Customer Reviews

Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900

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The story of the Union veterans of the Civil War is a complex one containing many subplots and competing lines. Like the war, nothing is simple and easy answers will not suffice to the complex questions. These men, like the age they lived in, are very different in outlook, challenges and attitudes. The common threads of remembrance, place in history and compensation interest all veterans.
The Grand Army of the Republic was the first truly organized veteran organization in America. Comprised of men who served in the Union Army during the war, it had tremendous political power with one in ten voters being members. This book covers the years from the end of the war, 1865, to when age and death had reduced the member's power. The author chose 1900 as the end of the book. While these men would live for almost another 60 years, their political power had started to diminish and would shortly fail.
The author judges the GAR by our standards and finds them wanting. He seems to have little respect for the organization, no sympathy for the men and damns them for holding the common views of race and religion for their time. The GAR was a white, Republican, anti-catholic organization but so was most of America from 1865 to 1900. The GAR is only a reflection of the society the men came from and were part of. This needs understanding and not judgment.
Another problem is sequencing of the story. The author cannot decide how to tell the story. Are we sequenced by year or do we cover a topic? The answer is both and the results can be difficult to follow. The reader is always trying to catch up with the switch from one style to the other.
I am still looking for a book on this subject; this is not a bad book but is not the book we need.

I highly recommend this book on a Civil War-related topic that
is very little known. The organization and activities of the Union veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic offer a host of
lessons for us today. It is an intriguing look at the effects of the Civil War on those who fought it, as well as their goals
and efforts to shape postwar society. My favorite portion was the section on the efforts of the veterans to inculcate patriotic
values among the youth of the Gilded Age. Well worth the time to
expand your knowledge of this aspect of the Civil War!

As I was preparing for a summer event relating to Civil War commemoration, I dug up a review I wrote on this book many years ago. Thinking back on this book,it was one of the more memorable ones of the many I reviewed while studying under Prof. Richard Beringer at the University of North Dakota. I give the book a "5" rating because as I think of it (which is every time I visit a cemetery and see the GAR symbol), I recall how nicely it relates local history to national history. Here's my original review:

"Be Gloriously content, the Union you preserved remains forever, and liberty, equal rights, and justice, is your heritage to your descendants even unto the judgment day" (Union Veteran leader John M. Thurston, 1898, cited on p. 234).

Glorious Contentment is a history of America's largest nineteenth-century veteran's organization, and it is much more. Stuart McConnell, who is himself not primarily a Civil War historian, has found in the Grand Army of the Republic a powerful link between the experience of the Civil War and the social background of the late nineteenth century. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR for short) was founded in 1865, on the heels of a two-day military parade celebrating the victory of the Union over the Confederacy. It went out of existence in 1956, when the last Union veteran passed away. During the first half of those ninety-one years, it exerted a strong influence on American identity.

McConnell explains in the preface that he came upon his topic "through the back channel of community history." The GAR and its local chapters, he found, was a "microcosm" of the gilded age, a powerful reserve of patriotic and moral sentiment that held up an idealistic image of what the nation had been and ought to be. Local GAR posts were centers where veterans could maintain, through ritual and re-enactment, the memories they cherished. They offered, says McConnell, memories, communities of the imagination; communities that made up history as the members wished it had happened; communities, perhaps, as they wished the turbulent world they inhabited could be" (p. 104). While guarding the reminiscences of Union veterans, organizations like the GAR also exerted a significant influence on American self-identity. Commander-in-chief William Warren claimed in 1877 that his organization represented "the great conservative element of the nation" (p. 40).

Much of the research for Glorious Contentment was done in the archives of local GAR outfits. McConnell examined posts in Philadelphia, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin to build a composite picture of the membership and conduct of the national organization. His thorough acquaintance with advanced theories of ritual, belonging, and nationalism are apparent, particularly in the later chapters. The book is divided neatly into chapters corresponding to the GAR's initial founding (Parade); early methods of organization (Rank); membership patterns (Roster); local ritual activities (Post Room); local and national benevolence activities (Relief Fund); and nationalist ideology (Campfire and Flag).

Membership in the GAR, finds McConnell, tended strongly to cut across class boundaries: the bond of common soldierhood was stronger in most cases than that of economic class. GAR members were bound together by common ritual and a powerful overarching "cosmology" which, when fully developed by about 1880, placed the veterans and their experience at the center of what they saw as their nation's most significant historical event. Not surprisingly, the celebrations of that event took on quasi-religious aspects. The GAR, especially in its early years, utilized secret rituals resembling those of the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, and other gilded age orders. Most interesting is the rite of induction, established in 1866, which required the enlistee to kneel blindfolded before a coffin while an armed guard acted out the sounds and motions of a firing squad. Just after the "ready, aim," command, the officer was to remove the blindfold and command the troops to "Hold! This is a soldier and a brother!" (p. 95). Within a few years, this ritual was softened or abandoned, and GAR rituals took on a more evangelical tone, with Bible reading and chaplains more prominent. In 1871, the same year the three-grade system (recruits, soldiers, and veterans) was abolished, references to Christ were added to official ceremonies. As the GAR became less of a secret society, its rituals de-emphasized militarism and hierarchy, and took on aspects of a church service (p. 102). What remained always was the reaffirmation that in the Civil War, Union Veterans had sacrificed themselves at the hour of America's ultimate need.

Paradoxically, the GAR's emphasis on manliness, self-sufficiency and sacrificial service coexisted with its increasing demands for more government support for veterans. GAR posts did admirable charity and relief work, but as the members aged the national organization began lobbying for increased government benefits for veterans. In an age dreadfully fearful of socialism, some critics accused the GAR of treason against the great Victorian virtues of self-reliance and individualism. To justify its demands for increased government pensions, leaders in the 1880s and 90s developed an effective argument to defend their entitlement: they argued that veterans were only claiming what was already theirs by right--since they as individuals had preserved the nation, it was the duty of government to support them, regardless of their need or lack of it (p. 157). After President Grover Cleveland vetoed a generous dependent pension measure in 1887, the GAR lobbied for an even more generous one, which Benjamin Harrison signed in 1890. Victorious lobbyists called it "The most liberal pension measure ever passed by any legislative body in the world. . ." (p. 153). Though McConnell points out that many GAR leaders were hesitant about or opposed to such measures, one cannot help but see their organization as the closest nineteenth-century equivalent of today's AARP.

While the "manhood versus money" issue was argued, even among veterans, the GAR was busy trying to ensure that its conservative view of nation and history was not abandoned in the schools. When school textbooks appeared that failed to communicate adequately the "treason" of the Confederacy in the late war, veterans lobbied legislatures and threatened publishers. To ensure a sufficient degree of patriotism, they enacted local and state laws requiring the daily pledge of allegiance, and required public schools to fly the flag. McConnell mentions that in 1890 legislatures in both North Dakota and New Jersey passed laws requiring school flags. Civil War veterans, who constituted a powerful political elite, were ever on the lookout for ways to remind the nation of its glorious preservation in 1865.

Perhaps the most far-reaching contribution of the GAR was the conservative view of American history it helped to create and maintain. McConnell notes that while pre-1865 ideology was often radical, looking to the war as a means of clearing away the dead thickets of tradition, postwar ideology interpreted the conflict as a battle for preservation, not liberation. The war had rescued not only the Union, but whatever was presumed to represent good old American tradition. Integral to this view, which McConnell links to English Whig history, was the notion that the Civil War had a changeless moral quality. As a GAR commander said in 1884, "we [fighters for the Union] were eternally right, and they [the Confederates] were eternally wrong" (p. 190). The conflict had been grand and cosmic, an exceptional event the likes of which had never been seen before and would not be again.

The historiography of Union veterans was moralistic, and it also hid the truth about the cruel nature of the war. McConnell finds that the recollections of both officers and rank and file soldiers were sentimental and highly selective, stressing the large themes of providence, sacrifice, brotherhood and glory, while ignoring or downplaying violence and death. Realistic accounts such as Ambrose Bierce's recollection In the Midst of Life and Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage did not appear until the 1890s. McConnell suggests that sentimentalism about war had some unhappy practical consequences: in the 1898 war with Spain, American soldiers neglected many basic sanitary and safety precautions because they had learned from the veterans of the last conflict to look for the glories of war instead of its dangers.

Glorious Contentment is a very worthwhile piece of historical scholarship. Except for the third chapter, which tediously examines membership patterns in various local posts, it is very engaging. The great value of the book lies in the way it connects the experience of the Civil War with the way experience was shaped in the postwar era. McConnell suggests in the preface that the habit of periodization has frequently prevented historians and their students from appreciating the long-term effects of powerful events. Likewise, it is not often that we are challenged to go beyond surface manifestations of nationalism and asked to critically consider the nature of the experiences and rituals that make up our sense of identity as Americans. If it is true that the second half of the nineteenth century was the era that laid the most important foundation for the following century (and I believe it was), then Glorious Contentment is quite an important work for helping us understand who we are.