The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

Although Memorial Day ceremonies in tbe years immediately following the Civil War often reflected the country’s sectional divisions, the Memo- rial Day of tbe mid-1890s was a considerably different holiday from what it had been twenty years earlier. By that time, the trend toward reconcili- ation of North and South was well advanced and the Spanish-American War further hastened the nation along the path to sectional accord and national unity. All the while. Memorial Day was evolving, a process that is best observed on the local level. As a result. Memorial Day became a more popular and less reverential day, joining the Fourth of July as the country’s only other “national” holiday. It continued to evolve during the first decade of the twentieth century. Overall, the holiday became more inclusive by embracing a larger segment of the community. Nevertheless, there were those who found the standard celebration not altogether satis- factory and elected to observe Memorial Day in their own fashion.

I

Memorial Day ceremonies mirrored, and, in a small way at least, helped to advance the long-term trend to North-South unity. At first, though, fears were expressed in some quarters that the holiday might in fact en- courage sectional discord. In 1869, for instance, the New York Times editorialized that Memorial Day:

Is an appeal to the patriotism of one section at the expense of the pride and feeling of the other section. It is a memorial of the triumph of Northern loyalty over Southern rebellion. It is a method of reminding the North that it is a con- queror, and the South that it is conquered. . . . As managed by revered gentlemen here and at Washington, and elsewhere, it is an occasion for heaping epithets of infamy upon one set of graves while piling flowers upon another set- for reviving the bitter memories of conflict, scattering fresh the seeds of hate. . . . Such a ceremony. . . . is utterly incompatible with that restoration of cordial feelings

26 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

between the people of two sections, which alone can impart lasting vitality and strength to the Union.’

Others agreed, and as late as 1883 the New York Tribune insisted that it “is unwise and indecent to take the old grievances out of their graves once a year,” but “so long as the day is celebrated as it is now, that will inevitably be done.”^

Nor were such criticisms without a certain degree of merit. For ex- ample, incidents that stirred sectional animosities had occurred on Me- morial Day at Arlington National Cemetery. In 1869, by prior agreement with the GAR, no flowers were to be placed on the gravesites of Confed- erates at Arlington. But when a woman, defying the agreement, placed blossoms on those sites, a Marine lieutenant, on guard at the time, stamped on them and then dispersed a gathering crowd. The incident, as it turned out, elicited considerable criticism of the GAR. The next year, “mischie- vous persons” removed flowers from the graves of Union soldiers and placed them on the resting places of “Rebels.” Moreover, “two ladies” took a small flag that headed a row of Union graves, which adjoined a row of Confederate graves, tore off the stars, reversed the flag, and reinserted it in the ground.^

Similarly, in 1869, when a GAR post in Pennsylvania made plans to decorate Union and Confederate graves, the post was overruled by na- tional headquarters. And in 1875 when a county fair at Rockford, Illinois, offered an invitation to Jefferson Davis to address the local populace, the GAR and other Northerners joined in having the invitation withdrawn, though it bad already been accepted.” Although tbey may seem minor, these kinds of incidents aroused ill-will in both the North and South.

Even more divisive, since they were frequently carried in the press for all to read and ponder, were the Memorial Day speeches. A number of Memorial Day orators rebuked the South for having endangered the Ameri- can Democratic experiment. James A. Garfield, Ohio Congressman and future President, who gave the address at Arlington in 1868, asserted that the rebellion of the South challenged “the principle that all owe due submission and obedience to the lawfully expressed will of the majority.” Tbis principle, said Garfield, was “our political firmament, in which all otber truths are set, as stars in Heaven,” and its “overthrow would have brought such ruin as might follow in this physical universe if the power of gravitation were destroyed . . ..”̂

When Fredrick Douglass, abolitionist and ex-slave, gave the Memorial Day address at Arlington in 1871, he made essentially the same point, though perhaps a tad more dramatically. Said Douglass:

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

When our great republic, the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world, had reached the point of supreme peril; where the Union of these states was torn and rent asunder at the center, and the armies of a gigantic rebellion came forth with broad blades and bloody hands to destroy the very foundation of American society, the unknown braves who slumber in those graves flung themselves into the growing chasm where canon roared and bullets whistled, fought and fell. They died for their country!

May my right-hand forget its cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted and bloody conflict.̂

Seven years later, Douglass delivered a Memorial Day address to a large crowd at Union Square in New York City. He again chided the South for its attack on the “grand experiment of self-government not yet 100 years old.” Alluding to conditions in the South with the end of Re- construction and the withdrawal of federal troops, Douglass spoke of the “lawless and revolutionary spirit still abroad in the country,” of “the con- stitution and laws” being “compromised or threatened,” and of “the elec- tive franchise being overborne by intimidation and fraud.” Challenging the South, he said “let us have the Constitution, with its thirteenth, four- teenth, and fifteenth amendments fairly interpreted, faithfully executed, and cheerfully obeyed in the fullness of their spirit and the completeness of their letter.” Near the end of his speech, however, Douglass insisted that, “Though I have worn the yoke of bondage, and have no love for what we called the good old times of slavery, there is in my heart no taint of malice toward the ex-slaveholders.”^

But there were other speakers who seemed unprepared to make any concessions to the South. ” There was a difference in fundamental prin- ciples of civilization and government,” asserted a Memorial Day orator in 1884. He continued:

We went into the war for the Union; we fought it through against treason and rebellion. Living or dead, their soldiers must remain what they were, and ours what they were, to the end of time. In the charm of brilliant valor we may forget the injustice of the occasion that called it forth, but it will be only for a moment. The sober second thought of the people will never allow it to be permanent. Their dead are not our dead, nor our dead theirs.^

On Memorial Day in 1888 in a speech delivered in San Francisco, Charles A. Sumner, a California Congressman, declared that:

With a remedy for every wrong appointed for our assertion, and with never any complaint in that respect . . . there is absolutely no excuse for revolution or rebellion; and treason is the boldest of treachery, and disloyalty dishonor. All

1 8 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

serious expression of favor for the latter should be promptly confronted by the neighborly patriot with appropriate deprecating and admonition and the known, well understood, invariably inflicted penalty for the former should be death.’

