Grand Army of the Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Grand Army of the Republic was, at its peak in 1890, an organization of 410,000 men who had fought to hold the United States together. They called their local meeting places "posts," and those posts spread into every state in the country, including the former Confederate ones. At the height of its power, the GAR could, in the words of one member, throw its support at any presidential candidate "like a sock." It helped elect six presidents. It secured federal pensions for hundreds of thousands of veterans. It turned a spring observance into what Americans now call Memorial Day. How did a fraternal club for war survivors become the most powerful single-issue political lobby of the late nineteenth century? And what happened when the last of its members was gone?

• 2. Founded on Three Principles

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  Dr. Benjamin F. Stephenson founded the Grand Army of the Republic on the 6th of April 1866, in Decatur, Illinois, on the stated principles of "Fraternity, Charity and Loyalty." The men who joined in those earliest years were not primarily seeking political influence. They were looking for the company of people who understood what they had been through. The shared experience of combat and service created a kind of fellowship that civilian life could not easily replicate, and veterans gathered first for camaraderie before they gathered for anything else.

  The early years were precarious. By the early 1870s, many state-level divisions, called "departments," and local posts had quietly ceased to exist. The organization came close to disappearing entirely. What saved it was a strategic pivot in the 1880s, when new leadership made the case for federal pensions as the organizing principle. That single issue gave the GAR a reason to grow again, and grow it did.

• 3. Memorial Day's Origins

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  General John A. Logan, the first Commander-in-Chief of the GAR, issued General Order No. 11 on the 5th of May 1868. The order declared May 30 to be Memorial Day, calling on GAR members to make that date an annual occasion. Logan had not invented the practice of decorating war graves; such observances already existed. What his order did was give the practice a name, a fixed date, and an organized constituency to carry it forward.

  Decades after Logan's order, the commemoration spread beyond the Union states. Organizations of Southern soldiers established their own version, known as "Confederate Memorial Day" or "Confederate Decoration Day," typically held in April. The GAR's act of naming and scheduling what had been informal mourning rituals became the template that other groups, on both sides of the old conflict, found worth adopting.

• 4. Black Veterans and Unequal Ground

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  Robert A. Pinn of Hart Post 124 in Massillon, Ohio, was elected commander of a predominantly white post, a fact notable enough that the source records it as a specific instance of African American leadership within the GAR's ranks. Black veterans joined in significant numbers during the revival of the 1880s and organized their own local posts. The national organization, according to its historians, promoted voting rights for black veterans and took steps that distinguished it from other institutions of the era.

  The reality of pensions told a more complicated story. Federal pensions did reach many black soldiers, and the records in those pension files are now described as a valuable source for African American genealogical research. But some historians note that black soldiers received these pensions less frequently than their white counterparts. By 1919, African American members of the GAR had organized the National Memorial Association, pressing specifically for a memorial dedicated to black soldiers.

• 5. Women in the Ranks

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  Kady Brownell served alongside her husband Robert, a private in the 1st Rhode Island Infantry, at the First Battle of Bull Run and later with the 5th Rhode Island Infantry at the Battle of New Berne. In 1870, she was admitted to Elias Howe Jr. Post #3 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, making her the first woman known to have joined the GAR. The GAR insignia is engraved on her gravestone in the North Burial Ground in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Sarah Emma Edmonds presents a more intricate case. She served in the 2nd Michigan Infantry as a disguised man under the name Franklin Thompson from May 1861 until April 1863. In 1882, she gathered affidavits from former comrades to support a pension petition, which succeeded in July 1884. The GAR admitted her in 1897, but she died on the 5th of September 1898 and was a member for only a brief period. She was reburied in Houston in 1901 with full military honors.

  Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a Union Army surgeon and Medal of Honor recipient who treated soldiers from both sides and was captured by Confederate troops in 1864, was admitted to the GAR before her death in 1919. Mary Bostwick Shellman, whose association with the Wilson Post No. 1 of the Department of Maryland came around 1899, had spent her life caring for veterans, beginning as a teenage volunteer nurse and later organizing one of the nation's oldest Decoration Day parades in Westminster, Maryland. She is recorded as having personally prevented at least five Union soldiers from receiving pauper burials.

• 6. Presidential Power

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  Ulysses S. Grant joined the Philadelphia George G. Meade Post on the 16th of May 1877, the same year he finished his second term as the 18th President of the United States. He was the first of at least five GAR members who reached the presidency. William McKinley, the 25th, joined Canton Ohio GAR Post #25 on the 7th of July 1880; the post was later renamed in his honor.

  The six presidents who were Civil War veterans, running from Grant through McKinley, were all Republicans. The lone post-war Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, had paid a substitute to serve in his place and did not serve in the Civil War. He vetoed many of the pension laws that the GAR had lobbied Congress to pass. Chester Arthur, alone among the six veterans, has no confirmed record of GAR membership, though he had served as a Union general. The pattern of the GAR's endorsing and assisting Republican candidates was not incidental; it was, for a generation, one of the organization's defining political features.

• 7. The Long Dissolution

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  The 83rd National Encampment, held in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1949, brought together the last surviving members. By then, only sixteen remained alive, and six were able to attend. James Hard, who had fought at First Bull Run, Antietam, and Chancellorsville, was there as the last surviving combat veteran. The attendees voted to leave the existing officers in place until the organization dissolved, which meant that Theodore Penland of Oregon, the sitting Commander at the time, would serve until the end.

  Seven years later, in 1956, Albert Woolson died, and the Grand Army of the Republic was formally dissolved. U.S. Route 6, which had been designated the Grand Army of the Republic Highway for its entire length, remained as one of the organization's lasting physical traces. In 1948, a commemorative stamp had honored the GAR, and the organizational model of departments at the state level and posts at the community level, which the GAR had established, was later adopted by the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion.

• 8. In Literature and Memory

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  John Steinbeck wove the GAR into East of Eden through the character of Cyrus Trask, a father with "very little actual battle experience" who nonetheless leverages the organization to build an outsized reputation in Washington. Steinbeck gives Cyrus a speech in which he boasts of being able to throw the Grand Army's support at any candidate "like a sock," defeat senators, and pick appointments "like apples." It is a portrait of the organization's power used for personal aggrandizement.

  Sinclair Lewis referenced the GAR in both Main Street and It Can't Happen Here. Charles Portis included it in True Grit. William Faulkner mentioned it briefly in The Sound and the Fury, and Willa Cather touched on it in her short story "The Sculptor's Funeral." The GAR also appears in the second, seldom-sung verse of the song "You're a Grand Old Flag." In 1917, Charles Ives set John McCrae's poem "He Is There!" to music as part of his cycle Three Songs of the War, which references the GAR. Ward Moore's 1953 alternate history novel Bring the Jubilee imagined a version of the organization as a resistance movement in a United States where the Confederacy had won, using the name to signal what had been lost and might be recovered.