Grand Army of the Republic

Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), largest and most powerful post–Civil War organization of Union Army and Navy veterans.Founded on 6 April 1866, at Decatur, Illinois, by the former army surgeon Benjamin Franklin Stephenson (1823–1871), its proclaimed goals were “fraternity, charity and loyalty.” Simultaneously a political club, pension lobby, fraternal lodge, charitable society, and patriotic group, the GAR was perhaps the most influential voluntary organization of the Gilded Age. Except for Grover Cleveland, every president elected between 1868 and 1900 was a member; the unprecedented Dependent Pension Act of 1890 (which cost $1 billion by 1907) was the product of GAR lobbying; and the nearly seven thousand local posts that ultimately dotted the northern landscape were important centers of sociability. Grand Army membership crossed class lines, and to some extent it was interracial, though black veterans usually were relegated to segregated posts.

Between 1866 and 1872, the GAR operated as a virtual wing of the Republican party, boosting the careers of soldier‐politicians such as Illinois senator John A. Logan (1826–1886), who served several terms as GAR president. After 1872, it entered a steep decline, reaching a low of fewer than 27,000 members in 1876. In the 1880s, the GAR was revived as a fraternal order, emphasizing its secret initiation ritual and the provision of charity to needy veterans. It also began focusing on pensions and, by the 1890s, on a conservative version of American nationalism that stressed the ideals of independent producerism and the citizen‐volunteer. At its peak membership of 409,489 in 1890, the Grand Army enrolled about 40 percent of eligible Union veterans.

The GAR declined in influence after 1900, holding its last encampment in 1949 and officially expiring with the death of its last member in 1956. Its chief legacies to the twentieth century were a pension system that acted as the template for subsequent entitlement spending and a conservative political agenda that later veterans’ groups (notably the American Legion) emulated.
See also Welfare, Federal.

Bibliography

Mary R. Dearing , Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.A.R., 1952.
Stuart McConnell , Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900, 1992.

Stuart McConnell