Into the 189O’s some Memorial Day speakers continued to remind their audiences of the essential justice of the Union cause. In the words of one such speaker: “No conception of the relation of right and wrong in the affairs of any people has ever approached the comprehensive power of every loyal citizen of the United States as was displayed in their sublime effort to maintain the constitution, suppress the rebellion and crush out slavery.” And another orator, in an address titled “The Meaning of Me- morial Day,” emphasized that:

To ignore the irreconcilable distinction between the cause of the North and that of the South is to degrade the war to the level of a mere fratricidal strife for the display of military prowess and strength. War, horrid war waged for its own sake is ignoble, brutal; but when waged in defense of convictions which deserve to prevail, then indeed war may be glorified and sanctified by the suffering and lives of its victims. . . . There is a distinction between the principles of liberty and those of slavery. ‘°

Southerners, of course, were not necessarily prepared to follow the New Testament injunction to turn the other cheek. For a time, writes E. Merton Coulter, “the South indulged itself to the fullest in the heathen sweetness of hate.” As a Virginian phrased it in 1866, “there is a mutual and an inextinguishable hate between the Yankee and the Southerner.” For their part. Confederate Memorial Day speakers, while expressing despair at Southern defeat, also praised the achievements of the Confed- erate dead, and defended the uprightness of their motives and deeds.”

Yet, amidst the mutual recrimination. Northerners and Southerners performed acts of generosity that became more frequent as time passed. As early as 1866, as Coulter points out. Southerners decorated.the graves of Union soldiers. In the mid 1870s, Southerners joined Northerners in Cincinnati to decorate the graves of fallen comrades; and in Madison, Wisconsin, Union veterans decorated the grave sites of Confederates who had perished there as prisoners of war. In 1882, groups of Northern and Southern veterans in New Orleans joined to pay homage to each others’ dead. That same year. Union and Confederate soldiers met for the first time at Gettysburg. These Blue and Gray gatherings, as they were called, were continued in subsequent years. “The soldiers bear no malice”, ob- served Harper’s Weekly/, for they “have seen the tenacious and terrible courage of both sides” and so, “they will drop a memorial flower upon the heroic grave of either.” In 1886, on the eve of Memorial Day,

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

Confederates decorated Union graves in Chicago; the year following, the Blue and Gray met a second time at Gettysburg. On Memorial Day in 1890 the Blue and Gray came together at Vicksburg, listened to speeches (including one from the former Confederate commander of Vicksburg and another from the Governor of Mississippi), decorated the graves of both armies and enjoyed a barbecue together. And in 1895, the GAR held its annual encampment at Louisville. “The city was gorgeously decorated and the old flag was everywhere in evidence,” recalled a GAR member who had attended the gathering. He added that “I have visited many encampments, but in none of them have we received a more royal welcome.”‘̂

If the acts of generosity and good will helped to lessen sectional ani- mosity so, too, did some of the Memorial Day addresses. As early as 1877, in a speech given at Nashville, Tennessee, Henry Watterson, edi- tor of the Louisville Courier-Jourrial and a former Confederate soldier, announced:

The war is over. It is for us to bury its passions with the dead, to bury them beneath a monument raised by the American people to American nationhood and the American system. . . . I hope. . . . to do honor to the patriotism and valor of those who died to save the Union. . . . War or no war, we are all countrymen, fellow-citizens; and it is no empty sentiment . . . which seeks to bring us nearer together. The day of the sectionalist is over. The day of the nationalist has come. . . . ”

Again, on that day, in a speech at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, another former Confederate soldier assured his audience that “Southern statesmanship is not so blind in its proverbial sagacity as not to see that henceforth the strength and security of the South are to be found only under the shield of the Union.” ‘̂’ That day, too, Oliver P. Morton, a parti- san Republican Senator from Indiana, told his audience that, “We cannot forget the past, we ought not to forget it.” But he also asserted that, “We will let by-gones be by-gones.”^^

Over the years, such sentiments became more common in Memorial Day addresses. Of course, there were a few speakers—in both the North and the South—who remained intractable. Still, as a Memorial Day orator in New York remarked in 1885, the “passionate bitterness” of the years immediately after the war had begun to surrender to a feeling “of broader patriotism.” Moreover, Southerners, especially the younger generation, had to a considerable extent come to accept the propositions that, as a speaker in Augusta affirmed in 1885: “No state will ever again resort to secession from the Union.” “Slavery is gone. Secession is dead,” Henry Watterson proclaimed a decade later: the “Union, with its system of state- hood still intact, survives.”^*

20 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

II

The war with Spain accelerated the drift toward creating a more cohesive nation. A rebellion that erupted in Cuba against Spanish rule in 1895 dragged on for three years, with devastating consequences for the Cuban economy and civilian population. The American public, alerted to condi- tions in Cuba by a strongly pro-rebel United States press, became con- vinced that the war had to be brought to a close and Cuba granted its independence. Public opinion, in turn, exerted pressure on President Wil- liam McKinley and the Congressional leadership. The sinking of the United States battleship Maine, in Havanna Harbor on 15 February 1898, added measurably to the pressure. On 11 April, after negotiations with the Span- ish government on ending the war proved unsatisfactory, McKinley went before Congress to ask for the authority to use the army and navy to bring a halt to the hostilities in Cuba. Congress answered affirmatively, and the President then called for volunteers.^’

Young Americans from the North and South eagerly answered the President’s call. Aging Confederates and Union veterans volunteered, too. McKinley bolstered Southern pride by commissioning as major generals two former Confederate officers, Fitzhugh Lee of Virginia and Joseph Wheeler of Alabama. The fact that Northerners and Southerners fought and died together in 1898, and that the war ended in three months with a resounding victory, brought the country together in a giddy spasm of national feeling.’*

Memorial Day provided an appropriate occasion for celebrating the American victory and for spelling out some of its results. “The late war with Spain has added several thousand more to the nation’s patriotic graves,” the Boston Globe reminded its readers on Memorial Day in 1899. But though “tbis has brought peculiar affliction to many homes,” still, the paper declared:

There is for the nation at large the satisfying thought that these graves are not the result of sectional strife but are occupied by heroes of a united country who battled with the common purpose of rescuing victims of persecution and robbery from the cruel bonds of Spanish misrule.”

Memorial Day orators generally ̂ agreed. “The old animosities are dead,” declared a speaker at a gathering of Union and Confederate veterans sponsored by the “Daughters of the Confederacy.”^”

A dramatic illustration of waning sectional animosity was the invitation to speak issued by a Boston GAR post to General Joseph Wheeler, the first Confederate officer to receive such an invitation from a New England

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915 21

GAR post. Wheeler, who delivered his address at the Boston Theater (one of the largest theaters in the world at the time), was greeted enthusiasti- cally by a standing-room-only crowd. More than equal to the occasion, he opened his address witb a tribute to tbe part played by Massachusetts in American history, and then asserted tbat:

This Memorial Day of 1899 possesses interest which has not been felt in any preceding anniversary. Today throughout our land new graves are being covered with flowers—graves of sons of every state who have fallen in the battle since the celebration of last year. . . .

