KINDLING THE FIRES OF PATRIOTISM: THE GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC, DEPARTMENT OF INDIANA, 1866-1949 Nicholas W. Sacco Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of History, Indiana University May 2014 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Master's Thesis Committee __________________________________ Anita Morgan, Ph. __________________________________ Modupe Labode, Ph.D ii Acknowledgements First-time visitors to Indianapolis are often struck by the city's myriad variety of monuments, statues, and war memorials.
When I moved to the city in August 2012, I noticed that several of these landmarks bore the signature of a Civil War veterans' organization called the "Grand Army of the Republic," including the Oliver P. Morton statue at the Indiana State House and the Indiana Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Monument Circle, the geographical heart of the city. These observations ignited a desire to learn more about the ways Union veterans' remembered their role in the Civil War. No writing project is ever the work of a single individual.
I could not have finished this project without the help of my thesis committee, which gladly read my chapter drafts and provided constant support for my scholarly goals. Anita Morgan's patience, guidance, edits, and suggestions provided focus and clarity to this thesis project. Towne and Dr. Modupe Labode consistently offered ideas and questions that strengthened my arguments and challenged me intellectually.
The kindness, compassion, and enthusiasm this committee brought to the project inspired me, and it is hard to put into words how thankful I am of their help. I stand in awe of them as intellectuals and as people. Several other professors provided support and deserve my thanks, including Drs. Scarpino, and Rebecca K.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Indiana Historical Society, Indiana State Archives, and Indiana State Library for their research assistance. Finally, I must thank my family, especially my parents, whose constant phone calls of encouragement meant more to me than they will ever realize. I dedicate this work of scholarship to them. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction .1 Chapter One: Civil War Memories and Veteran Identity .20 Chapter Two: Memorial Day in Indiana, 1868-1923.58 Chapter Three: Patriotic Instruction in Indiana Public Schools.142 Curriculum Vitae iv Introduction On May 23, 1865, upwards of 150,000 victorious Union soldiers marched in a grand review of Washington, D.
The American Civil War was coming to a rapid conclusion, with Confederate Generals Robert E. Johnston, and Richard Taylor all surrendering their forces to the United States military within the past sixty days. President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and Union General William T. Sherman all stood at the review stand, watching as each soldier passed by.
For two days, the grand review captured the attention of Washington, D. So much, in fact, that the trial for the alleged masterminds behind the Abraham Lincoln assassination conspiracy was delayed in order to celebrate the return of those who had preserved the Union. 1 As the soldiers made their way past the Capitol, they would have seen an emotionally powerful banner hanging from the building. Its message captured the feelings of gratitude and relief that supporters of the United States felt in the war’s immediate aftermath: “The only national debt we can never pay is the debt we owe the victorious Union soldiers." 2 Many Union supporters on the home-front knew a friend or family member who had donned the Union blue during the war, and perhaps some parade-goers who attended the festivities that May thought about those who died in the conflict as its survivors proceeded in a twenty-five mile column.
All who saw the banner understood these newly-minted veterans and their fallen comrades had accrued a debt that could never be fully compensated. But what was the nature of that debt? Even if this 1 Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 2. 2 McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 10. 1 payment could never be met, didn’t society have some sort of obligation to its veterans? If so, what, exactly, was owed to the men who put their lives in danger for the state? As the postwar negotiation over this “national debt” continued into the 1866 midterm elections, Union veterans organized into what would become the first veterans’ fraternal organization open to all United States soldiers, regardless of rank: the Grand Army of the Republic.
Amid a serious job shortage for returning veterans and President Johnson’s insistence on returning full political privileges to former Confederates as soon as possible, GAR members believed that collective action in a veterans’ interest group was necessary to preserve the fruits of military victory and convince society that financial aid to veterans was not an act of "misplaced pity," but one of national justice to the soldiers. 3 Although some politicians and newspaper editors expressed reservations about an active veterans' organization operating in peace time, the GAR's influence spread to all parts of the country, eventually topping 400,000 members nationally by 1890. 4 Several historians studying the GAR have interpreted the Capitol building's "national debt" banner at the 1865 grand review as a message to veterans about an 3 James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 171. Beckett, an member of the Indiana General Assembly during the Civil War, remarked after the passage of a state relief act for soldiers in 1865 that "we should be careful how we trifle with the people's money," suggesting that aid to soldiers would cripple the state's finances.
