This entry is a subentry of Veterans.
The Civil War produced more than 2 million veterans of both armies; as late as 1890, the federal census found 1,034,073 surviving Union ex‐soldiers and 432,020 former Confederates. At the war's close, both groups faced dim employment prospects, civilian indifference, and the lingering effects of wounds and disease—13.9 percent of Union veterans and probably 20 percent of ex‐Confederates suffered from wounds alone. Union veterans in 1866 organized the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), which grew to more 400,000 members by 1890 and became probably the most powerful political lobby of the Gilded Age. Smaller groups included the Union Veteran Legion, the Veterans Rights Union (VRU), and the officers‐only Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS). Union veteran political pressure helped bring about the Arrears Act of 1879, which doubled pension expenditures in less than two years, and the Dependent Pension Act of 1890, which created a service pension system in all but name. The number of Union pensioners (including widows) reached a peak of 969,711 in 1901. In 1874, Congress mandated preference for disabled veterans in federal hiring, and New York and Kansas enacted general veteran preference laws; twelve new state soldiers' homes opened between 1879 and 1888. Federal largess to veterans, which represented the United States's first foray into social welfare spending, drew the fire of genteel reformers such as E. L. Godkin in the 1890s.
Confederate veterans organized much later. The largest Confederate veterans' group, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), was founded in 1889, and had an estimated 80,000 members by 1903; before 1885, the more exclusive Association of the Army of Northern Virginia (AANV) predominated. Ex‐Confederates were ineligible for federal pensions and hiring preferences, though individual southern states erected sixteen soldiers' homes to care for the wounded and indigent, and some provided modest pensions. Much of Confederate veteran culture, especially after 1890, was tied to a developing Lost Cause mythology that helped southerners cope with defeat while reintegrating themselves within the nation.
The attitudes of Civil War veterans toward each other, and toward noncombatants, were exceedingly complex. Wartime hatreds never really disappeared, as suggested by Grover Cleveland's hasty retraction, under GAR pressure, of an 1887 order to return captured Confederate battle flags to the South, or by ex‐Confederate veneration of Jefferson Davis and his daughter Varina Anne Davis on their tour of the South in 1886. Union and Confederate veterans also skirmished throughout the 1890s over the proper telling of Civil War history in school textbooks. But veterans of both sides also were prone to idealize each other at the expense of “civilians.” Between 1884 and 1887, the Century's widely read “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” avoided politics and balanced northern and southern viewpoints, while local Blue‐Gray reunions beginning in the 1880s culminated in a gigantic fiftieth anniversary reunion at Gettysburg in 1913. In their memoirs, veterans from both sides tended to emphasize Union, states' rights, and personal heroism and to downplay slavery and race.
[See also Civil War: Postwar Impact.]
Bibliography
- Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1987.
- Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1866–1900, 1992