The “warriors who fell side by side”, fighting the Spanish in Cuba, said Wheeler, men from the North and the South, among them some of your brave boys from the 2d Massachusetts, were buried together in the great National cemetery at Arlington. . . .

Wheeler then proceeded to endorse the McKinley administration’s deci- sion in 1899 to acquire the Philippines in tbe peace settlement with Spain. He ended bis speech with a ringing call for national unity, saying: “There is one sentiment which should be impressed on every mind and instilled into every heart: ‘My country. May she always be rigbt, but rigbt or wrong my country.’”^’

Wheeler’s approval of tbe administration’s policy notwithstanding, powerful opposition existed among Democrats and others to tbe acquisi- tion of the Philippines. The reelection of McKinley in 1900, wbo de- fended his foreign policy in the campaign, would seem to have settled the matter. But the question of tbe country’s relationship with tbe Philip- pines was again thrust into tbe public arena when charges surfaced tbat the United States Army had used cruel means (including the notorious “water cure” torture) in suppressing a Filipino revolt (1899-1902). Dur- ing the early months of 1902, Southern Democrats in tbe Senate, sens- ing an opportunity to embarrass tbe administration, condemned tbe army’s conduct. But President Theodore Roosevelt (who bad succeeded McKinley in 1901 after bis assassination), determined to seize tbe political initiative from bis critics. In a speech at Arlington Cemetery, on Memorial Day, 1902, the President stoutly defended tbe army, arguing that “our warfare in the Philippines has been carried on witb singular humanity,” and tbat the young American soldiers there,

have fought under terrible difficulties and have received terrible provocation from a very cruel and very treacherous enemy. Under the strain of these provocations I deeply deplore to say that some among them have so far forgotten themselves as to counsel and commit, in retaliation, acts of cruelty.

22 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

The President further insisted that although the “hostile natives” had in- flicted many more and “far greater acts of cruelty” on “our troops” than the latter had on the rebels, the guilty American soldiers would be found and punished. And then Roosevelt added provocatively:

From time to time there occurs, in our country, to the deep and lasting shame of our people, lynchings carried on . . . (with) a cruelty infinitely worse than any tbat bas been committed by our troops in the Philippines. . . . The men who fail to condemn tbese lynchings, and yet clamor about what has been done in the Phil- ippines, are indeed guilty of neglecting the beam in their own eye while taunting their brother about tbe mote in his.̂ ^

Roosevelt’s remarks hit a sore spot; in 1900 alone, over a hundred Afri- can Americans were lynched.̂ ^ Angry Southern Democratic Senators accused the President of “waving the bloody shirt.” And one Senator labeled it “a very unwise address” that “will serve no useful purpose,” and that its “effect will be to arouse sectional feeling.” ‘̂’

In retrospect, however, the address seems to bave done little to derail the steady trend toward sectional reconciliation. Furthering that trend, in 1905 Congress approved tbe return of captured Confederate battle flags to the South. In a speech at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day of tbat year, Joseph Foraker, a Republican Senator from Ohio, pointed out tbat tbe battle flag measure “was passed by both Houses without debate and without a dissenting vote.” To Foraker tbis was striking evidence “tbat the country bad entered an era of peace and goodwill.” “We are not only again one people, in tbe sense tbat we are again all Americans,” observed Foraker, “but even party rancor and acrimony bave largely passed away.”̂ ^ In 1887, President Cleveland bad ordered tbe return of tbe Confederate battle flags, but tbe storm of opposition in tbe North was so fierce tbat be rescinded tbe order.

One of tbe loudest opponents of tbe order bad been Foraker, then Governor of Obio. Tbe intervening eigbteen years and Republican con- trol of Congress and tbe Presidency bad clearly given bim a different perspective.^^ Toward tbe end of bis speecb, Foraker, shifting bis focus from tbe issue of sectional reconcilation, added a revealing comment:

Where genuine Americanism prevails there cannot be danger of any very wide- spread populism, communism, anarchism, or any other heresy that would under- mine and overthrow our institutions. . . . this national spirit is. . . . our greatest shield from harm. . . .^

Foraker’s remarks remind us tbat in a time of substantial economic cbange and social unrest, prominent characteristics of tbe late nineteentb and

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915 23

early twentieth centuries, a call for national unity might serve as a substi- tute for radical challenges to the established order. This, after all, was the era of “Big Bill” Haywood, and the radical syndicalist union, the Industrial Workers of the World.̂ «

Of course, for the generality of Memorial Day speakers, including Foraker, national unity was a goal worth pursuing for its own sake. Not surprisingly. Memorial Day orators largely softpedalled the charge that the South had been guilty of treason. Nothing offers more convincing proof of the acceptance of the South than the election of Woodrow Wil- son in 1912. He was the first Southerner to be elected to the Presidential office since before the Civil War. And his selection, as Arthur Link has observed, determined that “for the next four years the southern Democ- racy would literally be in the saddle of the federal government.” Southern- ers exulted that at last they were back “in the house of their fathers.”^’

Wilson was a Southerner, but as President he was also the nation’s leader and it was his responsibility to ensure that the two roles meshed. How, then, by the second decade of the twentieth century did the most prominent southerner in the country view the Civil War and its legacy? Wilson’s Memorial Day address at Arlington Cemetery in 1915 answered that question emphatically, and showed how far the South and the nation had progressed along the road to national unity. About a third of the way into his address, Wilson said:

We are constantly speaking of the great war of which we think today as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before,—a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the birth of the Union. It was’ the time when America for the first time realized its unity and saw the vision of its united destiny.^”

Omitted from Wilson’s “united destiny” were African Americans, espe- cially those living in the South. Disenfranchised, and subjected to the constraints of the Jim Crow system, black Americans, in a sense, paid the price for the unification of the white North and South.̂ ^

Ill

Just as sectional and national sentiment evolved over time, so, too, did Memorial Day itself. First of all, the holiday changed in terms of the num- ber and kinds of people and organizations associated with the day’s ac- tivities. Secondly, the sense of solemnity that originally surrounded Me- morial Day diminished, and it did so rather rapidly.