Charles O'Bierne, an aide to President Johnson, traveled to Indiana in 1866 and reported to the President in an alarming tone that "the G. are drilled to the sound of the bugle and summoned by the call. Indiana needs reconstruction." An Ohio newspaper echoed O'Bierne's concerns and argued that the GAR was "a secret political organization. it is armed and organized to vote and fight!," while a Tennessee newspaper commented that "we have a right.
to inquire what is this 'Grand Army of the Republic?' of whom it is composed? what its numbers? how organized? how supported? and what its purposes and designs?" Beckett quoted in Justin E. Walsh, The Centennial History of the Indiana General Assembly, 1816-1978 (Indianapolis: Select Committee on the Centennial History of the Indiana General Assembly & Indiana Historical Bureau, 1987), 254; O'Bierne quoted in Mary Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G. 2 unfilled financial debt. Dearing, one of the first scholars to study the GAR in the 1950s, argued that the GAR was first and foremost a political organization intent on advocating for financially beneficial legislation in the form of equalized bounty payouts and monthly pensions.
5 Forty years later, historian Stuart McConnell argued that feelings of postwar friendship and fraternity among Union veterans were just as crucial to the GAR's formation as its political concerns. Nevertheless, he suggested that the GAR's claim to society's "national debt" took place solely "in the form of pension demands." 6 The unpaid "national debt" the Capitol banner spoke of, however, went beyond financial concerns like monthly pension payments by also conveying deeper questions about the nature of remembrance and commemoration in American society. What "debts" did Americans owe to the veterans when it came to remembering the Civil War? What obligations did society have to remember the soldiers who never made it home? How would the war be interpreted in popular memory, and who would be entitled to speak on behalf of the past? What kinds of public Civil War commemorations would best convey the values of democracy, patriotism, and American nationalism, and who would be the arbiter of what constituted an "appropriate" ceremony? What would children in history classrooms learn about the Civil War years after the conflict ended? This thesis aims to address these important questions of memory, remembrance, and commemoration by analyzing the Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Indiana. While questions related to soldier aid are certainly important in assessing the challenges veterans faced in their transition back into postwar American, a truly holistic 5 Mary Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.
6 McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 10. See also Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 3 understanding of the GAR demands that one analyze how veterans remembered their role in the Civil War and how those memories functioned in a reciprocal relationship between past and present. The memories of war were used as political tools by the GAR to advocate for pensions, funding for national and state veterans' meetings, and the building of monuments, but those very memories of war were also shaped by postwar events such as the Pullman Car Strike of 1894, the Indianapolis 500 automobile race, and a wave of Southern and Eastern European immigrants who arrived in the United States after the war.
This thesis argues that members of the Indiana GAR met in fraternity in order to share and construct memories of the Civil War that helped to make sense of the past. In constructing these memories, Indiana GAR members took it upon themselves to act as gatekeepers of Civil War memory in the Hoosier state. GAR veterans publically celebrated their time in the military and consistently argued that the values acquired through armed conflict—obedience, duty, selflessness, honor, love of country—were necessary for an increasingly industrialized society that many veterans believed was becoming increasingly selfish, materialistic, and politically radical. When individuals and organizations challenged the GAR's understanding of the past or violated one of its "unwritten rules" of memory, its members were quick to use their memories of war to assert their vision of society through newspaper editorials, public speeches, parades, and public monuments.
The Indiana GAR is a particularly appropriate topic of study because its members played a unique and integral role in both the Hoosier state and the national GAR in shaping the debates over Civil War memories that would take place in America well into 4 the 1920s. Even though the GAR was first created in 1866 by Illinois veterans Benjamin. Logan, and Richard Oglesby, it was Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton and Hoosier veterans Oliver Morris Wilson and Robert S.
Foster who were largely responsible for the organization's national growth that year. On September 25, Wilson, Foster, and a large delegation of Indiana veterans attended a Soldiers' and Sailors' Republican Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to promote the "work" of the GAR; these efforts were so successful that the GAR's first national veterans' meeting, or "Encampment," was held in Indianapolis, Indiana, in November. 7 Indianapolis would go on to host six more national GAR Encampments, the most of any city in the United States during the organization's existence. 8 Each chapter in this thesis explores a method by which Indiana GAR veterans used their memories of the Civil War to act as gatekeepers of the past and authoritative social leaders in the present.
Chapter one begins with a re-creation of the GAR's initiation ritual for new recruits and uses Hoosier veteran William J. Donelson's 1890 initiation into the organization as a case study. Donelson's life story and his initiation ceremony provide a useful example for analyzing how veterans continued to maintain their identity as Civil War soldiers while raising families and working their occupations. The chapter then explores the nature of the Indiana GAR's civil war memories and argues that its members generally remembered the war as a fight for the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery.