” and “Yank” evolved in the fifty years since the end of the war. Participants insisted that both sides contained “brave men” no “matter whether they wore the blue or the gray.” For the Andersonville survivors, kin, and Southerners encountered along the way, the war was over and the remaining social divisions and issues of the war were neatly avoided and erased.254

“The War Is Over and with It Ceased All Anger and Hate”

253 Ibid., 61, 67.

254 Ibid., 125. 191 Pilgrimages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether to GAR

National Encampments, or South to sites of memory and mourning, served the dual function of historical memory vehicle and reconciliation procedure. From a historical memory standpoint, pilgrimages made by Union veterans permitted the old soldiers an opportunity to experience a new locale while commiserating with those who shared a similar wartime experience. The travel and shared sight-seeing along a pilgrimage strengthened the veterans’ bonds of camaraderie. Once at their “Mecca,” or final destination, activities furthering the bonds of memory ran the gamut of martial exercises to campfires to memorialization exercises. The pilgrimage morphed a religious activity into a secular one aimed a memory making. Historical memory was not the only element at play. Once in southern territory, and commiserating with former foes, the pilgrims reframed their historical memories of the war on common ground allowing the

Confederacy to dictate the terms of the peace. While the North won the war, the South won the peace.255

Reconciliation also figured prominently in pilgrimages. The most obvious reconciliation pieces were pilgrimages to sites in the South. At stops along the way to cities, cemeteries, or historic sites, like Andersonville, numerous speeches extolling the shared brotherhood of the former combatants occurred. These occasions did not merely come from the lips of boosterish Southerners. Northern dignitaries and Union veterans uttered reconciliation. Even pilgrimages to GAR National Encampments or monument unveilings in Northern cities, reconciliation echoed reverberantly in public pronouncements. According to one pundit, “the soldier boys in blue, resting in the same

255 “Emblem for Hoosier Veterans,” The Indianapolis Journal, Indianapolis, Indiana, 8 October, 1892, 2. 192 graveyard with the boys in gray, were parted in life; they are united in death.” The end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century zeitgeist permitted reconciliation to flower. Through acts of pilgrimage, the pilgrims, whether crisscrossing the North or heading South, felt the time necessary to mend the festering wounds from the war.256

The idea of pilgrimages began to peter out as the war’s fiftieth anniversary passed. By 1915, fewer and fewer veterans were alive to compose a pilgrimage. Those still living did not have the faculties and capacity to take an extended journey to Northern or Southern locales. Besides, war in Europe and the U.S.’s role in that conflagration consumed the minds of Americans. The old veterans of a nineteenth century war just did not command the attention they once did. However, that is not to say the Civil War did not capture the imagination of Americans. The war did and it came to life in a new mass media form born in the early twentieth century. If historical memory and reconciliation felt faded with the passing of the Civil War generation, it found new breath through cinema. From 1915 on forward, the memory of the war and its interpretation became a

Hollywood sensation. From cinema, new American generations came to understand the war through the designs of directors, producers, actors, and actresses. Indeed, the Civil

War became big box office bonanzas for the cinematic industry. The memory of the war lived on through the “silver screen.”

256 State of New York Andersonville Monument Dedication Commission. A Pilgrimage to the Shrines of Patriotism. (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1916): 125. 193 Chapter 5

“After All Tomorrow is Another Day:” Casting Memory of the Civil

War, Reconstruction, and the South Through Cinema

The headline blazed: “EXTRA EXTENDED ENGAGEMENT OF THE

GREATEST AMERICAN PLAY!” The date was April 16, 1916. While war raged in

Europe, the U.S. public attended movie theaters in droves. For $.25 to $2.00, depending on preferred time and seating, movie theater attendees could experience the “25 Piece

Symphony Orchestra” attached to the “greatest American play.” Just a day prior to the

16th, “hundreds turned away” for a Saturday showing of the film. The “historic and dramatic merits, which are the wonder of the world” just had to be seen. If the merits of the film did not hook the audience, the film in question “will make a better American of you!” The hubbub and brouhaha over said film elicited the same advertising ploys across the United States. In the early stages of cinema, this was a show of epic proportions. The film in question? D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.257

Spaces of memory and commemorative landscapes, along with pilgrimages, are only part of the creation of Civil War historical memory in the first forty years of the twentieth century. As the Civil War generation passed from the scene, the forging of historical memory of the war fell to a younger generation, one that grew up with stories from parents and grandparents about the war. Those passed on stories found their way into various modes of cultural production. One vehicle was cinema. The medium of film

257 The Birth of a Nation Advertisement, Evening Capital News, Boise, Idaho, 16 April 1916, 2. 194 helped forge how Americans understood the Civil War and Reconstruction. This chapter explores how two films, Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), helped create a lasting impression of the war and Reconstruction. Cinema, especially by the

1939 release of Gone with the Wind, became how most Americans interacted with and learned of the Civil War. Gone with the Wind played a deep role in forging the

“moonlight on magnolias” myth concerning the antebellum South, the war, and

Reconstruction. In the process, Hollywood began to define the historical memory of the war while writing out of the historical record the agency African Americans displayed in fighting for the Union during the war, and their perceptible social gains made after the war. Cinema provided a unique opportunity to shape perceptions of the war and

Reconstruction. For a few bucks, Americans consumed the war and its aftermath through

Hollywood’s interpretation. By 1940, Americans understood the Civil War and

Reconstruction through the lens of Hollywood productions. The cultural production

Tinsletown put forth during the first forty years of the twentieth century far exceeded anything commemorative landscapes, monuments, or reunions could accomplish.

Because of this, the historical record of the Civil War and Reconstruction warped significantly. The reimagining of the war on the Silver Screen substituted mythology for actual fact of the war’s causes and outcomes. Hollywood’s imaginative rendering of the war and the twelve years after usurped historical production concerning the events of the two periods. Thus, Americans came to understand the Civil War and Reconstruction through a medium that was accessible beyond the confines of any other type of interpretation.

Setting the Scenery: The South in Flux During the First Thirty Years of the Twentieth Century

195

During the waning years of the nineteenth century, Southern boosters latched onto a sanitized version of the northern urban-industrial revolution. Post-Reconstruction

Southern leaders, in both business and politics, appealed to northern goodwill and northern pocketbooks. Appearing before the New England Society of New York City in

December of 1886, Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, sung a song of an industrializing South that the northern businessmen in attendance found quite appealing.

In his speech, Grady extolled the virtues of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society that possessed great potential through low labor costs. According to Grady, the:

“New South is enamored of her new work. Her soul is stirred with the breath of a new life…She is thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity. As she stands upright, full-statured and equal among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanded horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because, through the inscrutable wisdom of God, her honest purpose was crossed and her brave armies were beaten.”

Grady laid forth the potentiality of the South as an industrial-urban investment opportunity. For the men in attendance at the New England Society of New York City,

Grady’s grandiose vision was music to their ears. Labor problems throughout the North prior to Grady’s speech galvanized Northern businessmen to find a cheaper, less confrontational business climate. The New South, with its affordable labor, natural resources, and burgeoning industrial capacity provided a siren song. The growing cities of the South drew their labor base from the region; thus, Northern investors did not contend with immigrants harboring radical labor ideas. Furthermore, cities such as

Richmond, Atlanta, and Birmingham, provided excellent rail access, growing heavy industrial bases, and affordable, chic suburban locations. In essence, the New South

196 Grady trumpeted could provide the amenities of a Northern metropolis without the headaches associated with massive urbanization.258

In his New York City speech, Grady broached the issue of the “color line” in his vision of the New South. “What of the negro?” he asks. Towards this end, Grady expounded further:

“Let the record speak to the point. No section shows a more prosperous laboring population than the negroes of the South, none in fuller sympathy with the employing and landowning class. He shares our school fund, has the fullest protection of our laws, and the friendship of our people. Self-interests, as well as honor, demand that he should have this. Our future, our very existence, depend upon our working out this problem in full and exact justice.”

For African Americans in the South, Grady’s words rang hollow. Since Federal troops departed the region in 1876, the African American population steadily lost ground legally, socially, and economically. For boosters like Grady, white washing the “color line” made good business sense. If he had to fib a little on race matters in the region to drive northern investment, so be it. By the turn-of-the-century, the South had clamped down on African American civil rights and liberties. Jim Crow was in full swing and

Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 crystallized the legal codes of Jim Crow. The Federal government abandoned the black population in the South, while Southern state governments brutally imposed voting and racial segregation rendering African Americans in the region second-class citizens. Compounding the racial tension in the region was

White Southerners’ imposition of Black subservience through acts of deference.

Challenge this unwritten code, and African Americans faced the threat of violence and

258 Grady, Henry W, “New South Speech to New England Society of New York City, 1886” pulled from Fink, Leon, Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993): 104-107; Edward, Ayers L. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2007): 55-56. 197 the specter of lynching (not to mention the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan running around the southern countryside). A half century after the end of slavery, most African

Americans lacked the citizenship rights and meager economic opportunities that Whites enjoyed. Thus, in Grady and his fellow Southern boosters’ estimation, the South was a

White enterprise trying to bring White investment to the region.259

Myth and imagination drove most of the New South mantra. The region hitched its horse to the unqualified expectations of commercial and editorial boosters. Designed to lead the South out of poverty and backwardness held over from the Antebellum period, the New South campaign nearly succeeded through drawing thousands of converts from both the North and the South. The promise of a South of abundance never really materialized. The New South spokesmen, such as Grady, propounded, and widely spread a myth of success. By the 1910s, the region predominately found itself the poorest and least economically progressive region in the United States. If New South boosters failed to concretely change the economic and social conditions of the region, then possibly romanticism and memory would fill the New South’s project objectives.260

By 1915, the historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction had undergone a profound transformation. The bitterness of the war and its aftermath shifted with reunions, joint encampments, and the establishment of spaces of memory on the old battlefields from the end of the war through the 1890s. In conjunction, the romanticism of reunion captured the public imagination both North and South. In the project of reunion

259 Grady, Henry W, “New South Speech to New England Society of New York City,” pulled from Fink, Leon, Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993): 105; Diner, Steven J. A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998): 125.

260 Gaston, Paul M. The New South Creed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1970): 189-207. 198 and reconciliation, bitterness was sloughed off for a neatly packaged historical memory of the war. As the old combatants began passing from the scene, cultural production stepped up to demonstrate a united and unified country. The new leisure technology of cinema held promise of providing a platform from which to show how the once divided and contentious regions had once again joined hands. In addition, the new medium of film provided a vehicle for writers and directors to shape public perceptions regarding the war, Reconstruction, and race. Film became a way to “teach history by lightning.”

Tinsletown Reimagines the War: D.W. Griffith, Race, and The Birth of a Nation

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Hollywood turned to war related content as a moneymaking vehicle. Early films also impacted how Americans formed memories of war. The movie industry’s impact in producing memories of wars cannot be understated. Since the advent of the medium, Hollywood has turned to war to not only sell tickets, but to also shape perceptions of conflicts. The Civil War was no different.

Around 1915, the cinema industry began cashing in on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

That year saw Thomas Dixon’s racist novel, The Clansmen, interpreted for the silver screen. The film version, The Birth of a Nation, advanced the Lost Cause narrative at the expense of African Americans.261

Dixon’s sentimental novel appeared in 1905 to considerable fanfare and presentation as a stage play throughout the South. Dixon dedicated the novel, “To the

261 Prior to World War I, Hollywood explored the Civil War through short films. Thomas Ince’s fifty- minute The Battle of Gettysburg debuted in 1913 before a raucous audience in New York’s Grand Opera House. Ince’s film stood as the longest and most expensive film devoted to the conflict until 1915: Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 42. 199 memory of a Scotch-Irish leader of the South, my Uncle, Colonel Leroy McAfee, Grand

Titan of the Invisible Empire Ku Klux Klan.” Dixon went further with his theme: “How the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old Scotland, went forth under this cover and against overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon’s death, and saved the life of a people, forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race.” Dixon pulled no punches in suggesting that the South’s struggle was a racial epic, involving white Southerners against a common, ancestral enemy – the Black population of the region.262

Director of The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith, riffed his cinematic production from the popularity of minstrelsy in the nineteenth century. Even well into the twentieth century, White audiences understood the performative nature of minstrelsy to prop-up their notions of “whiteness.” According to American Studies scholar, Michael H. Epp, the power of minstrelsy to capture the attention of White audiences laid in the potential of

African American stereotypes to influence the discourse of race in mass-audience stage, or film portrayals. Through White actors applying burnt cork to their faces in mimicking the blackness of African Americans, the white actors could mime Black actions without actually being “black.” Performing as a “coon” on stage, or film, allowed White actors to further the cleavage between the races, in essence playing to the White audience’s basest desires to be “white.” Minstrelsy, as Griffith deployed it in Birth of a Nation, permitted the director to tap into latent undercurrents in American mass-audience entertainment’s understandings of African Americans. Their behaviors and actions are the product of

262 Dixon, Thomas. The Clansman. (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905): Introduction without page number; Carter, Everett, “Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of Birth of a Nation,” American Quarterly 12, No. 3 (Autumn, 1960): 348. 200 “whiteness,” that is the mimicking of Blacks props up white supremacy and relegates

African Americans to animalistic status. Griffith deftly used the minstrelsy stereotypes in creating “blackness” versus “whiteness” in the Birth of a Nation.263

Aside from minstrelsy stereotypes, The Birth of a Nation adhered to Dixon’s novel closely. The Clansmen told the story of Thaddeus Stevens’ “bold attempt to

Africanize the ten great states of the American Union…” Furthermore, the novel interpreted the history of Reconstruction as Stevens’ vengeance upon the South motivated partly by economics (the destruction of his Pennsylvania iron mills by Robert

E. Lee’s Confederate Army), and partly by religion (in Stevens’ parlor hung a picture of a nun because he had always given liberally to an orphanage run by a Roman Catholic sisterhood). However, according to Dixon, the main motivating factor in Stevens’ revenge was lust: his housekeeper was “a mulatto woman, a woman of extraordinary animal beauty” who became through her power over Austin Stoneman (the fictional name for Stevens) “the presiding genius of National legislation.” Stoneman’s instruments in the

South were described in animalistic terms, demonstrating that the Civil War was fought to defend White civilization against the barbaric and the bestial. Silas Lynch, the carpetbagger in the novel, “had evidently inherited the full physical characteristics of the

Aryan race, while his dark yellowish eyes beneath his heavy brows glowed with the brightness of the African jungle.” The African American leader, Aleck, had a nose “broad and crushed flat against his face and jaws strong angular, mouth wide, and lips thick, curling back from rows of solid teeth set obliquely…”264

263 Epp, Michael H., “Raising Minsterelsy: Humour, Satire and the Stereotype in The Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled,” Canadian Review of American Studies 33 (2003): 17-23.

264 Dixon, Thomas. The Clansmen. (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905): 57, 90, 95, 93, 248-249. 201 The White, plantation owning family, the Camerons, were the principal heroes of the novel. Gus, a renegade Freedman, ravaged the sixteen-year old daughter of the

Cameron clan, Marion Cameron, who was a “universal favorite…” that embodied “the grace, charm, and tender beauty of a Southern girl…” Silas Lynch attempted to rape Elsie

Stoneman, betrothed of one of the Cameron boys, Ben Cameron. The violation of the two

White women symbolized a figurative rape of the South by the North. The figurative, and literal, ravishments by Freedmen and their carpetbagger friends provoked the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, which according to Dixon, “…the world had not seen since the

Knights of the Middle Ages rode on their Holy Crusades.” The Klan saved Elsie, revenged Marion, brought dismay to the Freedmen, the carpetbaggers, and their scalawag allies, and in the final stanza of the novel, “…Civilisation has been saved, and the South redeemed from shame.”265

David Wark (D.W.) Griffith directed The Birth of a Nation. Griffith was a

Kentuckian and a firm believer in the righteousness of Southern nationalism during the war, as well as the ideology of the Lost Cause. Griffith grew up hearing stories told by his grandfather, who served as a colonel in a Confederate Kentucky cavalry brigade.

According to historian Paul Gardullo, The Birth of a Nation, “crystallized the ethos of white supremacy, racial radicalism, and nativist nostalgia” that grew entrenched in the two decades after Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Griffith understood the milieu he worked in: an environment of legal segregation throughout the South, a resurgence of racial terror in the region, and the re-inscription of white supremacy through the pseudo-scientific language of Social Darwinism. Griffith’s cinematic epic attempted to homogenize and fix

265 Ibid., 254, 171, 316, 374. 202 the nation during a moment of political and social instability. By 1915, the United States had emerged as an imperial power, an industrial behemoth, and experienced massive immigration to its shores. Thus, The Birth of a Nation served as a vehicle to not only reunite a still fractured nation, but also as a discourse on racial relations from

Reconstruction forward.266

As explained earlier, Lost Cause ideology consciously sought to establish a retrospectively favorable account of the Confederate people and their short-lived nation.

Among other points, ex-Confederates denied the importance of slavery in triggering secession, blamed sectional tensions on abolitionists, celebrated antebellum Southern slaveholding society, portrayed White Confederates as united in waging their war for independence, extolled the gallantry of Confederate soldiers, and attributed Northern victory to sheer weight of numbers and materiel. On one hand, there is the history of the war, the account of what in fact happened. On the other there is what historian, Gaines

Foster calls the “Southern interpretation” of the event. Touching almost all aspects of the war’s reasons, the Lost Cause originated in Southern rationalizations after the conflict. It then spread to the North and, by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, became a national phenomenon. In popular culture at the turn-of-the-century, the Lost

Cause represented the national memory of the Civil War; it substituted for the actual history of the war.267

266 Gardullo, Paul, “Spectacles of Slavery: Pageantry, Film and Early Twentieth-Century Public Memory,” Slavery & Abolition 34, No. 2 (2013): 231.

267 Gallagher, Gary W. and Nolan, Alan T., Eds. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000): 4-12. 203 In the film, the Old South is epitomized by a social structure that existed no more, and certainly never did. “Kindly masters,” cheerful loyal slaves, and genteel white people inhabited the South on the eve of the Civil War. During one particular pre-war scene, a

Northern family (the Stonemans) visiting a South Carolina plantation (the Camerons) were shown the slave quarters where contented slaves perform exaggerated dances.

Storm clouds brewing over an idyllic South marked Lincoln’s inauguration. The film portrayed heroic Confederate soldiers battling to the last ration of parched corn, only defeated by the materiel abundance of the Union Army, and its inexhaustible supply of manpower. Even in a climactic scene where one of the protagonists of the movie, Colonel

Ben Cameron, charged a Union line, Federal soldiers are shown cheering on the

Confederate’s desperate attempts to penetrate Union defenses. This particular scene is a nod to reconciliation and the shared historical memory of the war. Furthermore, Griffith ripped his imagery straight from the pages of Lost Cause ideology. The Old South of the film was a picturesque landscape torn asunder by the ravages of Union war mongering and miscegenation. Griffith portrayed African Americans, whatever their station, as dolts, schemers, and general charlatans. On the other hand, the bravery of Confederate soldiers received a hero’s embrace by both combatants.268

Griffith’s film followed Dixon’s novel faithfully in plot, character, motivation and theme, and became a visualization of what scholar Carter Everett termed the “Plantation

Illusion.” The Plantation Illusion encompassed the belief in the Antebellum Period as a golden age of the South, an age in which feudal agrarianism provided the good life for wealthy, leisured, kindly, owners surrounded by loyal, happy, obedient slaves. In 1905,

268 Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 44-45. 204 Dixon fostered the Plantation Illusion that the South, before the Civil War, was ruled by an, “aristocracy founded on brains, culture, and blood,” whose dream for the region was tainted by “the Black curse, which today could be the garden of the world.” Griffith’s and

Dixon’s racism merged seamlessly in the film. Slavery sowed the seeds of disunion between North and South when it reached the shores of America and spread southward.269

A corollary of the Plantation Illusion, a necessary counterbalance, is the corresponding vision of the North as a land of coldness, harshness, and mechanical inhumanity. In the parlance of Dixon and Griffith, the North represented the head of the nation, while the South its warm, human heart. Dixon’s novel and The Birth of a Nation expressed the North in commercial terms; the South an idyllic landscape tended by chivalrous Whites and contented slaves. Indeed, The Clansman emphasized the contrast between the warm South and the cold North through rechristening Thaddeus Stevens as a man of stone who is the villain of the novel and the movie. The Stevens of The Birth of a

Nation, Austin Stoneman, moved angularly and mechanically. His house and dress were gloomy, dark, and cold, as opposed to the warmth and lightness of Southern plantation dress and scenes.270

In commenting on Reconstruction, Griffith presented scenes to illustrate how badly southern African Americans behaved after the passage of the Thirteenth

Amendment, when they were freed and men given the vote as well as the passage of the

Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, both of which granted protean civil rights to

269 Carter, Everett, “Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of Birth of a Nation,” American Quarterly 12, No. 3 (Autumn, 1960): 350.

270 Ibid., 351. 205 African Americans. These scenes contain large numbers of Black actors, along with

Whites in blackface, aggressively groveling and grimacing – constructing what cinema scholar Michelle Faith Wallace termed the “Myth of the Black Brute.” This portrayal of

Black abnormality stipulated that Freedmen, and by extension all African American men, were schemers bent on defiling White womanhood, a fear of Southern White men. In addition, the “Black Brute” acted childlike in his mannerisms and behavior. According to ethno-geographer Eric Olund, the childlike and sexualized behaviors of the African

Americans in the film solidified their standing as something to be fear and tamed. The racial displacements of Black Americans in Birth of a Nation furthered their “otherness.”

In addition, this animalistic state marked African American masculinity as a fear of

White America. In the same vein, freed slaves in the film throw down their sacks in the cotton fields to dance and frolic all day when granted emancipation. Black members of the South Carolina state legislature, where the action took place, sit with their bare feet on their desks while swilling whiskey. African Americans sold their votes or were simply unable to comprehend what voting meant. In the film, African Americans demonstrated with picket signs demanded mixed marriages.271

Many of the White characters in the film hold privileged positions. The film’s

African American characters are denied moments of normality. In other words, the Black characters are defined and limited by their inevitable and inherent excesses. Physical motions of White characters in the film are characterized by horizontality, meaning they are always standing straight as opposed to hunched over, and displayed general

271 Wallace, Michelle Faith, “The Good Lynching and ‘The Birth of the Nation:’ Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow,” Cinema Journal 43 No. 1 (Autumn, 2003): 93.; Olund, Eric, “Geography Written in Lightning: Race, Sexuality, and Regulatory Aesthetics in The Birth of a Nation,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 No. 4 (2013): 927-929. 206 purposefulness. The motions of Black characters were denoted by general frivolity and wastefulness. Therefore, virtually all the action by Black characters in The Birth of a

Nation seemed excessive, whether that excess derives from mindlessness, lechery, or a devotion to White Southerners and their cause.272

In the film, Griffith related Whites to Blacks as “others,” as representatives of what sociologist Joyce Ladner describes as the stereotype of a “disorganized, pathological, and aberrant group.” Essentially, the African American characters in The

Birth of a Nation are projections of deep-seated fears White Southerners held. The impression of “otherness,” which was further highlighted by the fact that all the major

Black roles were played by White actors in heavy blackface, gives rise to the comic relief of African Americans as childlike. During the Reconstruction period of the film, when the Southern world seemed morally inverted, Black “otherness” was no longer containable. The contented, shuffling “darkies” of the Antebellum Period gave way to mindless loafers, vicious schemers, and violent rebel rousers.273

Griffith wanted his movie to move in two directions: the first, and most obvious direction, was that of an epic; the second, and more subtle direction, is what scholar

Everett Carter termed “symbolic realism.” Griffith desired to create an epic stemming from his understanding that great epics involved the destiny of races and nations, a nod to

Dixon’s hint that the South’s struggle was part of an Aryan saga. In both The Birth of a

Nation and the novel, the Klan performed as part of an Aryan tradition. Griffith went further than Dixon in the movie. In one particular scene, a mob of African American

272 Gallagher, Brian, “Racist Ideology and Black Abnormality in the Birth of a Nation,” Phylon 43, No. 1 (1st Quarter, 1982): 70.

273 Ibid., 71. 207 soldiers attacked embattled Whites. The Klan came to the rescue in an epic manner.

Before arriving to save the day, Klan members are shown partaking of a primitive barbaric rite. They dip their flag in the blood of a White virgin that died in a previous scene before they ride out to avenge her and the besieged Caucasians.274

According to Everett Carter, Griffith deployed symbolic realism to bring forth an apparent imitation of actuality that leads to symbolic or representational meaning of the apparent reality. Symbolic realism was effective in the portrayal of either deep psychological, or universal meanings. During The Birth of a Nation, numerous examples of symbolic realism abound: a cart versus a carriage as symbols of feudal levels of

Southern society; Stoneman’s mechanical inclinations representing the coldness of an industrialized North; and, a view of an army winding past a mother and child symbolizing the agony and displacements of war. Griffith aligned his symbolic realism off early European and American directors. However, Griffith succeeded in deploying this cinematic strategy to drive home the emotional bunker-mentality of the South.275

The Birth of a Nation was also a clear-cut attempt to unite the White populace of the North and South in dealing with the “Negro Question” during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Geographer Eric Olund postulated that the film’s drawing power for White audiences laid in the skewed historical narrative of the war and Reconstruction.

Furthermore, for Olund, the White and Black bodies on the Silver Screen served as clear demarcation zones for differentiation. The public, political Black bodies in the

Reconstruction South Carolina legislature showed zeal and excess; the White bodies, in

274 Carter, Everett, “Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of Birth of a Nation,” American Quarterly 12, No. 3 (Autumn, 1960): 350-356.

275 Ibid., 356-357. 208 and outside the legislature room, demonstrated purposefulness, decorum, and respect. In addition, as Olund laid out, the “radical” African American politicians in the

Reconstruction South, as Griffith told the story, represented all the worst ambitions of a former race held in bondage. In essence, the Black bodies on the Silver Screen became spaces to write into effect why segregation was needed in the region, and unite the White population of each region in proscribing African Americans to second-class citizenship.

But, Griffith did not stop at segregation. The Birth of a Nation meant to be a historically accurate epic of the war and Reconstruction, and a bit more.276

Griffith contended that the film was anti-war in nature. According to the director,

The Birth of a Nation provided “one of the most realistic sermons against the horrors of war that could be preached.”277 In March 1915, prior to the film’s New York premiere,

Griffith tied the film to the current conflagration in Europe. In his mind, Griffith felt that the war in Europe would conclude much like the American Civil War did: unresolved issues regarding war and peace. To wit, Griffith proclaimed, “Peace after war is not real peace. Hatred, malice and bitterness, direct results of the long four years’ struggle, were apparent in the relations of the North and South for twenty years after the actual cessation of hostilities.”278 Griffith gave his reasoning in an effort to make the film a legitimate piece of art and possibly brace for backlash from the African American press. And, backlash he got.

276 Olund, Eric, “Geography Written in Lightning: Race, Sexuality, and Regulatory Aesthetics in The Birth of a Nation,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103 No. 4 (2013): 927-933.

277 Riverside Enterprise, 2 January 1915.

278 Lenning, Arthur, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Film History 16, No. 2, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (2004): 118. 209 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) caught wind of the film’s limited release in Riverside, California in January 1915. The organization wanted the film halted because of its racist content and because the film put in graphic and highly dramatic terms certain issues, such as lynching and racial discord.

The NAACP demanded that the Los Angeles City Board of Censors ban the film before its premiere on grounds that its release would incite racial animosity and possible riots.

The NAACP’s protests went unheeded. The Board of Censors demanded a few unimportant modifications to the film and left Griffith to open the show in Riverside.

However, the NAACP made one more attempt at getting the film banned in Los Angeles.

They convinced the Los Angeles City Council to instruct the Chief of Police to suppress the film. One of the picture’s investors, W.H. Clune, defended the film on the grounds that it “is more rightfully speaking, the story of The Birth of a Nation, or if you choose to call it so, The Rebirth of a Nation.” He went further in explaining that opposition to the film was based on a “misunderstanding of the great historical purpose of the picture, which is not an attack on any race or section of the country. It is a most powerful sermon against war and in favor of brotherly love of all sections and nations.”279 While the

NAACP rightly pegged The Birth of a Nation as racially incendiary, Griffith and his supporters adhered to the film’s antiwar line.

The early stages of the NAACP’s fight over the Birth of a Nation pivoted on the harmful nature of the film to race relations in not just the South, but also on the exclusion of African Americans in the crafting of historical memory of the war and Reconstruction.

Since the end of Reconstruction, African Americans, particularly GAR members and

279 Ibid., 120; Los Angeles Times, 6 February 1915. 210 their community supporters, fought vigorously for inclusion of their stake in the war’s and postwar U.S.’s memory of the conflict and its aftermath. While progress had been made with some integrated GAR Posts and African American Posts, even in the South, the deployment of Jim Crow legislation in the region and the terror of lynching squelched efforts of the black community to make headway in convincing even White Northerners why the war was fought. While Griffith and his production studio paid lip service in public pronouncements to the “advancement of the colored race” in the fifty years following Appomattox, it did not detract from the incendiary nature of the film’s potential for racial violence. For the NAACP, getting the film censored, if only in the

North, was one flank of a two pronged strategy. The other machination centered on recognition for African American contributions to memory of the Union war effort and progress during and after Reconstruction. However, the campaign to halt public showings of the film and use the opportunity to get in on the historical memory formation project became a fraught endeavor for the NAACP.280

Regardless of what the NAACP did in California, Griffith plowed ahead. After the Riverside showings, Griffith, with the help of Thomas Dixon, secured a screening at the White House with President Woodrow Wilson on February 18th. In attendance were the President, his family, and his cabinet. Griffith sought to gain traction through the

President’s blessing. Wilson left the screening impressed with what Griffith produced.

The film’s portrayal of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction aligned with Wilson’s own accounting of the period through his own scholarly work, History of the American

People (1902). According to Griffith, Wilson pronounced that the film “teaches history

280 McEwan, Paul, “Lawyers, Bibliographies, and the Klan: Griffith’s Resources in the Censorship Battle Over The Birth of a Nation in Ohio,” Film History 20 No. 3 (2008): 357-359. 211 by lightning.” The White House screening bestowed legitimacy on The Birth of a Nation and the White clientele of D.C. had no problems with the film’s depiction of carpetbagger and African American conduct during Reconstruction. With the New York premiere weeks away, Griffith acquired blessings, from the highest U.S. political office, for the movie.281

The Birth of a Nation premiered on the evening of March 3, 1915 in New York

City. Griffith costumed male attendants, who greeted patrons at the entrance of the theater, in Union and Confederate uniforms. He garbed female ushers in formal dresses of the 1860s. The selected audience for the opening consisted of predominantly White film, literary, and society figures, and some of the general public. Quite a few ticket seekers were turned away at the box office, and there was a standing room section three deep. Dixon and Griffith attended the New York premiere. After the first part of the film,

Dixon, not one to shy away from his Lost Cause lineage, said a few words. He declared,

“no one save the son of a soldier and a Southerner could have made such a picture.”

Dixon went further and proclaimed Griffith as “the greatest director in the world.”

Griffith next spoke and claimed his aim with the film “was to place pictures on par with the spoken word as a medium for artistic expression appealing to thinking people.” When the movie concluded, the crowd burst into waves of applause. Griffith carefully selected

New York, and more generally, the North, to open the movie. He realized that the East

Coast, at the time, was the epicenter of critical acclaim. Furthermore, he realized if the movie was to sell as a joint reconciliationist and antiwar epic, he needed Northern

281 Lenning, Arthur, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Film History 16, No. 2, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (2004): 121-122; Washington Times, 20 February 1915. 212 support. The rousing reception to the film’s first night was music to Griffith’s ears.

Reviews further legitimized the movie and its content.282

The White New York press gobbled up Griffith’s interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Hector Turnbull in the New York Tribune latched on to the antiwar theme Griffith promoted, but also praised the “thrill war scenes.” Turnbull failed to mention any of the racist elements of the film. The New York American noted the film had “the force of a whirlwind, leaving the spectator breathless” and the racial question regarding the war “no longer burns,” with the overall effect as “unsectional and unpartisan.” The demure New York Times shared in the film’s exceptionalness as a work of art, but noted that the movie did “pluck at old wounds.” For the most part, the movie received rave reviews. Those who saw the movie during its first few months of run believed that it was a fair representation of historical facts. An article by Thomas B.

Gregory appearing two days after the film’s premiere in The New York American summed up the film’s view of history and its impact on interpretations of the war and

Reconstruction:

“Instead of the reunion which should, and would, have come close upon the bloody heels of strife, there came reconstruction – hell broke loose – such a carnival of high crime and misdemeanor as the world had not seen since the days of the Terror during the French Revolution. All the horrors of that ‘ten years of hell’ are made to live before us – the scoundrelly carpet-baggers, the venomous half-breeds, the hordes of ignorant blacks, the crushed but still proud and courageous whites, cast down. The Southland is cleared of those who would wipe out its civilization. The carpet-baggers vanish, the great mass of black savagery

282 Lenning, Arthur, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Film History 16, No. 2, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (2004): 123; Moving Picture World, 13 March 1915; Moving Picture World, 10 July 1915. 213 calms down and ceases to be a menace; the ballot-box is regained by its former masters, and once again the chaos takes on the form of order and peace.”283

As Griffith attempted to rewrite history through the medium of film, the African

American press and NAACP pushed back. A day after the film’s New York opening, the editor for the African American The New York Age telegraphed the New York City mayor that the film “appeals to baser passions and seeks to disrupt friendly relations existing between white and colored citizens of New York City.” The New York Age went further and argued the film was not historically correct and even “if it were, nothing would be gained by bringing up happenings of the past which only tended to degrade a people and incite race hatred.” However hard the Black press pushed against the film, their critiques only increased White audiences’ desires to see it. A boomerang effect happened. Instead of marginalizing the film, the African American press gave free publicity to it. With the backlash from organs such as The New York Age, White audiences continued to pack movie houses to witness Griffith’s epic. Much to the chagrin of the African American press trying to ban the movie, Griffith, and to a lesser extent

Dixon, had a production that recast the Civil War and Reconstruction.284

The Birth of a Nation moved on from New York City to Boston in April 1915. In a city that was a hotbed of abolitionist agitation prior to the Civil War, the NAACP hoped to halt the film. Instead the local White press, as it had in New York City, praised The

Birth of a Nation. White reviews generally ignored the racist undertones of the movie and

283 Turnbull, Hector, “A Stirring Film Drama Shown,” New York Tribune, 4 March 1915, p. 4; New York American, 4 March 1915, p. 10; New York American, 7 March 1915, Section M, p. 7; New York Times, 4 March 1915; Reverend Thomas B. Gregory, New York American, 5 March 1915, p. 10.

284 Lester A. Walton, Telegram to Mayor Mitchell, 4 March 1915, printed in the New York Age, 11 March 1915, p. 1; The New York Age, 11 March 1915, p.1. 214 instead focused on the artistic elements. The NAACP mounted a vigorous censorship offensive even getting the Boston Mayor, the Massachusetts Governor, and

Massachusetts State Legislature involved. The efforts of the NAACP did not get the movie banned, but did get a key lynching scene cut from the film. At one particularly raucous meeting on April 26th, most participants attending were for a degree of censorship. However, a Bostonian pastor, Dr. Hawkins, was against censorship. He contended, “No race should be so sensitive that it cannot stand a discussion of its weakness.” Rabbi Charles Fleisher, in attendance, opposed censorship as well on the grounds, “I can stand all the hysteria and vilification that will come to me for my stand on this matter if this play tends to make the North and South face the negro problem. I am glad the play is being given. The great principle of freedom of speech is being threatened by this agitation.” Dr. Hawkins and Rabbi Fleisher outline the problems with the battle over the movie. On the one hand, White liberals understood the racist content; however, at the same time they could not stand against freedom of speech. In their minds, the movie brought front and center dialogue over race in the North and South. The African

American press and the NAACP won a minor victory with the removal of the lynching scene, but they could not sway public attendance, even from allies, away from the movie.285

The NAACP did not stop in Boston in trying to influence opinion on the film and staunch the White reconciliationist message of the film. The African American organization agitated heavily for censorship in a key battleground state, Ohio. In

September 1915, leveraging Republican allies in the state, the NAACP succeeded in

285 Lenning, Arthur, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Film History 16, No. 2, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (2004): 126-132; Boston Globe, 26 April 1915. 215 getting the film banned. Griffith and his production company tried again in 1916 with the same result – banned. While Griffith and his production company kept attempting to remove the ban in 1921 and 1925, all efforts ultimately failed. However, the story twisted a bit. Griffith decided, in 1925, to appeal to Ohio and U.S. court systems in order to receive an injunction against the Ohio ban. In the failed 1925 attempt, Griffith showed his racist hand in producing a “bibliography” of questionable scholarship supporting the film.

According to film historian Paul McEwan, the weird bibliography was “a 70 page booklet printed especially for this [Ohio] case that consists primarily of excerpts from a number of historical works, including Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People, which is of course cited in the film’s intertitles.” Indeed, as McEwan notes, “all of the excerpts included in the bibliography deal with Reconstruction exclusively, indicating that Epoch

[Griffith’s production company] felt that they knew what material was the cause of the ban, despite no official reasons having been given.” In a more interesting plot twist,

Dixon’s The Clansman was mysteriously omitted from the bibliography. Griffith knew what his film’s purpose was and its power – White reconciliation between the regions around shared historical memory elements.286

What did the public tensions over The Birth of a Nation gain? For Griffith and

Dixon, the film controversies gained them popularity throughout the North and South.

More specifically for Griffith, The Birth of a Nation and the attention it garnered cemented him as one of the greatest Silent Era filmmakers. Dixon utilized the movie’s popularity in propounding his racist and Lost Cause ideology, which tapped into a White reconcilationist vein between North and South. The African American press’s opposition

286 McEwan, Paul, “Lawyers, Bibliographies, and the Klan: Griffith’s Resources in the Censorship Battle Over The Birth of a Nation in Ohio,” Film History 20 No. 3 (2008): 359-360. 216 to the film gained far the Black press more readership. Reports on The Birth of a Nation in the Black press extended beyond Northern metropolitan centers. Newspapers covered resistance efforts against the film in locations such as Kansas, Nebraska, New Jersey,

Connecticut, West Virginia, and Ohio. The African American print coverage was not just an attempt to gain greater readership, but sought to strengthen black community consciousness through the circulation of topical information that connected African

American readers across time and space. The nascent NAACP became a national organ of resistance to the prejudice faced by Blacks in both the North, and the South.

Perhaps the greatest fallout from The Birth of a Nation was its shaping of public perception of the Civil War and Reconstruction. White patrons hailed the movie as a cinematic landmark and attended showings in droves North, South, and West.287 The

Birth of a Nation portrayed the Antebellum Period as a peaceful time, while the Civil

War tore that peace asunder. More importantly, The Birth of a Nation’s presentation of

Reconstruction as a time of lawless African Americans abusing their freedom and power hit home the most. During the tumultuous fifty-years since the end of the war to the film’s release, White America desired a saga that placed the blame of society’s upheaval on an “other” factor. Freed blacks and their woe-begotten White allies provided the perfect scapegoat. The Birth of a Nation substituted a revised history lesson for what actually occurred during the Civil War and postwar the period.

By 1915, the “rebirth” of the Klan was in full swing. The Klan’s reemergence tied neatly into the nativist, anti-immigrant, white supremacist message the movie espoused.

America by 1915 experienced labor upheaval, race riots, mass lynchings, and general

287 It is in these regions where the movie made the most money and its racist content elicited little in response from whites. 217 societal unrest of rapid urbanization and industrialization. The Birth of a Nation touted an idyllic time and neatly packaged the Klan as the rescuer of America’s White, Protestant birthright. It is little wonder much of White America gobbled up The Birth of a Nation’s premise so readily. While regarded as tawdry in the early 1910s, cinema by 1915, specifically with the release of The Birth of a Nation, claimed a prominent role in the education of the American public. Indeed, shortly after the film’s release, Griffith proclaimed, “The time will come when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures…you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened. There will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at the making of history.”288

Even up to the early 1930s, Griffith still held firm to his assertions that Birth of a

Nation’s historical portrayal of the war, Reconstruction, and the postwar South carried cultural legitimacy and accuracy. In addition, Griffith’s flagging career trajectory forced him to add sound. The film modifications the director made consisted mostly of score and scene sound, and no dialogue. As time passed and cinema technology advanced,

Griffith’s 1915 piece fell out of favor. The African American press did not take on the film’s sound release in 1931 as it did in 1915. More pressing problems faced the African

American community than Griffith’s work, such as housing segregation, federal employment segregation, and still standing Jim Crow laws in the South. However, The

288 Glick, Josh, “Mixed Messages: D.W. Griffith and the Black Press, 1916 – 1931,” Film History 23, No. 2, Black Representations (2011): 183; Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 45; Gardullo, Paul, “Spectacles of Slavery: Pageantry, Film and Early Twentieth-Century Public Memory,” Slavery & Abolition 34, No. 2 (2013): 232. 218 Birth of a Nation managed to play to large audiences up until the 1940s. For most White

Americans, the movie became the main way they learned of the Civil War and

Reconstruction.289 The power of cinema to influence the consumption of history was just beginning. In the late 1930s, on the eve of World War II, a new interpretation of the Old

South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction emerged.290

The American Experience During the Golden Age of Cinema: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Eve of WWII

As Griffith toyed with adding sound to The Birth of a Nation, the United States found itself in the grips of the Great Depression. The supposedly “Roaring Twenties” were not so roaring, after all. Americans accumulated massive amounts of debt, farms failed after WWI, industrial and commercial production outstripped demand, and a general malaise from the WWI experience left the country a precariously balanced house of cards. The stock market crash in 1929 ushered in a general economic panic that forced

Americans to confront their pecuniary frivolity. As more and more of the population became ensnared in the widening economic crisis, political and business leaders found no discernible response to the situation. Thus, by the early 1930s the United States seized from economic calamity and a lack of political responses to the economic crisis.

Confidence in the economic system and social institutions was shot. Into the void entered

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and his “New Deal” for Americans.291

289 By 1919 alone, roughly 5 percent of the American population had seen The Birth of a Nation. Undoubtedly, with showings continuing up to 1940, the percentage of the American populous exposed to the film grew. Butters Jr., Gerald R. “The Birth of a Nation and the Kansas Board of Review of Motion Pictures: A Censorship Struggle,” Kansas History 45, No.3 (2004): 9.

290 Ibid., 45.

291 McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America 1929 – 1941. (New York: Times Books, 1984): 5-9, 47. 219 FDR’s New Deal relied on the Keynesian economic model. Under Keynesianism, state apparatuses take a more active role in the macroeconomic life of the nation. More specifically, the U.S. Federal government provided extensive intervention in capital, labor, and consumer markets to the point of regulating corporate business practices, and assigning the Federal government the role of employer, builder, and on rare occasions, manufacturer. The Keynesian approach had the shared goal of using the nation-state to stimulate consumption and to distribute the fruits of capitalism on a large scale. To this end, FDR broadened the role of the federal government in the daily lives of Americans through his “alphabet soup” of New Deal agencies. However, while the South received attention through the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Works Progress

Administration (WPA), rural electrification efforts, and other Federal governmental efforts, the region did not receive the full attention of New Deal intervention.

Consequently, the incomplete integration of the South meant the incomplete integration of African Americans within the political economy of the 1930s and early 1940s.

Southern blacks still found themselves on the outside looking in, as the country wrenched and lurched its way throughout the decade of the 1930s. By the eve of World War II,

African Americans dealt with rampant racism North and South, Jim Crow in the former

Confederacy, and little help through Federal interventions.292

While the U.S. grappled with the Great Depression, Nazi Germany and Imperial

Japan began gobbling up neighboring territories in the mid to late 1930s. As if American anxiety was not high enough due to economic and social malaise, the gathering storm clouds in Europe and Asia further heightened the anxious feelings as the decade of the

292 Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930 – 1980. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989): xiv-xvii. 220 1930s came to a close. In 1938, the final reunion of 2,000 Civil War veterans occurred on the Gettysburg battlefield. With war looming overseas, Americans drew inward not only physically through isolationism, but romantically as well through a remembrance of the past. The Federal government sponsored the seventy-fifth anniversary reunion of

Gettysburg veterans. The medium, film, which Griffith deployed to reconstruct the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in 1915, captured the old veterans on the

Pennsylvania battlefield. While the former combatants, both Blue and Grey, shook hands and yelped the famed “Rebel Yell,” reunion and reconciliation seemed complete. Thus, with war gathering in far off places, Americans could take comfort in knowing that the old divisions that plagued the nation from 1865 through the first decades of the twentieth century were buried. However, film would reimagine the Civil War and Reconstruction yet again. Moreover, unlike Griffith’s epic, the newest edition of interpretation and reimaging the tumultuous last half of the nineteenth century would have far greater cultural capital than The Birth of a Nation.

“A Civilization Gone with the Wind:” Interpreting the South, The Civil War, and Reconstruction on the Eve of World War II

In 1926, to relieve the boredom of being cooped up with a broken ankle, Margaret

Mitchell began to write Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta,

Georgia in 1900. She came from a family of storytellers who had served in the

Confederate Army during the Civil War. She often explored the former Confederate earthworks around Atlanta with Confederate veterans. In 1922 she took on a position with the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine where she honed her writing skills. After the ankle injury in 1925, Mitchell set up her Remington typewriter on an old sewing table and completed the majority of the book in three years. She wrote the last chapter first,

221 and the other chapters in no particular order. Stuffing the chapters into manila envelopes, she eventually accumulated almost seventy chapters. When visitors appeared, she covered her work with a towel, keeping her novel a secret. There has been much speculation on whether the characters were based on real people, but Mitchell claimed they were her own creations. Mitchell did pull the curtain aside on her source material.

Because of her familiarity with Georgia’s, and Atlanta’s Civil War heritage, coupled with family stories, her aim was to create a masterpiece on the area’s war and Reconstruction experiences. Also, she felt Virginia received too much attention in narratives of the war and its aftermath.293

In April 1935 Harold Latham, an editor for the Macmillan Publishing Company in

New York City, toured the South looking for new manuscripts. Latham heard that

Mitchell had been working on a manuscript, and asked her if he could see it, but she denied having one. When a friend commented that Mitchell was not serious enough to write a novel, Mitchell gathered up many of the envelopes and took them to Latham at his hotel. He had to purchase a suitcase to carry them when he left the city. He read part of the manuscript on the train to New Orleans, Louisiana, and sent it straight to New

York City. By July, Macmillan had offered Mitchell a contract. She received a $500 advance and 10 percent of the royalties.294

As she revised the manuscript, Mitchell cut and rearranged chapters, confirmed details, wrote the first chapter, and changed the name of the main character (originally

293 Thomas, Jane. "Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949)." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 08 June 2017. Web. 02 November 2017.; Brown, Ellen F. “Margaret Mitchell: American Novelist.” Encyclopedia Brittanica. 04 November 2018. Web. 13 December 2018.

294 Ibid. 222 called Pansy). Mitchell was especially interested in writing a historically accurate novel.

She wrote to a reader in 1937 that she had spent "ten years . . . reading thousands of books, documents, letters, diaries, [and] old newspapers" to ensure that her book was historically sound. She also conducted her own formal, and informal interviews, with people who had lived through the war, reportedly going horseback riding with

Confederate veterans to confirm details about the era. Margaret Mitchell published her novel Gone with the Wind in 1936. At the height of the Great Depression, the book sold nearly 1.7 million copies in its first year and won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in

1937.295

Mitchell arranged Gone with the Wind chronologically, basing it on the life and experiences of the main character, Scarlett O’Hara, as she grew from adolescence into adulthood. During the time span of the novel, 1861 to 1873, Scarlett ages from sixteen to twenty-eight years old. The maturation process is known as a type of Bildungsroman novel concerned with the moral and psychological growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood (a “coming of age” story). Scarlett’s development is affected by the events of her time – the Civil War and Reconstruction. Mitchell used a smooth linear narrative structure. The novel is known for its exceptional “readability.” The plot is rich with vivid characters. Gone with the Wind is considered in the literary subgenre of the historical romance novel. Mitchell’s adherence to historical “research” gives the novel a semblance of legitimacy. The characters and plot interweave themselves in the historical period of

295 Ibid.

223 wartime and postwar Atlanta and Georgia. Thus, romance and history combine to give the novel its enduring popularity.296

The novel version of Gone with the Wind received critical acclaim after its release in 1936. According to Eleanor L. Van Alen of The North American Review:

“Most memorable are the scenes and vignettes that must provide the warp and woof of such an historical novel: the county barbecue at the beautiful Twelve Oaks plantation; the gay Confederate war bazaar; the burning and the frightful sack of Atlanta; the endless filing past ruined plantations of the ragged Confederates, beaten by lice and dysentery as much as by superior forces; the fearful reign of terror of the carpetbaggers, back by the Freedman’s Bureau in their effort to raise the Negroes; the organization of the night-riders, and their final victory over Governor Bullock and the regime of Reconstruction. It would be a pity to give away in detail such highlights of the story as Scarlett’s scene with Ashley the day of the barbecue, or her lone escape to Tara through the lines of the two armies behind a dying horse. These scenes, and a dozen others, are what prove Miss Mitchell a story teller, and a mistress of the classical technique of artful suspense.297

Van Alen’s review confirmed a number of Lost Cause elements of Mitchell’s novel. The

Confederate forces defending Atlanta are beaten, not by superior martial power of the

Union Army, but by disease and pests. Mitchell, born and raised in Atlanta, knew of the tumultuous period during the war and after through second-hand accounts. African

Americans, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Reconstruction are painted in a negative light.

The “night-riders,” or Ku Klux Klan, are the true heroes, releasing the South from

Northern servitude. Mitchell based her novel on Confederate stories she collected from her grandfather and veterans. Mitchell admittedly recalled these stories as part of her

“research” for the novel. Thus, she weaves in many elements of the Lost Cause into the

296 Ibid.

297 Van Alen, Eleanor L, “Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell,” The North American Review 242, No. 1 (Autumn, 1936): 203. 224 novel. Gone with the Wind, as a work of literature, was pure escapism. At a time when

Americans needed escape from the Great Depression, and looming war in Europe and

Asia, Mitchell’s work filled a need for fanciful relief.

Lost Cause themes emerged in other reviews of Mitchell’s novel. Ralph

Thompson, writing in the New York Times “Books of the Times,” echoed similar sentiments as Van Alen. According to Thompson:

“Gone with the Wind is a historical romance. The happy ante-bellum days an light-opera, in tone, packed with gallant and conventional dialog (‘they’ll have to fight or stand branded as cowards before the whole world’) and conventional characters (darkies hummin’, banjos strummin’, hard-riding colonels, sallow, Yankee overseers. The years of actual fighting, followed from behind the lines, and more realistically described, and the Reconstruction period is portrayed in terms that seem, at first sight, to be definitely unromantic. But the whole is really not far removed from the moving picture called The Birth of a Nation.”298

Linking the novel to The Birth of a Nation placed Mitchell’s work squarely in line with

Lost Cause ideology. The antebellum South is portrayed as a happy place in which slaves performed for their masters. The Yankees, who occupied the South after the war, were shown as the true villains. Mitchell portrayed Reconstruction as chaos contrasted against the idyllic Old South. That aside, Northern reviewers did not turn on Mitchell and the novel. Even well into the first third of the twentieth century, Northerners felt no reason to push back against Lost Cause ideology. However, would the novel sell on the Silver

Screen as well as The Birth of a Nation?

Producer, David O. Selznick, took on the project of transferring Mitchell’s novel to the movie screen. Selznick was a son of the silent movie producer Lewis J. Selznick.

David studied at Columbia University until his father lost his fortune in the 1920s.

298 Thompson, Ralph, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 30 June 1936. 225 During the late 1920s, David started work as an MGM scriptwriter. He left MGM to work at Paramount then RKO. He was back at MGM in 1933 after marrying Irene Mayer

Selznick, the daughter of MGM owner Louis B. Mayer. In 1936, David finally set up his own production company, Selznick International. Selznick paid Mitchell $50,000 for the rights and set about converting the 1,037-page book into a movie. The final cinematic product ran for three hours and forty-two minutes.299

For the Atlanta premiere, Selznick stole a page from Griffith’s promotional tactics for The Birth of a Nation. The director arranged for a lavish opening on December 15,

1939 in Atlanta, Georgia. Selznick deployed period pieces such as ladies in hoopskirts,

Confederate uniforms, and other period dress. A parade was arranged that passed a crowd estimated at 300,000 spectators with Confederate flags flapping from buildings along the parade route. According to the Time magazine review, “crowds larger than the combined armies that fought the Battle of Atlanta in July 1864 waved Confederate flags, tossed confetti till it seemed to be snowing, gave three different versions of the Rebel yell, whistled, cheered, and goggled.” Prior to the movie’s opening night, Selznick, the cast, and Atlanta dignitaries attended a costume ball with more than 6,000 participants. Gone with the Wind’s opening rivaled anything Griffith did for The Birth of a Nation.

Georgia’s Governor, Eurith D. Rivers, proclaimed a statewide holiday for the December

15th opening and prepared to call out the National Guard if crowds got out of hand.

Atlanta’s Mayor, William B. Hartsfield, proclaimed a three-day festival. For Georgia and

299 Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 45-46. 226 Atlanta, the movie’s opening spectacle was “like winning the Battle of Atlanta 75 years late, with Yankee good will thrown in.”300

Reviews of Selznick’s Gone with the Wind whipped up moviegoers into a frenzy for the film. Frank S. Nugent, New York Times reviewer, felt Selznick nailed the plantation images of, “picture-postcard Tara and Twelve Oaks, with a few-score actors posturing on the premises” doing justice to an age that had, “a glamour to it, a perfection, a symmetry like Grecian art.” Variety rapturously claimed, “as in the book, so on the screen, the most effective portions of the saga of the destroyed South deal with human incident against the background of the war between the states and the impact of honorable defeat to the Southern forces.” Selznick built a strong case for “a civilization of chivalry…entire passage of the film, from the start of the war to the capture of Atlanta, is a moving and thrilling experience…”301 Reviews of Gone with the Wind romanticized the South, in the period before the Civil War, and presented the postwar South as a victim of Northern aggression.

White Southerners clapped, cheered, whistled, and wept at Gone with the Wind’s treatment of the war and Reconstruction. Movie audiences attended Gone with the Wind screenings in droves, much as they did with The Birth of a Nation. For the most part, the

African American press did not castigate Selznick’s rendition of Mitchell’s novel.

However, some voices of dissent arose from the black and liberal White press. In the

300 Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 45-46; Time Magazine, “Cinema: G With the W,” Monday, December 25, 1939.

301 Nugent, Frank S. “The Screen in Review; David Selznick’s ‘Gone with the Wind’ Has Its Long Awaited Premiere at Astor and Capitol, Recalling Civil War and Plantation Days of the South – Seen as Treating Book With Great Fidelity.” The New York Times, December 20, 1939; Flinn, John C. “Review: ‘Gone with the Wind,” Variety, December 19, 1939. 227 journal the New Masses, a reviewer called Gone with the Wind a “primary symbol of capitalist, Anglo-Saxon racism and of the influence of the reactionary South on American life and letters.” The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, termed Selznick’s production, “a weapon of terror against black Americans.” On the other hand, Lillian

Johnson, in the Baltimore Afro-American, found little quarrel with Gone with the Wind, concluding the film was “magnificently done.” Selznick used Black actors and extras in the film instead of White actors in black face. This move tempered protest from the Black press corps. In addition, Selznick eschewed Griffith’s blatant racism for a more paternalistic treatment of slavery. According to historian Matthew Paul Smith, Selznick worked diligently to treat African Americans in the film delicately. To that end, the historical accuracy of enslaved African Americans of the true Old South was tempered.

In fact, few scenes of Gone with the Wind portray slaves in fields laboring. Coupled with the use of actual Black actors and actresses, the film allowed audiences to view the cinematic production as a romanticized portrayal of the Old South, the war, and

Reconstruction. Because of eschewing accuracy for the “beauty” of planation life, the movie met the approval of audiences across the racial spectrum, who found the film not as incendiary as The Birth of a Nation.302

Gone with the Wind played a seminal role in defining the Civil War and

Reconstruction for Americans in the mid twentieth century. The message Selznick communicated through his film resonated with audiences in powerful ways, shaping their

302 Time Magazine, “Cinema: G With the W,” Monday, December 25, 1939; Briley, Ron, “Hollywood’s Reconstruction and the Persistence of Historical Mythmaking,” The History Teacher 41, No. 4 (August 2008): 461; Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 46.; Smith, Matthew Paul, “‘Ridiculous Extremes:’ Historical Accuracy, Gone with the Wind, and the Role of Beauty in Plantation Tourism,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 172. 228 ideas about the past’s influence on the present. White America, and to an extent the

African American community, gobbled up the Lost Cause themes Selznick promoted.

Certainly, in the late 1930s, racism presented a problem Americans still confronted.

However, with another global conflict starting, and the Great Depression still hovering over the country, many Americans found escapism through Selznick’s project.

“Tomorrow is another day” worked well for Americans looking for better days ahead.

Thus, the film’s paternalistic treatment of slavery, that is its portrayal of the institution as benevolent, and Lost Cause themes, did not strike most Americans as historically inaccurate. Gone with the Wind provided an outlet for troubled times.303

Mitchell’s novel and the film version of Gone with the Wind struck a responsive chord with many Americans of both sexes. Like much of the popular culture of the

Depression era, Gone with the Wind presented a defense of a perceived American value construct that resonant social spheres for men and women, as well as an attack on wealth accumulation. What the film accomplished was, as Billy Middleton argued, a “historical gaze” for a time and place that existed only in the imagination of White Americans.

According to Middleton, the characters in Gone with the Wind presented a “past, how they encounter it informs how we interpret the film’s representation with the historical record.” With its setting in the rural South, Mitchell and Selznick portrayed modernity as a problem confronting Americans of the Civil War period. Depression America was no advertisement for the trappings of modernity. Americans, not long removed from their own rural backgrounds, fell in love with the nostalgic settings of rural Georgia. Gone with the Wind’s story of returning to the soil struck a positive nerve with American

303 Briley, Ron, “Hollywood’s Reconstruction and the Persistence of Historical Mythmaking,” The History Teacher 41, No. 4 (August 2008): 461-462. 229 audiences. Indeed, the Roosevelt administration recognized these impulses. Elements of the New Deal sought to re-establish American families on farms through the

Resettlement Administration.304

Selznick’s movie did much to recreate the psychological landscape of the 1930s.

The Reconstruction South and the Great Depression years were glaring exceptions to the myth of American abundance. The poverty and social insecurity of the post-Civil War

South contrasted poignantly with the vanished affluence and social structure of the

Antebellum Period. In turn, the hard times of the 1930s contrasted sharply with the memory of the perceived affluence of the 1920s. In a world turned upside down, the

Reconstruction South seemed a fitting example of the United States during the

Depression years. In both eras, the rich became poor, the strong became weak, and

American society seemed unstable and insecure. Gone with the Wind set out to reassure its audience that the world could be orderly again, not by restoring wealth and power, but through survival and perseverance.305

In The Celluloid South, Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr. agues Gone with the Wind did much to shape Americans’ perceptions of the Civil War and Reconstruction from a White

Southern perspective. Campbell felt the wild popularity of Gone with the Wind “revealed the persistence of a legend which decreed that an opulent South and its beliefs were being enjoyed at the expense of progress nationally in race relations and in a more accurate perception of the South’s past and present.” While Selznick downplayed the Klan and the

304 Middleton, Billy, “‘Furl that Banner, Softly, Slowly:’ Confederate Flags and the Historical Gaze in Gone with the Wind,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 154. Morton, Marian J., “‘My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn:’ Scarlett O’Hara and the Great Depression,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 5, No. 3, (Autumn, 1980): 52.

305 Ibid., 52-55. 230 more overt racism of Mitchell’s novel, the film still managed to capture Mitchell’s interpretation of slaveholding Whites as the true victims of the war and Reconstruction.

While Gone with the Wind’s contemporary reviews made little mention of the film’s racism and Lost Cause narrative, pulling the curtain back a little reveals a cinematic version of the South cornered into defending a way of life, overrun by alien invaders, hounded by fanatics, and forced to endure a harsh occupation.306

The content of Gone with the Wind informs us greatly on how Americans on the cusp of World War II understood the Civil War and Reconstruction. As historian

Matthew Paul Smith noted, Selznick attempted a delicate balancing act between artistic beauty and historical accuracy. Memos between the director and the production crew indicated a conscientious effort at historical accuracy. However, more times than not, the desire to create a fairyland Old South and Reconstruction took precedence over the proper portrayal of the historical record. Visual appeal won out over appealing to audiences and antebellum authenticity. Indeed, the melodramatic opening titles of the film lay out clearly Mitchell and Selznick’s historical memory of the war:

“There was a land of Cavalier and Cotton Fields called the Old South…Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow…Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave…Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered…A Civilization gone with the wind…”

One reason why the film inspired such an emotional response was the composition of the

Antebellum South as a fairyland of knights and kindly masters. The movie went to great lengths to portray Southern men and women as dignified sufferers. However wrong their

306 Campbell, Edward D.C. Jr, The Celluloid South: Hollywood and Southern Myth, (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981): 140; Briley, Ron, “Hollywood’s Reconstruction and the Persistence of Historical Mythmaking,” The History Teacher 41, No. 4 (August 2008): 464. 231 cause might have been, the methods of the racial imbalance in the South appears far less brutal than that of the occupying Union forces. While Gone with the Wind shows no battle scenes, it depicted Atlanta’s burning and razing by Union forces under General

William T. Sherman. The film compared the Union Army to Nazi hordes ravaging civilized Europe in the contemporary world.307

The cinematic Gone with the Wind put in stark terms the disjuncture between the

Antebellum South and the South during and after the war. The movie typified the Old

South through genteel balls and barbeques. The imagery is bright and grand. Confederate iconography was portrayed positively. In one particular scene, Confederate wounded and dying litter the main train depot of Atlanta. The emotional elicitation from Atlanta’s destruction and the South’s demise stemmed from the desire to force a response from the audience. Selznick and Mitchell starkly contrast the idyllic Antebellum South against the confusion and disorganization wrought by the war. Sherman is vilified for his role in

Atlanta’s destruction. Yet again, it is the North and its aggressiveness that brings destitution to the South.308

In a commentary on Reconstruction, the novel’s protagonist Scarlett O’Hara was attacked by Freedmen in a notorious part of Atlanta known as “Shanty Town.” Scarlett’s husband, Frank, led a posse of the Ku Klux Klan to avenge the wrong committed on

Scarlett by the African American males. To Mitchell, the Klan served as guardians of

Southern female honor and virility. In a 1937 letter to Thomas Dixon, author of the

307 Juddery, Mark, “Gone with the Wind,” History Today, (August 2008): 37-38.; Smith, Matthew Paul, “‘Ridiculous Extremes:’ Historical Accuracy, Gone with the Wind, and the Role of Beauty in Plantation Tourism,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 171-172.

308 Middleton, Billy, “‘Furl that Banner, Softly, Slowly:’ Confederate Flags and the Historical Gaze in Gone with the Wind,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 157-158. 232 Clansman and “consultant” on The Birth of a Nation, Mitchell went so far as to praise

Dixon’s interpretation of the war and Reconstruction: “I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much.” Thus, Mitchell’s understanding of the Civil War and

Reconstruction was grounded in Lost Cause ideology and racism. However, Selznick had other ideas in his production of the film version. In 1937, Selznick asked the screenwriter of the film, Sidney Howard, to remove all references to the Klan. Selznick’s reasoning was quite revealing. He set out not to produce an, “unintentional advertisement for intolerant societies in these fascist-ridden times.” In addition, Selznick made the NAACP official advisors to the film in an effort to avoid the taint of racism with in it. Therefore, in the film version a white man, instead of a Black man attacks Scarlett, and it is a Black man who saves her. Finally, Frank is shown preparing for a “political meeting” in retaliation, removing any mention of the Klan.309

Selznick treaded around the “color line” carefully. In a letter to the head of the

NAACP during production of the film, Selznick referenced his own Jewish heritage noting that as a member of a persecuted “race,” he was “most sensitive to the feelings of minority peoples.” In excising the Klan from the cinematic Gone with the Wind allowed the director to create a film that appealed to large swaths of the American movie going public. While racism was still present in Gone with the Wind, the film version averred from Mitchell’s blatant heroism of the Klan. While Lost Cause ideology was present in the movie, it did not stand out starkly as it did in The Birth of a Nation. Indeed, Selznick ordered one of his producers to scour the South for appropriate representations of

Antebellum plantations bereft of references to slavery. Selznick’s upbringing as a Jewish-

309 Juddery, Mark, “Gone with the Wind,” History Today, (August 2008): 39-40. 233 American, and his northern education at Columbia, contributed to his realization that

Mitchell’s racism needed toning down. In addition, to get on the NAACP’s good side, the film required real African American actors and actresses. To that end, Selznick hired Hall

Johnson, founder of the Hall Johnson Negro Choir. Johnson’s role was to “watch the entire treatment of Negroes, the casting of the actors for these roles, the dialect that they use, etcetera, throughout the picture.” However, the role Black actors and actresses performed still put them in a marginalized status. Hattie McDaniel, “Mammy” in the film, won a Best Supporting Actress awards for her role. Yet, her mannerisms and diction created the image of the historical “Mammy” from the antebellum period. McDaniel won an award, but she played a typecast African American performer. The war and

Reconstruction came across as a tragedy for the White, Southern plantation class. Even with Selznick’s attempts to skirt the “color line” and search out Southern “authenticity,” the cinematic Gone with the Wind managed to still get the actual history of the period wrong.310

Furthermore, the film glossed over the causes of the Civil War. No mention is made of Lincoln’s inauguration setting off secession in the South; in addition, slavery is completely absent as a cause of the war. Mention is made of “land” being a prime driver of tensions between the regions, but even this is a flimsy contention based on the historical reasons for the war. Selznick also eliminated slanderous language and portrayals of Northern characters in the novel version of Gone with the Wind.

Furthermore, the production team wrote out the protagonists’ anti-Northern rhetoric and

310 Smith, Matthew Paul, “‘Ridiculous Extremes:’ Historical Accuracy, Gone with the Wind, and the Role of Beauty in Plantation Tourism,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 172-173.; Middleton, Billy, “‘Furl that Banner, Softly, Slowly:’ Confederate Flags and the Historical Gaze in Gone with the Wind,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 156. 234 hate. Selznick’s objective was to create a film that appealed to audiences North and

South. To that end, the film takes on a rather reconciliationist tone.311

However, Selznick, first and foremost, considered himself an artist and entertainer. Because of his artistic disposition, the film does take aim at the postwar

South. While the first half of the film catalogues the supposed abuses committed by the

Union Army down south, the second half of the film introduces a new enemy: carpetbaggers, northern opportunists who travelled south after the Civil War, forming a coalition with Freedmen and scalawags (southern Whites who supported the Republican party during Reconstruction). This abhorrent group, which the movie pulls no punches in denouncing, sought to establish control over the former Confederacy. The film’s interstitials (title cards between scenes) described the coalition harshly, almost comically, as “another invader…more vicious and cruel than any they had fought.” Reconstruction was shown as an opportunity for carpetbaggers to exploit dim-witted and ignorant

African Americans. During one scene, a schemer exclaims to an excited audience of

Freedmen:

“Do you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to give every one of you forty acres and a mule…because we’re your friends and you’re going to become voters. And you’re going to vote like your friends do.”

Whatever benevolence Northern philanthropists and the Freedmen’s Bureau might have shown in the Reconstruction South was stripped away. Yet again, the Lost Cause interpretation of Reconstruction took precedence over the historical record of African

311 Middleton, Billy, “‘Furl that Banner, Softly, Slowly:’ Confederate Flags and the Historical Gaze in Gone with the Wind,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 156. 235 American advancements in the South after the war. Still, Selznick and his crew attempted to create a message of reconciliation between the former antagonists.312

The film version of Gone with the Wind became how most Americans remembered the Civil War from the 1940s well into the twenty first century. No movie did more to trumpet the myths of the Old South and Reconstructions’ failures for White

Southerners. In the process, the film, aside from wanting to be a reconciliationist message, became more nostalgic than anything else. The deployment of Confederate iconography in positive terms, the Atlanta premiere’s Confederate spectacle, and the use of actual African American actors in “authentic” dialogue did more damage to the historical record of the Civil War and Reconstruction period than The Birth of Nation could ever attempt to match. Exacerbating the feeling of nostalgia was the erection of faux antebellum plantations in Hollywood that warped the actual architectural form and function of a “real” Southern plantation from the Old South. If all of the previous did not further skew the historical portrayal of the war and Reconstruction in Gone with the

Wind, Selznick craftily deployed his African American cast as loyal slaves to their White owners. While the actors and actresses were actual African Americans, their diction, dialogue, and behaviors furthered the racist stereotype of the “old-time Southern Negro.”

