Memories for Decoration Day

My childhood memory of what is now called Memorial Day is of accompanying my slightly distressed mother to the cemetery to make sure some veterans' organization had placed flower urns next to the correct extended family graves. Whoever did this each year, they couldn't be relied upon to get it right. Mother, as the caretaker of family history and of good order, wanted to be sure all was flawless. 

Most of the veteran graves were pretty obvious -- a sergeant who served in France in WWI; an airman lost over the Pacific in the run up to WWII. But a couple of overgrown 19th century stones were obscure to me -- marked with standards reading G.A.R.

Curious child that I was, I asked "what's G.A.R.?" "Why, the Grand Army of the Republic" she told me, "from the Civil War." She said it as if this was something everyone knew. I don't think I pursued the question at the time.

Writing about more contemporary matters, E.J. Dionne explained the origin of the G.A.R. markers in a Memorial Day column.

... the holiday — first held on May 5, 1868 — was called “Decoration Day” because it was an occasion to adorn the graves of fallen Union soldiers with flowers. It was initiated by the Grand Army of the Republic, the vast and politically influential organization of Union veterans, at a time when North/South divisions were still raw and the two parties decidedly polarized.

Republicans were for racial progress, pushing Reconstruction in the South to democratize the region and guarantee full political rights for Black Americans. Formerly enslaved people were winning elections and enacting more egalitarian policies. Democrats were the party of the Confederate South, reaction and outright racism. ...

(Yes -- the political parties have subsequently switched constituencies and consequently policies on racial matters.)

It turns out that Union Civil War veterans, under the banner of the G.A.R., kept up a decades long political struggle to remind the nation that the Confederate soldiers they fought had been pursuing a traitorous cause. 

The Angry Staff Officer provides a catalogue of G.A.R. stalwarts trying to keep alive the national understanding that their cause had been righteous and their opponents had been illegitimate rebels. An prescient example:

Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, himself a Virginian who had remained loyal, summed up the swift change that was occurring in a letter to Grant in 1868: “[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them.” ...

These Union soldiers provided little organized opposition to the South's revival of white supremacy after military occupation ended, but they did understand that what they had fought for was being erased.

Click to enlarge.

U.S. veterans tended not to care what the former rebels were doing in the south – as evidenced by the nation’s apathy when it came to Jim Crow, lynching, and general disenfranchisement of African-Americans. But as time went on, and as the Lost Cause narrative grew in power, the GAR began to realize that it had been silent for too long.

In 1885, the Indiana GAR attempted to remind the nation of what they had fought for: “The Union soldier stood embattled on the side of right and truth. The Confederate soldier was arrayed on the side of wrong and error. Under the blessing of God, the right and truth prevailed. There can be no compromise upon that. Right and wrong cannot be reconciled. Right is right and wrong is wrong to the end of the world’s reckoning.” ...

When the debate about Confederate monuments at Gettysburg began, the Patterson, Pennsylvania GAR Post had some very choice words: “As soldiers and citizens we have no apologies to make for calling words by their proper names, ‘traitor’ a traitor and ‘rebel’ a rebel…,” the Post wrote in an 1889 editorial. “We reiterate that we are opposed to the erection of monuments by the great or small upon the battlefields of Gettysburg or any other place that will in the slightest degree make glorious the deeds of those who trampled under foot the national ensign. We believe in making treason odious.” ...

In 1922, the National GAR decried the use of the phrase “The War Between the States” – invented by the former vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens – rather than the War of the Rebellion, as it had been termed for decades: “The designation the ‘war between the States’ is to us peculiarly hateful and insulting. It is false in fact. There never has been a war between the States. While there have been causes of dispute and even threats of conflict, the American people have always found a way of peaceful settlement within the law and under the Constitution which was formed with that very end in view. We as participants did not go to war at the behest of a State or against a State but under the flag of the Federal Union and for its preservation.”

And as the Library of Congress photo shows, apparently the G.A.R. was open to veterans of color -- as well it should have been, since by the end of the war, nearly 200,000 men of African descent were in the Union forces.

My mother came of age in the 1920s in a family that had been prominent Union supporters 70 years previously. No wonder she thought the G.A.R. was just part of the landscape, an obvious reference ...