CIVIL WAR VETERANS

Over the course of the Civil War, from 2.1 to over 2.4 million men served in the United States Armed Forces. In addition, from 850,000 to over 1,000,000 men served for some period of time in the Confederate Army and Navy. Significantly, of the men who served in the United States Army, over 180,000 were African Americans; another 24,000 blacks served in the United States Navy. More than 86,000 white men from Confederate states served in the United States Army. About 620,000 servicemen died in combat or from wounds or disease, but hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned to their civilian lives transformed by their memories of battle, the enemy, and military life.

Veteran soldiers began to return to civilian life while the fighting continued because terms of service, wounds, and other disabilities allowed men to leave the armed forces before the end of the war. Both governments, however, made an effort to keep experienced soldiers in the ranks. In 1864, the Confederate Army established an invalid corps that placed wounded soldiers on light duty. In late 1864, the United States government offered a special bounty to veterans who would enlist in General Winfield Scott Hancock's Veteran Corps; for various reasons only 4,422 men joined this corps by the end of the war. A more successful effort was the U.S. War Department's Invalid Corps, established in April 1863 to keep wounded or sick veteran soldiers who might otherwise have received discharges on duty in rear echelon jobs. A total of 57,000 enlisted men served in what became known as the Veteran Reserve Corps. By fall 1865, 1,036 officers had received commissions in the corps. During Reconstruction, this corps' officers actively competed for service in the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. They made up the majority of the officers on duty in that organization and, along with many agents who were also Union veterans, committed themselves to the task of securing the fruits of victory, including civil rights for the ex-slaves.

The transition to civilian life was not easy for either Union or Confederate veterans. Many camp-hardened Union veterans first passed through a bureaucratic morass of paperwork; some engaged in boisterous drunken behavior on their routes home. Confederate soldiers drifted home through a desolate countryside and along the way stole from government warehouses and civilians to feed themselves. Some Northern and Southern civilians worried that the war had made these men unfit for civil society.

Physical and emotional scars compounded the problems of adjustment. Over 200,000 Union soldiers returned home with wounds. Many Confederate soldiers returned home in similar condition. A number of veterans continued to be troubled by unhealed amputations, disease, or psychiatric problems; some of them resorted to drugs and alcohol to ease their pain.

northern veterans

Once home, veterans confronted unemployment and their own concerns about making their way in civilian society. Disabled Northern veterans found assistance in the federal government's pension program, first established in 1862 and expanded over the years by subsequent legislation. The federal government also established veterans' homes for disabled and psychologically scarred soldiers. Some veterans attempted to revive the camaraderie of the service by joining organizations such as the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, founded in 1865, and the more popular Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), founded in 1866. These organizations did not attract large memberships at first, an indication perhaps that Northern veterans were initially more concerned with putting the past behind them. However, during the latter decades of the century, these fraternal organizations grew. The GAR, which in 1890 claimed more than 400,000 members, became an important political voice for veterans' concerns, an influential supporter of Republican Party candidates, and an advocate for preserving the history of the war and for teaching patriotic values to new generations. In 1871 Union veterans also founded the National Rifle Association to develop the marksmanship of future soldiers. A number of Civil War veterans served in federal units in the West to subdue American Indians and ease white settlement of the frontier.

black veterans

African-American Union veterans faced problems similar to those of whites, but they found their prospects restricted by the racism they encountered in Northern and Southern society. Black veterans commonly found themselves in separate GAR posts; on celebratory occasions they were left no choice but to bring up the rear of parades. They also found themselves in conflict with former officers who challenged the notion of black suffrage. In the South, black veterans shared the fate of all blacks throughout the region, although some rose to positions of community leadership because of their military experience. That experience, however, also made them targets for violence, as in the case of veterans attacked by whites in May 1866 in Memphis, Tennessee. By the end of the nineteenth century, black veterans lost what rights they believed they had won by means of their service, including the right to vote.

CIVIL WAR MEMORIALS

The problem of burying soldiers killed during the Civil War not only brought about the establishment of a national cemetery system, but led to the ongoing effort to memorialize America's war dead that has since been taken for granted. While the war lasted there was no formal procedure for dealing with the dead; they were hastily buried in fields, churchyards, or plots donated by private cemeteries near the places where they died. Many of the bodies were unidentified. After hostilities ceased, the army searched the countryside to find Union dead and reinter them with honor, a process that took five years. Southerners, too, made efforts to retrieve and rebury their dead.