24 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

Strangely enough, more people initially became attracted to Memorial Day after Congress amended the criteria for admission to the National Cemeteries. When Congress established the first fourteen National Cem- eteries in 1862, only Union soldiers killed during the Civil War were eli- gible for burial in those cemeteries. By excluding Union veterans who died after 1865 Congress had missed an opportunity to offer a desirable and inexpensive benefit to ex-soldiers, who also happened to be their constituents. In 1872 the Grand Army of the Republic urged Congress to permit the burial of Union veterans in National Cemeteries. Congress complied in 1873 by passing legislation that bestowed the right to be interred in a National Cemetery on all honorably discharged Civil War veterans.^^ Though it could hardly have been anticipated, this legislation had a significant impact on Memorial Day by enhancing the attraction of the holiday and its ceremonies to surviving Civil War veterans, not to speak of their families and friends. This is apparent when one examines how Memorial Day changed between the late 186O’s and the late 187O’s.

IV

On the morning of Memorial Day in 1869 or 1870, in scores of cities and towns across the nation. Civil War veterans (members of the GAR if a post or posts had been established in the community), accompanied by one or more units of the state militia, a military band, the local fire (or police) department, a group of children (frequently orphans of deceased veterans), and perhaps a few community officials, traveled to the nearby cemetery (National or otherwise). In a procession following them were citizens of the community. At the cemetery, all participated in a relatively simple, sober ceremony that included a dirge played by the band, a prayer offered by a minister, a reading of the Gettysburg Address, a suitable speech delivered often by a local notable, the singing of “My Country Tis Of Thee” or “America”, the strewing of flowers on the heroes’ graves, and recitation by the minister of a benediction.^^

Something of the solemn spirit of Memorial Day in 1870 was captured by the Philadelphia /nquirer when the paper observed that “it is a good thing that on one day of the year the Nation, with head uncovered and with hands ladened with floral offerings, should go solemnly out among its heroic dead to decorate their resting-places.” “It is good for the young” “to learn from this solemnity,” the paper continued, that those who died for their country “are held in sacred regard by the country which their chivalric daring preserved.”^

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915 25

This reverential tone and the unvarying focus on the Civil War dead faded fairly quickly. As early as 1875 the New York Tribune found that the “old pathos and solemnity” of Memorial Day had “vanished,” “except in very quiet country places.” And five years later the Brooklyn Eagle observed that, “Time has healed the wounds and assuaged the suffering of the bereaved,” whose “days of mourning have long since passed away.”^ Even the Memorial Day music changed. As historian James McPherson has pointed out, sad songs like “Strew Blossoms On Their Graves” and “Cheers Of Tears” were by the 188O’s replaced with “spirited tunes” like “Marching Through Georgia” and “Rally Round The Flag.”^^

Another change in the atmosphere took place after the mid-1870s, when veterans of the War of 1812 and the War with Mexico began to march (or ride) regularly in Memorial Day parades. The newspaper editor William Allen White remembered fondly a Memorial Day in Kansas City in the mid-1870’s where “in the town’s one open carriage” sat “a veteran of the War of 1812—a man well into his nineties.” Behind him, wrote White, “on horseback were the veterans of the Mexican War,” a “small squadron of fifty men, or so, all bearded.”^’

The parameters of the day’s ceremonies had been expanded in other ways. Along with strewing flowers on the graves of the deceased of the Civil War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War, floral decorations were draped over the statues of George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette in New York City. Wreaths were also placed on monuments to the victims of British prison ships in Brooklyn^* and the graves at West Point of Thaddeus Kosciusko and George A. Custer were decorated.^’ By 1879, as the New York Tinnes pointed out. Memorial Day was “marked” “by a general tribute to those whose names are associated with the trials and triumphs of the country.””*”

A similar tendency can be observed in the names adopted by some GAR posts. As the GAR grew-from roughly 31,000 members in 1870 to its high point of 400,000 by 1890-it added new posts.”^ Most of these, following traditional practice, were named after local Civil War heroes, or such legendary figures as Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Farragut, and of course, Lincoln. Breaking with this convention, some of the new posts chose for namesakes prominent contemporaries, (or near-contem- poraries). Brooklyn had William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, and Barbara Frietchie posts.”^ New York had a Thaddeus Stevens post; Philadelphia, Charles Sumner and Anna M. Ross posts; Chicago, a John Brown post; and Washington, D.C. had Oliver P. Morton, Charles Sumner, and Frederick Douglass posts.””̂ At least it can be said that these name-

26 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

sakes possessed a recognizable link to the crisis leading to the Civil War, or the Civil War itself, and its afternnath.

Different forces were at work in the selection of several of the other nanaesakes. New York City, for instance, had a George Washington, a Marquis de Lafayette, and an Alexander Hamilton post.’*” These choices reflected, at least in part, a renewed interest in the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers following the celebration of the Centennial in 1876. ”̂ The appearance of posts like these also affected the Memorial Day ceremonial routine. Along with their other duties on that day mem- bers of these posts typically held a ceremony that featured the laying of a wreath or garland on the monument or grave site of the namesake. At times someone might also deliver a eulogy to that post’s namesake.”*^

The naming of a handful of GAR posts seems at first to border on whimsy. New York City was graced with Cornelius Vanderbilt, Peter Coo- per, and Horace Greeley posts, while Rensselaer County, in upstate New York, had a post named after Thurlow Weed. All were contemporary New Yorkers of significant accomplishment. Vanderbilt and Cooper were highly successful businessmen and the latter was an inventor and philan- thropist to boot; Greeley was a famous newspaperman, who had run for President in 1872; and Weed was a journalist and politician. Still, none was a heroic figure known for his contribution to the Union cause. At the very least, their selection suggests that a more provincial orientation and a less bellicose mood had taken over in some GAR posts.

From the 1880s through the early years of the twentieth century cer- emonies associated with Memorial Day continued to evolve. The pres- ence of a minister at the Memorial Day cemetery services had, from the outset, assured a role for religion. That role gained a new dimension in the spring of 1888 when the GAR instructed its members that “whenever practicable” local posts were “to attend divine worship in bodies on the Sabbath preceding Memorial Day.’”” After that directive, church services, among all denominations, became a fixed feature of the Memorial Day experience.

Perhaps inspired by the GAR directive, Brooklyn Catholics held their own kind of pre-Memorial Day religious service: a field mass to com- memorate the nation’s departed military. Beginning in 1903, and lasting until 1918, the clergy of that borough offered an outdoor mass at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Celebrated according to the “military ritual of the Middle Ages,” this “memorial military” high mass attracted thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines, veterans and citizens. The most impressive turn- out was the estimated 45,000 to 50,000 who attended the mass in 1911 .”̂

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915 27_

All the while, the Memorial Day parade grew larger. In 1870, the New York City parade—one of the larger parades in the country—had about 2,000 marchers. Between 1880 and 1912, the numbers varied. They never reached the 45,000 or more that attended Brooklyn’s Navy Yard mass in 1911. But in certain years there were as many as 20,000 march- ers (and cheering crowds of many thousands more lined the parade route).””

