The Grand Army of the Republic, the largest of all Union Army
veterans' organizations, was the most powerful single-issue
political lobby of the late nineteenth century, securing massive
pensions for veterans and helping to elect five postwar presidents
from its own membership. To its members, it was also a secret
fraternal order, a source of local charity, a provider of
entertainment in small municipalities, and a patriotic
organization. Using GAR convention proceedings, newspapers, songs,
rule books, and local post records, Stuart McConnell examines this
influential veterans' association during the years of its greatest
strength.
Beginning with a close look at the men who joined the GAR in three
localities -- Philadelphia; Brockton, Massachusetts; and Chippewa
Falls, Wisconsin - McConnell goes on to examine the Union veterans'
attitudes towards their former Confederate enemies and toward a
whole range of noncombatants whom the verterans called "civilians":
stay-at-home townsfolk, Mugwump penion reformers, freedmen, women,
and their own sons and daughters. In the GAR, McConnell sees a
group of veterans trying to cope with questions concerning the
extent of society's obligation to the poor and injured, the place
of war memories in peacetime, and the meaning of the "nation" and
the individual's relation to it.
McConnell aruges that, by the 1890s, the GAR was clinging to a
preservationist version of American nationalism that many white,
middle-class Northerners found congenial in the face of the social
upheavals of that decade. In effect, he concludes, the
nineteenth-century career of the GAR is a study in the microcosm of
a nation trying to hold fast to an older image of itself in the
face of massive social change.
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