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  • The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic by Barbara A. Gannon
  • John R. Neff
The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. Barbara A. Gannon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8078-3452-7, 288 pp., cloth, $39.95.

Barbara Gannon, in her study of the Grand Army of the Republic, portrays the GAR as a racially progressive and inclusive organization, the only such integrated "social" organization in the late nineteenth century. Challenging previous studies, Gannon asserts that unused state GAR records as well as a careful reading of African American newspapers reveal a truly fraternal organization, one in which "black veterans were the political and social equal of white Americans" (6). Indeed, she writes, "an interracial post represented GAR members' greatest aspirations, to create an organization where veterans of every race, creed, or ethnicity could come together as comrades" (6).

Gannon posits that the trials of the war, especially combat and suffering due to physical hardship, wounds, and illnesses, created between veterans a bond of shared experience strong enough to trump the all too common racial prejudice of the day. She describes the dynamics of interracial and all-black GAR posts, in both northern and southern states. Gannon also discusses in some detail the crucial role of African American women working in cooperation with black posts, both through the GAR's auxiliary Women's Relief Corps and the more independent Ladies Grand Army of the Republic organizations. This adds important information to our understanding of women's memorial activities. Through these experiences, Gannon believes, African Americans sought to shape the nation's Civil War memory.

Since no GAR roster indicates the racial composition of individual posts, Gannon has worked hard to glean clues about post membership from her research. Later chapters explore the meaning of the war for northern veterans as well as GAR perspectives on national reunion, former Confederates and the Lost Cause, and the United States' burgeoning global influence. In a chapter on pensions, Gannon suggests the veterans' desire to relieve the persistent suffering of comrades, not self-interest, motivated their notorious political activism. If the main themes of race and integration that dominate the book in its early chapters seem occasionally to slip away, this is attributable to Gannon's position that black and white Union veterans—united in war and peace—had but one voice (albeit with some variation) on many of these issues. [End Page 390]

While Gannon has conducted extensive research and has brought new evidence to this important subject, the work itself is not without difficulties. In her acknowledgments, she writes that "history is the homage the living owe the dead," a curious definition of our discipline that shapes much of the text that follows (xiv). Gannon writes with laudable passion, but too often in a manner that asserts her interpretations rather than argues them. Apparently to emphasize contrast, she is frequently dismissive of previous historians of the GAR, reducing their arguments to straw men. Historians from Mary Dearing to Stuart McConnell have "failed" to "report" or "recognize" the positive and racially progressive nature of the GAR (48, 86). Similarly, historians of veterans' pension efforts are characterized as approaching their topics with "scorn" and of being jaundiced or vicious in their criticism (132). More pointedly, Gannon baldly asserts that, "scholars [have not] acknowledged the suffering of the Civil War generation" (133).

Such an impassioned stance also seems to encourage, on occasion, a broader interpretation of evidence than may be warranted. Gannon has diligently identified 222 black posts and 467 integrated ones (calculated from her appendixes, 201-20), together forming only about 14 percent of the 5,026 total posts claimed by the GAR in 1885. She is correct to point out that the records are poor and these numbers cannot reflect fully the presence of black veterans in the GAR. Even if further research doubled her findings, however, black membership extended to less than a third of the national organization. This should at least temper any use of broad statements that construe participation by the entire national organization.

While Gannon begins the...

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