Who were the marchers in these years? As with the earliest Memorial Day formations, GAR members, national guard detachments, firemen, and a group of children (sometimes orphans) were central participants. Survivors of the War of 1812 (though there were few after 1885), and the Mexican War took part as did, after 1898, veterans of the Spanish-Ameri- can War. At times, members of the united States Army and other military personnel also marched. In 1883, for example, a thousand United States sailors, “each man in full fighting trim, with his carbine brought to his shoulder,” joined the parade in New York City. And ten years later, the Memorial Day assemblage was augmented by “600 Americans, 300 Ital- ian, and 200 Spanish tars.”^”

Another addition to the parade was the “Sons of Veterans.” First es- tablished in 1881, the Sons was composed, literally, of the sons of de- ceased or honorably discharged Union soldiers or sailors. The two orga- nizations never merged, and there existed a certain degree of tension between them.(How could the Sons possibly understand what their fa- thers had experienced?). Yet the GAR encouraged the Sons, and officially recognized the organization in 1888. As death took its inevitable toll on the Civil War veterans, they looked hopefully to the Sons to maintain the “tender ceremonies” of Memorial Day. ‘̂

Concerns about declining numbers—during the 1890s about 10,000 GAR members died each year—also fueled a drive by the GAR during that decade to mold the minds of school-aged children along the “correct” patriotic path. While still in a position to do so, GAR merribers hoped to unify the younger generation behind their conception of patriotism as well as their version of the Civil War and its meaning. These goals in- volved, among other initiatives, convincing school officials to fly the Ameri- can flag over their schools; employing Union veterans to visit the schools to talk to the children; and promoting the practice of military drill in the schools.^^

All of these efforts achieved some degree of success. By 1900 a num- ber of states, including New Jersey and North Dakota, had passed laws mandating the flying of flags over school buildings.̂ ^ And Union veterans across the country visited schools (usually the last school day before

28 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

Memorial Day) to talk to youngsters about loyalty and patriotism, and to relate their Civil War experiences. Part of the day’s exercises also in- cluded recitations of the Gettysburg Address and the singing of such pa- triotic songs as “Columbia The Gem Of The Ocean,” the “Star Spangled Banner,” and “America.” ‘̂’

The GAR also made headway, for a time, in introducing military train- ing in the schools of the northeast and mid-west. The greatest progress came in New York State, and especially in New York City. By the mid- 1890s thousands of children were taking military training in the state’s public and parochial schools. In 1894, between 3,000 and 5,000 boys (including the “Baptist Boy’s Brigade”) displayed their newly attained skills in New York City’s Memorial Day parade. The following year an esti- mated 13,000 youngsters (many armed and in uniform) marched “with true swing and precision” on Memorial Day. On 30 May 1900, a Brook- lyn reporter described a parade in that borough with “line after line of brave little lads who marched as if their very lives depended upon it and carried their guns with a tense stare that not even a familiar cry of ‘Hello Willy,’ or ‘Hurray for Harvey’ could distract.”^^

However, the GAR’s effort to introduce military training in the schools met stiff opposition from Quakers, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, plus some labor union officials, and lost much of its impetus by the early years of the twentieth century. But a lasting legacy of the GAR campaign was the expanded presence of young people in Memorial Day ceremonies. In 1911, some 3,000 members of the Boy Scouts (a non- militaristic organization) marched with their elders in New York’s parade. A year later they were joined by a contingent of the Girl Scouts (“in brown fatigue uniforms and Rough Rider hats”). In New York’s parade in 1913 the aging veterans marched with their grandsons and granddaughters holding their hands. In Chicago’s Memorial Day parade the year after, with 300,000 people lining the sidewalks, the marchers included Italian “shooters,” Italian policemen in “blue and red plumes,” members of fra- ternal organizations, school cadets, and Boy Scouts. And in East Hartford’s parade in 1915, Boy Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, and high school pupils were part of the Memorial Day assemblage.^^ Clearly, in the years be- tween 1870-1915, Memorial Day celebrations, by involving veterans from all of America’s wars. Sons of Veterans, boys and girls of school age and others had become more representative of the community.

Other groups, and in particular black Americans and women, also had a role in Memorial Day activities. Although officially the GAR stood for equality before the law and opposed segregation, few blacks were admitted

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

to white posts in the North. As a result, in large urban centers such as Chicago, Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia where there existed a substantial population of African American veterans, all-black posts were organized (often named after William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown) .̂ ^ African Americans were part of the Memorial Day parade, were cheered by spectators, and praised for their appearance and marching.^* Occa- sionally an outstanding black figure, like Frederick Douglass, was invited to make a major address. In the end, though, black Americans took part in Memorial Day ceremonies as they lived in America at the time, partici- pants in the parade but also separated from their white comrades.

The women’s situation differed in certain essentials from that of black veterans. Generally speaking, the wives, sisters and female friends of GAR members joined in Memorial Day activities at an ancillary level. There were several women’s societies associated with the GAR. The largest, the Women’s Relief Corps, was officially recognized by the GAR as an auxil- iary in 1882. The W.R.C. engaged in charitable work and during the 1890s supported the GAR’s campaign for school flags. Aside from mak- ing wreaths for cemetery services, the major responsibility of W.R.C. members on Memorial Day was to prepare a post-parade meal for the hungry marchers. Although their daughters (Daughters of Veterans, orga- nized in 1885) and granddaughters (Girl Scouts) might very well have joined the parade, the W.R.C. members, women of the Victorian era after all, seem to have been content to station themselves on the sidewalk to cheer on the passing parade.^’

Still other groups shared in the Memorial Day experience, though in their own way. The letter carriers in New York, for instance, had a parade in 1890 to honor Samuel (“Sunset”) Cox. A Democratic Congressman (who had not served in the military during the Civil War), Cox represented a New York district from 1868 until his death in 1889. He had been a firm supporter of legislation to boost postal workers’ salaries, and they displayed their appreciation with an impressive Memorial Day parade. Dressed in gray uniforms and straw hats, the marchers began at Union Square at Fourteenth Street, proceeded south past Cox’s house on Twelfth Street (where Cox’s widow stood at the parlor window watching as the mail carriers “dipped their colors”), thence to City Hall, and across the Brooklyn Bridge. At the other end of the bridge they were met by Brooklyn’s mail carriers, whereupon the entire body of some one thousand men marched to Greenwood Cemetery, where Cox was buried. There they laid “floral emblems” on his grave and listened to an “affectionate tribute” to their recently deceased champion.^” At times after 1890 the letter carri-