Selznick treated White Confederates as paternalistic figures caring diligently for their slaves, while fighting for home and hearth from an alien force.313

312 Juddery, Mark, “Gone with the Wind,” History Today, (August 2008): 41.

313 Middleton, Billy, “‘Furl that Banner, Softly, Slowly:’ Confederate Flags and the Historical Gaze in Gone with the Wind,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 162-164.; Smith, Matthew Paul, “‘Ridiculous Extremes:’ Historical Accuracy, Gone with the Wind, and the Role of Beauty in Plantation Tourism,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 172. 236 Gone with the Wind marked the apogee of the Lost Cause’s influence in

Hollywood. After the 1930s, World War II captured the imagination of directors and producers, relegating the Civil War to second hand status. With the rise of the Western genre in the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood took additional looks at the Civil War but nothing came close to trumpeting the Lost Cause themes as passionately as did Gone with the Wind. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hollywood returned to the Civil War in earnest. With Glory (1989), which catalogues the training and combat experience of the famed 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, Hollywood moved more towards Blight’s

Emancipationist interpretation of the war. The Emancipationist narrative champions the contributions and achievements African Americans made to the Union war effort.

Throughout the 1990s and beyond, the Emancipation narrative achieved dominance in

Civil War films.314

Yet, Gone with the Wind still draws huge viewing audiences when shown on television. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) regularly features Gone with the Wind as part of its programming. Because of the wide airplay on TCM, the movie garners more attention. The wide popularity of Gone with the Wind has led to the movie being voted as one of America’s favorite films. In addition, the film’s small screen success means that it reaches more Americans than the original 1939 version. Internationally, the film’s popularity is unparalleled. To many outside the United States, Gone with the Wind represents the South’s allure and attraction. Indeed, driving north on Interstate 75 from

Florida through middle Georgia, the traveler counts no less than five billboards in different locations touting the true “home” of Tara – the main faux plantation in the film.

314 Campbell, Edward D.C. Jr, The Celluloid South: Hollywood and Southern Myth, (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981): 92-93. 237 The fictional plantation landscapes at the center of Mitchell’s novel and the film never truly existed. However, various interstate stops in central and north Georgia still try to make a buck off the film’s popularity.315

What can we make of the continued popularity of Gone with the Wind? Certainly,

The Birth of a Nation is now seen for what it is: a racist production that touts the virtue of the Confederacy, and the failure of Reconstruction. Griffith played to a Southern audience that sought redemption from an image-battered history. The Birth of a Nation magnified convictions already present in the South. According to the film, Dixie was glorious, fallen, worked over, but redeemed. The White South suffered defeat from error and humiliation from Yankee blindness, but through the agony forged a reconciled, united, and sad-but-wise United States.

However, Gone with the Wind still captures the public imagination globally.

Some of the movie’s success is related to the lead heroine overcoming war and destitution to make it big in the post-Civil War South. However, more is at play than merely a female lead. The “moonlight on magnolias” myth of the Old South that the movie promotes is telling. The myth posits that the Antebellum South held the cradle of

American civilization. The kindly White folks display the trappings of American agrarianism mixed with courtly ambiance. Men wore uniforms, though they might not have served in the military; the women wore large hoop skirts of crinoline. The genteel, cavalier White people mask the virulent racism that existed prior to the Civil War (and after). Selznick made sure to portray slavery in a paternalistic light. Whites and African

Americans work hand-in-hand to overcome the struggles war wrought on the region.

315 Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008): 49-50. 238 According to the film, the New South that emerged afforded opportunities for Whites to overcome the devastation of the war and the social upheaval of Reconstruction. African

American representations are not the simian-like representations Griffith portrayed, but as loyal servants to their White masters. The antagonists of Gone with the Wind were the supposedly unsavory folks that descended on the South after the war to fleece the region of its identity and social hierarchy. Confederate soldiers are portrayed as valiant and noble, the Klan as a mystic group somewhere off screen. All this mixed together made for solid entertainment in the 1940s and one helluva myth of the Old South. Myths die hard, which might explain more precisely the film’s popularity. The balancing act

Selznick attempted between historical romanticism and historical record created a huge appeal as it related to the film’s popularity. The film’s narrative of the mythological “Big

House” on a working plantation romanticized the actual horrors and hierarchies of slavery in the South. Tourists traveling around the South to visit preserved antebellum plantations frequently make connections with what they are viewing “live” with the

“fiction” of Gone with the Wind. The complexities of presenting plantation life while countering the mythology of a film creates cognitive dissonance for the tourists visiting preserved historic plantation sites. Sadly, most of these complex spaces play on the film’s romanticism while eschewing the actual historical record the built environment could tell.

Therefore, the mythology surrounding the Old South and the Lost Cause continues to sell well. Commodification of the Antebellum South as an idyllic landscape of genteel White folks and slaves as happy and contented was pure fantasy. Tara, Confederate Atlanta, and

Reconstruction were far more historically complex than Selznick’s production. Perhaps,

Hollywood latched onto what the old veterans of the Blue and the Grey practiced in the

239 last twenty years of the nineteenth century. Maybe Selznick desired a film that stripped away the racism, Jim Crow, and social tensions the South dealt with since the end of the war. Whatever the case may be, Gone with the Wind set the bar for how cinema dealt with the Civil War. Though few films push back against the Lost Cause narrative in the fifty years after Gone with the Wind’s release, no film until Glory truly challenged the primacy of Hollywood’s fascination with the South’s Lost Cause.316

“Here in This Pretty World, Gallantry Took Its Last Bow:” The Civil War and Reconstruction During the First Thirty Years of The Silver Screen

Leisure technology and remembrance intertwined in the first third of the twentieth century, and cinema brought the Civil War back to the center of the American imagination. The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind became touchstones in how

Americans consumed the war and Reconstruction and, with Gone with the Wind, how public perceptions of the South were created. The fictional plantation life, the lack of historical accuracy concerning the war and Reconstruction, and the positioning of aesthetics over authenticity continue to grab the imaginations of not just Americans, but people the world over. Historical memory of the war still continued to be a whites-only affair, buttressed by the Silver Screen. Blacks fought back the best they could. The

African American press did its best to shut down Griffith’s 1915 racist screed, but ultimately did not succeed. Instead, public campaigns against The Birth of a Nation only fueled White Americans’ desires to see the film. The 1939 release of Gone with the Wind, on the other hand, presented a kindly portrayal of slavery and a genteel South dealing with the war’s devastation and Reconstruction’s uncertainties. Gone with the Wind

316 Smith, Matthew Paul, “‘Ridiculous Extremes:’ Historical Accuracy, Gone with the Wind, and the Role of Beauty in Plantation Tourism,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 172-179. 240 became an international sensation that mythologized the Old South and the war’s aftermath.317

The “pretty world” Selznick created on the Silver Screen has had lasting implications for public perceptions of the South. The historical memory Gone with the

Wind facilitated has even seeped into historical interpretations at actual preserved plantation sites throughout the South. Antebellum plantations, historically preserved, must deal with the film’s fallout. Most visitors to these sites sideline slavery and comment more on the architectural form and function of the structure(s), often eliciting a standard response of “Oh, this must be what Tara looked like!” Further skewing the historical memory process the film developed, the fictional Tara is commodified throughout central and north Georgia as tourist meccas. The main characters and their dialogue permeate popular culture. The fictionalized South in Gone with the Wind is still consumed as the preeminent interpretation of the period. Films produced in the twentieth and twenty first century attempt to displace Gone with the Wind’s perch; however, the film’s mythology and legacy diehard. The “gallantry” that took its “last bow” after

Appomattox never existed, but lives on through the medium of cinema.318

317 Briley, Ron, “Hollywood’s Reconstruction and the Persistence of Historical Mythmaking,” The History Teacher 41, No. 4 (August 2008): 464.

318 Smith, Matthew Paul, “‘Ridiculous Extremes:’ Historical Accuracy, Gone with the Wind, and the Role of Beauty in Plantation Tourism,” The Southern Quarterly 55, No. 2/3 (Winter and Spring 2018): 187. 241

Chapter 6

Epilogue: Whither the Confederacy?

In July 1938, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania hosted the seventy-fifth anniversary commemoration of the titanic battle that occurred in and surrounding the town. Much like the fiftieth anniversary in 1913, the remaining veterans camped on the battlefield in one last spasm of reconciliation. However, unlike 1913, the event elicited little attention from the American public. Clouds of war forming in Europe and Asia, and the lingering Great

Depression, preoccupied Americans more than a gathering of old men on the Gettysburg battlefield. Still, even without the fanfare, the spectacle of reconciliation happening in south-central Pennsylvania went off as planned. In 1938 only 1,950 Blue and Grey veterans attended the event, a marked contrast to the over 50,000 Civil War veterans present in 1913. In a show of U.S. military might, the United States Army put on a

“simulated air attack and an anti-aircraft defense of Gettysburg.” The military maneuvers linked the Civil War veterans to American martial glory seventy-five years after the bloody contest at Gettysburg.319

By 1940, the reconciliation project was more, or less, forgotten. The U.S. public primarily consumed memory and interpretation of the Civil War through the medium of film, and popular culture. The Blue and Grey veterans dwindled down to mere thousands by the time World War II started. Those few veterans remaining were well into advanced

319 “Local Legion to Help Commemorate Seventy-Fifth Gettysburg Anniversary,” Greenbelt Cooperator, Greenbelt, Maryland, 15 June 1938, 9.; “Flame Ignited Before 300,000,” Evening Star, Washington, D.C., 4 July 1938, 1. 242 age, with time and biology tainting whatever they recalled. Therefore, the main drivers of reconciliation and the war’s crafting of historical memory existed no more. World War II furthered the erosion of Civil War memory in the American consciousness. The postwar economic and demographic booms pushed the memory of the Civil War out of

Americans’ collective memory. The centennial of the war and the rise of the Civil Rights

Movement brought a new focus on the war’s memory and legacy, one that carried well into the twenty first century.

The centennial of the Civil War began in 1961 and ended in 1965. The war’s centennial anniversary provided an opportunity to further the Civil War’s memory and legacy. However, much like reconciliation a hundred years prior, the process of celebrating the centennial began problematically. In 1960 the NAACP began warning chapters throughout the country of “Pro-South Civil War propaganda.” According to a

Detroit, Michigan newspaper report, quoting an NAACP member, the Civil War centennial celebrations could “strike a hard blow at our present day movement toward equality.” Roy Wilkins, the organization’s Executive Secretary, commented on Southern states pouring great amounts of money into celebrations aimed at “repudiating the great moral issue which lay at the bottom of the Civil War.” Wilkins’ veiled language did not hide the real cause of the war: slavery. Furthermore, Southern states hosting celebrations maintained “strict segregation” at events hosted through state funded money. In Wilkins’ estimation, segregation at events violated “the basic principle to which the war was fought.” In a twist of irony, harkening back to the postwar period, New Jersey denounced

Southern measures and would not enforce segregationist practices at their state sponsored

243 events. The Civil War centennial celebrations and commemorations began to unravel reconciliation.320

Much as it had with the premiere of The Birth of a Nation in 1915, the NAACP ramped up efforts to keep the White South from dominating the historical memory and war’s narrative during the 1960’s centennial celebrations. Before leaving office, President

Eisenhower appointed a National Civil War Centennial Committee. The committee held its first planning meeting in Charleston, South Carolina – in a segregated hotel. The

NAACP blanched at this move, picketing the meeting “to protest this travesty on history in a dignified demonstration.” The NAACP felt the commission’s move not to heed

President Eisenhower’s admonition to treat the centennial celebrations in an equitable manner – including slavery as a prime cause of the war – warranted demonstrations.