Originally, the aim of the national cemeteries was simply to provide a decent resting place for those who had given their lives in the service of their country. However, because many of these cemeteries were located on the sites of historic battles, their dramatic associations gave them a memorial significance that had not been foreseen in 1862 when their purchase was authorized by Congress. Prominent among these was the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which was dedicated by President Abraham Lincoln in his famous Gettysburg Address. That site and many others were frequently visited by Americans other than families of those buried there. The custom of decorating soldiers' graves with flowers on Decoration Day, later to become Memorial Day, began in 1864 and spread rapidly throughout both the North and the South.

The best known of the national cemeteries is Arlington, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., which was established in 1863 on land formerly belonging to the stepson of George Washington and, later, to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. At the beginning it was not a prestigious burying place; like the others it was used only for unidentified war dead and those whose families could not afford to transport them to their northern home states. However, in 1873 Congress passed legislation granting all honorably discharged Civil War veterans the right to be buried at no cost in national cemeteries, and burial at Arlington, in the nation's capital, gradually came to be viewed as an honor. Later, it was opened to those who served in other wars and their dependents; many well-known people, including President John F. Kennedy, are buried there. It is the site of the famous Tomb of the Unknown Soldier built after World War I, but also contains the tomb of over two thousand unknowns from the Civil War—probably including the remains of Confederate as well as Union soldiers.

The national cemeteries, important though they have been to the nation as a whole, were not the primary means through which Americans memorialized the Civil War. Most memorials—monuments, equestrian statues of heroes, and simpler statues of individual soldiers—were created at the local level and served as focal points around which people of a particular community could gather to remember what the conflict and its sacrifices had meant to them. Built to foster unification and reconciliation, these memorials were dedicated in impressive ceremonies attended by large crowds with parades, music and emotion-inspiring speeches. Because raising funds for a local statue often took years, many, particularly in the South, were not erected until the late nineteenth century or even the early twentieth; by Southerners these were increasingly looked upon as symbols of traditional southern values and of the Lost Cause. Thousands of Civil War memorials still exist throughout the states that were involved in the war. Over time, they have played an important role in reaffirming both national and regional identity.

Sylvia Engdahl

southern veterans

In the postwar South, concerns about poverty and the meaning of defeat, as well as a new kind of race relations,

shaped the adjustment of Confederate veterans to civilian life. Resentment of emancipation and Reconstruction (1865–1877), which gave freed slaves economic and political power, prompted some Confederate veterans to conduct a low-level guerrilla campaign against their Yankee occupiers and freedpeople who challenged the former racial status quo, providing recruits for organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.

As in the North, Southerners did not join veterans' organizations in large numbers immediately after the war, as their main concerns were rebuilding their lives and regaining control of their communities rather than remembering their hardships. However, in the later years of the nineteenth century, they joined organizations that glorified, perpetuated, and shaped the memory of their wartime sacrifices. In 1889 Southern veterans formed the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), which attracted a significant following. The UCV lobbied for assistance for its less fortunate brothers and their families and helped to reshape the idea of the war memorial as a commemoration not only of the war dead, but also of the common Confederate soldier. Like the GAR, the UCV was also concerned with developing a "correct" memory of the war. To that end, in 1899 it sponsored the publication of the twelve volumes of Confederate Military History. Unlike their Union counterparts, who received federal pensions, needy Confederate veterans had to rely on state assistance. Southern state governments provided artificial limbs for amputees and eventually small pensions for veterans. States also established veterans' homes across the South, which came to serve as focal points of memorial celebrations for the Lost Cause.

veterans and national memory

Veterans brought away from the war varying degrees of hate and respect for their enemies. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, Blue and Gray reunions brought them together in a celebration of national unity. In 1898, the participation of Southerners and Northerners, including Civil War veterans, in the Spanish American War further solidified that spirit of unity. Once again, veterans identified themselves as soldiers, recognized themselves in their former enemies, and selectively remembered their wartime experiences. In the process, white Union and Confederate veterans significantly contributed to the construction of a Civil War history that ignored the centrality of the slavery issue, obscured the purpose of Reconstruction, and diminished the contributions of black Union veterans.

bibliography

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cimbala, Paul A., and Miller, Randall M., eds. Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.

Cimbala, Paul A. "Lining Up to Serve: Wounded and Sick Union Officers Join Veteran Reserve Corps during Civil War, Reconstruction." Prologue (spring 2003): 38–49.

Dean, Eric T., Jr. Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

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.

Logue, Larry M. To Appomattox and Beyond, the Civil War Soldier in War and Peace. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.

McConnell, Stuart. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Rosenburg, R. B. Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers' Homes in the New South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Paul A. Cimbala

See also:Lost Cause; Medicine and Health; Memorial (Decoration) Day; Poor Relief, 1816–1900.