30 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

ers marched, in New York and elsewhere, in the traditional Memorial Day assemblage.^’ But in some years, they held their own parade as they had done in 1890. ^̂

Like the letter carriers, other groups and communities staged their own celebrations on Memorial Day. Thus, in 1902, several thousand Swedish residents gathered about a statue of John Ericcson (designer of the ironclad Monitor) in New York’s Battery Park to plant a linden tree, sing Swedish songs, and listen to an address about Ericcson and the mean- ing of Memorial Day.̂ ^ Not to be outdone, local societies in Brooklyn and Philadelphia held services to honor the memory, respectively, of Thomas Paine and Betsy Ross (designer of the American flag).*”

These were fairly traditional sorts of activities. At times, though, the ceremonies took an odd turn. On Memorial Day, 1904, for example, the Abilene, Kansas citizenry, joined by the local GAR post, devoted “the principal part” of the ceremony “to the laudation” of a former marshal, Thomas J. Smith. In 1870, Smith had briefly subdued the lawless ele- ment in that frontier town, and “established the supremacy of the law,” before he was nearly decapitated in attempting to arrest a man on a murder charge. Thirty-four years later the citizens of Abilene marked his grave with a granite boulder.*^ In another Memorial Day oddity, each year between 1907-1914 New York’s animal rights’ activists sponsored a “Work Horse” parade. The purpose of these parades, in which the animals ambled along Fifth Avenue, was to encourage humane treatment of the city’s work-a-day horses.^^ The fact that work horses were being replaced at the time by the internal combustion engine lends a certain poignant note to these parades. The mail carrier and work horse parades show clearly that in the minds of many Americans Memorial Day ceremonies did not need to be confined to remembering the deeds of deceased soldiers. Me- morial Day had become a malleable holiday.

Ironic evidence of its malleability is found in the uses made of Memo- rial Day by reformers and labor leaders. Ironic because the GAR, which had framed the original model of Memorial Day, was a conservative orga- nization, firmly in the “camp of order and property rights,” and known for its hostility to labor unions. During the great railroad strikes of 1877, the Commander-in-Chief of the GAR offered to furnish President Ruther- ford B. Hayes “if necessary ” “thousands of volunteers for the restoration and preservation of order.” Amidst the Milwaukee riots of 1886, GAR posts in Wisconsin offered their services to the state administration. The Indiana GAR singled out “anarchist, nihilists, communists, socialists, athe- ists” as menaces to the principles soldiers had fought for. During the labor

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915 31

upheavals at Homestead and the Pullman Palace Car Company in the 189O’s, spokesmen for the GAR made their sympathies clear, criticizing labor and defending the National Guard.̂ ^ In short, GAR officials justified the use of armed might in order to achieve social order and unity.

The negative stance of the GAR on labor issues did not seem to unduly disturb reformers and union leaders. Indeed, they coopted Memorial Day for their own purpose, to honor the memory of these who had manned the battlements in the industrial wars. Typically, in these ceremonies, admirers assembled to memorialize a recently deceased hero of those wars. Perhaps the earliest of such alternate Memorial Day celebrations was a Philadelphia gathering of Knights of Labor members in 1890 to decorate the graves of Uriah S. Stevens, a founder of the Knights of Labor. General Master Workman Terence V. Powderly gave a brief speech in which he compared the work of the Knights of Labor with that of the GAR. The GAR had fought to free the slaves from bondage, said Powderly, and the Knights labored so that they might remain free.̂ *

The passing of Henry George, George E. McNeill, and Tom Johnson afforded additional opportunities for alternate Memorial Day services. George, author of Progress arid Poverty;, who died during his campaign for Mayor of New York in 1897, was memorialized at his grave in Green- wood Cemetery the following year on Memorial Day.*̂ Precisely ten years later, a monument to George E. McNeill—a leader in the eight-hour move- ment and a major figure in both the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor—was unveiled in Boston. Among those present at the ceremony was Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federa- tion of Labor, and John Frances Fitzgerald, Mayor of Boston and grand- father of a future President. Fitzgerald made a few remarks, praising McNeill, according to the Boston Globe, as “one of the most valiant fighters in the cause of workingmen.”^” Again, on Memorial Day, 1911, the recently deceased Tom Johnson, a follower of Henry George, and reform Mayor of Cleveland, was eulogized at a gathering of single taxers (as the followers of George were known).’^ By successfully appropriating Memorial Day to honor figures such as George, McNeill and Johnson, labor leaders and reformers showed once again how malleable the holiday had become. Interestingly, pre-World War I labor leaders did not attempt to broaden the day’s compass to include industrial workers as a class. That effort awaited another day.’̂

Memorial Day underwent major changes between 1870 and the first decade and half of the twentieth century. In 1870, Memorial Day speak- ers routinely castigated the South (while speakers below the Mason and

32 The Post Civil War Years, 1869-1915

Dixon Line upbraided the North), thereby promoting sectional discord. Thirty-five years later, Memorial Day orators regularly encouraged sec- tional amity and national unity. In 1870 Memorial Day ceremonies re- volved mournfully around the men who had perished in the Civil War. By 1915 Memorial Day had become both a less sober and more generalized holiday—a sort of American version of the Catholic Church’s All Souls Day.’̂ It had also become a very popular holiday; by 1914 Memorial Day was a legal holiday in all but eight Southern States.’”^ This unplanned transformation of Memorial Day is traceable to such disparate and uncon- nected events as an 1873 Congressional law and the Spanish-American War. Ultimately, though, central to the evolution of the holiday was the steady erosion in the numbers of surviving Civil War veterans, as their places in the columns of Memorial Day marchers were increasingly taken by the Sons of Veterans, the Daughters of Veterans, the Camp Fire Girls and the Boy Scouts. But soon there would be a new infusion of young ex- soldiers to bolster those columns.

Notes

1 New York Times, 3 June 1869.

2 Mary A. Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.A.R. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1952), p. 179; Franklin D. Tappan, The Passing of the Grand Army of the Republic. (Worcester, Massachusetts: Commonwealth Press, 1939), p. 184-85; New York Tribune, 31 May 1883.

3 Washington Post, 30 May 1954; New York Tribune, 31 May 1870.

4 E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction 1865-1877, (Louisiana State University Press, 1947), p. 384.

5 Robert Haven Schauffler, ed.. Memorial Da;; (Decoration Dai)); Hs Celebration, Spirit, And Significance As Related in Prose and Verse, With A Non-Sec- tional Anthology of the Civil War(New York: Moffart, Yard and Company,1911), p. 24.

6 John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds.. The Frederick, Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates and Interviews. Vol. 4:1864-1880 (New Haven; Yale university Press, 1991), pp. 290-91.

7 Ibid.. pp. 483-86.

8 George Duffield, Our Soldier-Dead. An Address on Decoration Day. Northville, May 30th 1884, (no place, no date), p. 6.

9 Charles A. Sumner, Memorial Day Oration. Delivered at the Opera House, San Francisco, Wednesday Evening, May 30, 1888, (San Francisco: James H. Barry, Printer, 1888), p. 18-19.

10 Junis Simons, Oration Delivered on Memorial Day at West Laurel Hill Cem- etery, May 30,1894, (Philadelphia, Pa., no date), p. 3; N.P Hallowell, “An Ad- dress Delivered on Memorial Day,” (Boston: Little Brown, and Company, 1896), p. 7.

11 Coulter, South During Reconstruction; Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Con- federacy (New York: Oxford university Press, 1987), p. 42.

12 Coulter, South During Reconstruction, p. 386; Foster, Ghosts of the Confed- eracy, pp67-8; Harper’s Weekly, XXXII(9 June 1888) p. 407; Chicago Tri- bune. 30 May 1886; New York Tribune. 30 May 1890; Forty-fourth Annual Encampment Of the Grand Army of the Republic, Atlantic City, 1910 ( Atlan- tic City,1910) p. 65. See also Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion 1865-1900 (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1937),pp. 120-21.

13 Henry Watterson, The Compromises of Life and Other Lectures and Addresses, (New York: Fox Duffield and Company, 1903), pp. 278,285-86.

34 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

14 The Proceedings on the Evening of Decoration Dai), M<¡1> 30th 1877, At The Academii of Music (Brooklyn: Printed by Members of the Bar,1877), p. 21.

15 Schauffler.ed, Memorial Day, p. 259.

16 New York Times, 31 May 1885; Schauffler, Memorial Day, p. 259; Watterson, Compromises of Life, p: 315.

17 A number of books deal with the coming and course of the Spanish-American War. Frank Friedel, The Splendid Little War (New York: Dell Publishing, 1958) is an excellent, relatively brief, account. A fuller, and more recent history is David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York: MacMillan, 1981).

18 John Bodnar, ed., Bonds of Affection: Americans Defend Their Patriotism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 72-4.

19 Boston Globe, 30 May 1899.

20 Washington Post, 31 May 1899.

21 Boston Globe, 31 May 1899.

22 Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Rooseuelt (University Press of Kansas, 1991), pp. 56-7; New York Times, 31 May 1902.

23 The Statistical History of the United States From Colonial Times to the Present. (Stanford, Connecticut: Fairfield Publishers, 1965), p. 218.

24 New York Times, 31 May 1902.

25 Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, pl54; “Address of Senator Foraker at Arling- ton, Memorial Day, May 30, 1905, African American Perspectives; Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907 (Library of Congress), pp. 6, 8.

26 Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland, A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1932, pp. 332-34.

27 Address Of Senator Foraker at Arlington, Memorial Day, May 30, 1905, p. 9.

28 Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States 1877-1919 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1987), pp. 262-68.

29 Address of President Wilson At Arlington, May 31, 1915 (Washington D.C., 1915), p. 3.

30 Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to The White House (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 527-28.

31 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 332-34, 426-33.

32 Robert B. Beath, Grand Army of the Republic (New York: Bryan Taylor and Company, 1888), p. 132. We wish to thank the Public Affairs Office of the Department of Veterans Affairs for supplying us with information on National Cemeteries.

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

33 This description of Memorial Day was based on the following sources: The Na- tional Memorial Day: A Record of Ceremonies. Over The Graves of Union Soldiers, May 29 and 30, 1869; (Washington City: Headquarters Grand Army of the Republic, 1870); Brooklyn Eagle. 1 June 1869; Philadelphia ¡nquirer. 31 May 1870; Chicago Tribune. 31 May 1870; New York Times. 31 May 1870; Mary H. Mitchell, Hollywood Cemetery; The History of a Southerner Shrine (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1985), pp. 68-9; New York Times. 31 May 1874.

34 Philadelphia Inquirer. 30 May 1870.

35 New York Tribune. 31 May 1875; Brooklyn Eagle. 31 May 1880. See also Henry Cabot Lodge, Address Delivered Before The Citizens of Nahant, Me- morial Day, 1882. (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, university Press, 1882), P 6.

36 New York Times. 26 May 1996.

37 William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1946), pp. 72-3. In surveying scores of descriptions of Memorial Day parades between 1868-1870 we found only a handful of refer- ences to the veterans of the War of 1812, and none to those of the War with Mexico. From the mid-1870’s on, however, newspaper accounts of Memorial Day ceremonies contain frequent references to both groups of veterans. (See for example the New York Times. 30 May 1876, 31 May 1878, 1 June 1880; Brooklyn Eagle. 31 May 1883.)

38 During the American Revolution the British stationed prison ships at Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn to receive American seamen taken prisoners of war. It has been estimated that over 11,000 died of starvation, disease and close confinement See American Heritage. XXI (August 1970), pp. 16-7, 90-3.

39 Thaddeus Koscuisko was a Polish officer who fought on the American side during the Revolution. George A. Custer was a Civil War officer, and a casualty of the Indian Wars.

40 New York Times. 31 May 1879. Huge sums were spent on Memorial Day flow- ers and floral decorations. According to one contemporary, in New York City alone, in 1885, the cost came to $100,000. Chicago Tribune, 31 May 1885.

41 J. Worth Carnahan, Manual Of The Civil War and Key to the Grand Army of the Republic and Kindred Societies (Revised Edition: Washington, D.C., U.S. Army and Navy Historical Association, 1899), p. 26.

42 For Fritchie’s story (the subject of a famous John Greenleaf Whittier poem) see Edward J. James, ed. Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary (3 Vols. Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Belknap Press of Harvard university), pp. I, 673-74.

43 Philadelphia Inquirer. 29 May 1880; Chicago Tribune, 31 May 1885; Wash- ington Post, 31 May 1899. We wish to thank Sue Greenhagen, of Morrisville College (SUNY), for supplying us with detailed information about the GAR posts in New York State.

36 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

44 According to Sue Greenhagen, the Washington post was established in 1879, Lafayette post in 1880, and Hamilton post in 1884. The last named was accord- ing to Greenhagen, “well-known for its charitable work and the social prominence of its members.” See also, Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment. The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p. 55. On Anna M. Ross see Appendix VI.