According to an NAACP circular concerning the picketing, “many of us who cannot simply sit back and see this Civil War commemoration made into a mockery of the chief principle underlying that historic conflict.” Much to the chagrin and disappointment of the NAACP, the commission did not include references to slavery’s role in the Civil War.

The commission stuck to battles and tactics of the war during its commemoration activities. Slavery as the prime cause of the war became too incendiary a topic to deal with during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.321

White Southerners, fearing societal change in the 1960s up to the 1980s, rallied around the Confederate battle flag (“Stars and Bars”) and their Confederate monuments dotting the civic landscape. According to historian Jay Winter, often times the meaning

320 “Warns ‘Pro-South’ Civil War Propaganda Can Be Harmful,” The Detroit Tribune, Detroit, Michigan, 25 March, 1961, 1.

321 “Civil War Centennial Will Be Picketed,” The Detroit Tribune, Detroit, Michigan, 1 April 1961, 4. 244 of memorials and monuments fades over time until the edifice is no longer useful to a society. However, Confederate monuments and battle flags, acquired renewed meaning during the South’s Civil Rights period. When first constructed in mass quantities in the

1890s through the end of World War I, the granite and marble emblems to Confederate independence embodied a shared conviction – the Lost Cause – to the South’s White community. During the 1960s and 1970s, the various monuments and memorials, coupled with the Stars and Bars, reasserted white supremacy in the region. The flags, the monuments, the memorials in the South acquired multivocal characteristics of White political power, that is they permitted White Southerners to leverage the emblems as markers of White resistance to social change. Therefore, the rituals of remembrance of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century pivoted slightly from Confederate hero worship, and white supremacy, to outright resistance to the Civil Rights Movement and federal intervention in the name of equitable treatment under federal law.322

The story of the Confederacy’s staying power did not end with the successes of the 1950s and 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, Confederate battle flags remained above many of the state capitol buildings of the former Confederacy up into the 1990s.

Slowly the Stars and Bars came down as the 1990s gave way to the 2000s. However, what of the Confederate monuments? The numerous monuments and memorials of the

Confederacy’s legacy still stood in Southern civic space, representing the White South’s claim to the region’s landscape. According to Winter, sites of memory, such as the

Confederacy’s built emblems, require cash to maintain. In essence, someone, whether through municipal money or private means, opened their pocketbooks to keep the built

322 Winter, Jay. “Sites of Memory,” in Memory: History, Theory, Debates. Radstone, Susannah and Schwarz, Bill, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010): 312-324. 245 heritage of the Confederacy where it first went up. The United Daughters of the

Confederacy, still alive well into the twenty first century, maintains quite a few of the monuments. Those under municipal control have taken a rather curious lifecycle development.323

Noted Civil War historical memory scholar David W. Blight contends there are more than 700 Confederate monuments in thirty-one U.S. states. A number of states, in both the North and the South, began removing their Confederate monuments in the

2010s. In an Historynet.com interview, Blight stated a community contemplating removal, relocation, or alteration of a Confederate monument “should create a body that includes a historian or two to research the monument’s origin or meaning…we are all responsible for telling the world how we will interpret history in the public square.” Pro-

Confederate groups push back that municipalities, or institutions, removing, or relocating monuments in the dead of the night (often times when the civic piece is dealt with) erases history from the landscape. A concurrent issue revolves around the notion of Southern identity. The removal of Confederate monuments and memorials in the region is akin to

“cultural genocide” for the White community. On the other hand, the stone and bronze emblems to the Confederacy are akin to racist markers throughout the Southern landscape. Since August 2018, close to thirty statues, memorials, and plaques have been removed. The controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and their designation as

“heritage” or “hate” pieces continues unabated.324

323 Ibid., 318-319.

324 Ernsberger Jr., Richard, “‘Cause They Lost: Interview with David W. Blight,” posted on Historynet.com, accessed 12 August 2018.; Levinson, Sanford. Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018): 27-29. 246 As communities wrestle with the disposition of their Confederate built environment, the historical legacy of the Confederacy’s failed bid at independence continues to garner attention. The Civil War’s painful legacy, which seemed “put to bed” in the late 1930s, is still complex and controversial. The veterans and the women who crafted the memory of the Civil War, worked at reconciliation, and attempted to assuage the emotional scars from the war also faced complex decisions as much as their heirs in the twenty first century. Over time, Confederate heritage waxed and waned in meaning acquiring a patina not much different from the built pieces of that heritage.

Landscapes of memory, be they battlefields, cemeteries, memorials, or monuments, constitute the cultural patrimony occupying physical space. The Southern civic landscape evolved into a palimpsest of landscapes, defined and contested by different groups. What were once landscapes appropriated by a white supremacist ideology have become sites in which the imagery blurs between “heritage” and “hate.”

The latent racism associated with the Old South and the Confederacy’s insurrection has been bested by a common philosophy of equal rights for all. The South’s history and legacy through the built environment leads to more questions. How does a citizen identify with the power of a piece of stone? Who is granted the power to speak authoritatively about the monuments’ content? The public is owed a measured, intelligent response to the numerous Confederate emblems scattered across the region’s landscape. The interpretive potential of landscapes of memory is to educate. The Confederacy’s unwillingness to wither away becomes problematic as long as one group appropriate emblems of the Confederacy as devices to further a warped ideology. Landscapes of memory should bend to the will of the people utilizing them. As scholars Jay Winter and

247 Robin Winks contend, the multilayered meanings of monuments presents a unique opportunity to educate through tangible items. In this manner, the false narratives of the

Confederacy should be met with alternative narratives, those that include the complex history of Southern history, White and Black. Communities own their landscapes and the interpretive potential of those built elements of the landscape. The curious case of

Confederate heritage emblems – monuments, memorials, battle flags – will continue their interesting historical trajectory.325

325 Saunders, Nicholas J., “Crucifix, Calvary, and Cross: Materiality and Spirituality in Great War Landscapes,” World Archaeology 35, No.1 (June 2003): 7-21. Levinson, Sanford. Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018): 55-58. 248

References

“The Sinews of Memory:” Preface

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Bodnar, John, from Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth-Century in The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Foster, Gaines. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Gross, David, from Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture, in The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Hobsbawm, Eric, from “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011).

“Introduction,” from The Collective Memory Reader, Olick, Jeffery K., Vinitzky- Seroussi, and Levy, Daniel, eds. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011).

249

Janney, Caroline. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

Lenning, Arthur, “Myth and Fact: The Reception of ‘Birth of a Nation,’” Film History 16, No. 2, Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting (2004).

Marten, James, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Mead, Sidney W. The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1963).

Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

Nolan, Alan T., “The Anatomy of the Myth,” from The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, Gallagher, Gary W. and Nolan, Alan T., eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000).

Wilson, Charles Reagan, “The Religion of the Lost Cause: Ritual and Organization of the Southern Civil Religion, 1865 – 1920,” The Journal of Southern History 46, No. 2 (May 1980).

Chapter I: Organizational Building: The Grand Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans

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250 Republic Held At Washington, D.C., January 30, 1884. (Publisher Not Provided, 1884), Newberry Library, Chicago.

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“From Davenport,” Chicago Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, 26 September 1866, 4.

“G.A.R. Encampment,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, 28 January 1880, 7.

“G.A.R. at Pittsburgh,” Dakota Farmers’ Leader, Canton, South Dakota, 21 September 1894, 3.

“Gov. Morton at Green Mount,” The Richmond Palladium, Richmond, Indiana, 8 November 1866, 1.

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251

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“The New Invasion of the South,” The Indianapolis Journal, Indianapolis, Indiana, 14 September 1894, 4.

“The Southern Dead,” Marshall County Independent, Plymouth, Marshall County, Indiana, 19 April 1895, 6.

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“Valiant Son of France,” The Bamberg Herald, Bamberg, South Carolina, 23 November 1899, 6.

Williams, Charles Richard, Ed. Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States, Volume IV, 1881-1893. (Columbus, OH: The F.J. Heer Publishing Company, 1924), Hayes Presidential Center and Library.

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252

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Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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Foster, Gaines. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Gannon, Barbara A. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Janney, Caroline. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

Lears, Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009).

Marten, James, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

Morgan, Francesca. Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Ragan, Diane. Grand Army of the Republic Department of Pennsylvania: Personal War Sketches of the African American Members of Col. Robert Gould Shaw Post No. 206 Pittsburgh. (Pittsburgh: Western Pennsylvania Genealogical Society, 2003).

Chapter II: Civil War Veterans’ Activities and the Flowering of Reconciliation

Primary Sources

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253 Advertisement for “Stonewall Regiment” Reunion, 1 September 1889, Razelmond A. Parker Collection, Box 14, Folder 2, Detroit Public Library.

“An Interesting War Paper,” Shepherdstown Register, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, 26 September 1889, 1.

Benson, C.H. “Yank” and “Reb,”A History of a Fraternal Visit Paid by Lincoln Post, No. 11, G.A.R., of Newark, N.J. to Robert E. Less Camp, No. 1, Confederate Veterans and Phil Kearney Post, No. 10, G.A.R., of Richmond, VA., October 15th to October 18th, Inclusive, (Newark, NJ: M.H. Neuhut, Printer, 1884).

Chesterman, William D. The James River Tourist, A Brief Account of Historical Localities on James River, and Sketches of Richmond, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. (Richmond: Everett Waddy, Printer, 1889).

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“Confederate Museum,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 22 September 1915, 4.

“Confederate Museum,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 22 September 1915, 5.

“Confederate Veterans,” Alexandria Gazette, Alexandria, Virginia, 7 January 1896, 3.

Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, I No. 1, January 1893, Nashville, TN.

Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, I No. 7, July 1893, Nashville, TN.

Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, I No. 8, August 1893, Nashville, TN.

Cunningham, S.A., Ed. “Keep War Relics in the South,” The Confederate Veteran Magazine, III No. 1, January 1895, Nashville, TN.

Cunningham, S.A., Ed. The Confederate Veteran Magazine, VI No. 3, March 1898, Nashville, TN.

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“Donations by Portsmouth Chapter, U.D.C.,” Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Virginia, 27 February 1900, 10.

254 “Gettysburg” Cartoon, New-York Tribune, New York City, 29 June 1913, 7.

“Historic Spots in Richmond,” The Times, Richmond, Virginia, 11 March 1900, 18.

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“No Scars Left in this Meeting at Gettysburg,” The Times Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia, 30 June 1913, 1.

“Old Soldier Reunion,” The Indianapolis Journal, Indianapolis, Indiana, 15 September 1899, 3.

“Opposed to Sectionalism,” The Critic and Record, Washington, D.C., 21 April 1891, 2. R.A. Brock, Ed., “Address of Gen. R.E. Colston Before the Ladies Memorial Association at Wilmington, N.C.” Southern Historical Society Papers, 21 (Richmond, Virginia: 1893).

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R.A. Brock, Ed., “The Defenders of Vicksburg, A Monument to Their Memory Unveiled at Vicksburg, Mississippi, 25 April 1893.” Southern Historical Society Papers, 21 (Richmond, Virginia: Lowry, M.F.: 1893).

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255 “Steubenville Ready to Celebrate Three Wars,” The Washington Herald, Washington, D.C., 20 July 1913, 9.

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Hillyer, Reiko, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Museum and Civil War Memory in the New South,” The Public Historian 33, No. 4 (November 2011).

Janney, Caroline. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

Morgan, Francesca. Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Neff, John R. Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

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Chapter III: Memorial Mania: Claiming Space in the South

256

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258

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Chapter IV: The Pilgrimage: Travels of Memory, Travels of Reconciliation

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Chapter V: “After All, Tomorrow Is Another Day”

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Epilogue: Whither the Confederacy?

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