45 Michael Kämmen, Mystic Chords Of Memory: The Transformation of Tradi- tion in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopp. 1991), p. 138.

46 See the descriptions of such ceremonies in the New York Times, 31 May 1883, Brooklyn Eagle, 31 May 1895, and Washington Post, 31 May 1899. Union Square had statues of Washington, and Lafayette; a statue of Peter Cooper stood at the entrance of Cooper Union at East 7th Street, while his grave was located in Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn. New York’s Lincoln Post held a ceremony each Memorial Day at his statue also located in Union Square. For a detailed description of one such ceremony see: “Decoration Day, 1882 Abraham Lincoln Post, NO. 13 G.A.R., Department of New York, Ceremonies in Union Square and at the Cemeteries” (New York: John Polhemus, Mfg Stationer and Printer, 102 Nassau Street, 1882).

47 Tappan, Passing of the Grand Army, p. 197.

48 Brooklyn Eagle, 30 May 1904, 29 May 1911, 30 May 1923. By 1913, the Field Mass was being celebrated in Philadelphia. See Philadelphia Inquirer, 31 May 1913.

49 New York Times, 31 May 1870, 31 May 1880, 28 May 1911.

50 New York Times, 31 May 1883, 30 May 1893.

51 Beath, History of the Grand Army of the Republic, pp. 209, 217, 356-57; Carnahan, Manual Of the Ciuil War and Key to the Grand Army of the Repub- lic, pp. 48; McConnell, Glorious Contentment, pp. 200; New England Maga- zine, II (June 1890), pp. 380-81.

52 Brooklyn Eagle, 31 May 1896; George J. Lankevich, “The Grand Army of the Republic in New York State, 1865-1898” (Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia Uni- versity, 1967), pp. 254, 255; McConnell, Glorious Contentment pp. 231-32; Dearing, Meterans in Politics, pp. 405-07, 476.

53 McConnell, Glorious Contentment, pp. 228-29.

54 Department of Public Instructions, Memorial Day. Aids For Its Proper Obser- vance By The Schools of Wisconsin (Madison, Wisconsin, 1897); American Heritage, XXII (April, 1971),pp. 55-6; Charles F. Speierl, “Civil War Veterans and Patriotism in New Jersey Schools,” New Jersey History (Fall/Winter 1992), CX, 44-5; Lankvevich, “Grand Republic Of the Republic in New York State,” pp. 272; Tappan, Passing Of The Grand Army, pp. 201.

55 Journal of the Twenty-Ninth National Encampment, Grand Army of the Re- public, Louisville, Kentucky. 1895 (Rockford, Illinois: Frank Harper Co. 1895),

The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915 37

p. 234; New York Times, 27 May 1894; Lankevich, “Grand Army of the Repub- lic In New York State,” p. 270; Brooklyn Eagle, 30 May 1900.

56 Lankevich, “Grand Army of the Republic in New York State,” pp. 271-73; Dearing, Veterans in Politics, pp. 476-81; JVeui York Times, 31 May 1911, 31 May 1912, 31 May 1913; Chicago Tribune, 31 May 1914; Hartford Courant, 31 May 1915. For the early background of the Boy Scouts and the organization’s non-militaristic approach, consult Robert W. Peterson, The BOÍ; Scouts: An Ameri- can Aduenture (New York: American Heritage, 1994), pp. 50-8.

57 McConnell, Glorious Contentment, pp. 210-18; Nick Salvatore, We All Got }-iisiori/: The Memory) Books Of Amos Webber, {New York: Time Books,1996), pp. 157-69: Bodnar, Bonds Of Affection, pp. 67-9. While Amos B. Webber, a black man, was a member of Post No. 10, GAR in Worcester, Massachusetts, Basil C. Barker was rejected because “he was a nigger.” Franklin D. Tappan, The Passing of the Grand Armi/ of the Republic (Worcester, Massachusetts: Com- monwealth Press, 1939), p. 262 and p. 23.

58 Neu; York Times, 31 May 1872, 31 May 1894; Chicago Tribune, 31 May 1904.

59 Dearing, Veterans in Politics, PP 275-77, 474-75; Boston Globe, 31 May 1915; Tappan, Passing of the Grand Armi), pp. 199-201; Hartford Courant, 23 May 1915; McCoinnell, Glorious Contentment, PP. 218-19. The grandson of a GAR members remembered those meals as consisting of “baked beans, cold ham, hot yeast rolls, pie, and other pleasures too numerous to mention.” Chris- tian Science Monitor, 25 May 1990.

60 David Lindsey, Sunset Cox; Irrepressible Democrat (Detroit: Wayne State Uni- versity Press, 1959)pp. 122-23; New York Times, 31 May 1890; Neu; York Tribune, 31 May 1890.

61 New York Times, 31 May 1891, 30 May 1906; Brooklyn Eagle, 30 May 1900; Cleueland Plain Dealer, 31 May 1900; Chicago Tribune, 31 May 1914.

62 Brooklyn Eagle, 30 May 1903, 30 May 1912.

63 Brooklyn Eagle, 31 May 1902.

64 Brooklyn Eagle, 31 May 1902, 30 May 1909; Philadelphia inquirer, 31 May 1906.

65 Chicago Tribune, 31 May 1904; Wayne Gard, Frontier Justice (Norman: Uni- versity of Oklahoma Press, 1949), pp. 235-39.

66 New York Times, 30 May 1907, 31 May 1914.

67 Beath, History of the Grand Army of the Republic, p. 187; McConnell, Glori- ous Contentment, pp. 211-12; Dearing, Veterans in Politics, pp. 217-18,325- 26.

68 Neu; York Tribune, 31 May 1890; Philadelphia inquirer, 31 May 1898.

69 New York Times, 31 May 1898.

38 The Post-Civil War Years, 1869-1915

70 Boston Globe, 31 May 1907.

71 New York Times, 31 May 1911.

72 In 1912, Abraham I. Elkins, a member of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, called for a wider Memorial Day that would include the “Army of Children” who every year “are marched forward into industrial destruction.” New York Times, 27 May 1912. See Appendix VII.

73 For recognition of this development see: Philadelphia Inquirer, 31 May 1890; Brooklyn Eagle, 31 May 1897; Journal of the 38th National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, Boston, Massachusetts, 1904 (Rochester: Genesee Press, 1904) p. 71; Journal of the 45th National Emancipation of the Grand Army of the Republic, Rochester, New York 1911 (1911) p. 95; Schauffler, ed. Memorial Day, p. XIV.

74 New York Times, 30 May 1914.