“Our Work Is Not Yet Finished”: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, 1865–1872

On May 23 and 24, 1865, beneath a “wonderfully beautiful sky,” more than two hundred thousand men from the victorious Union armies paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue, past a reviewing stand teeming with elected officials, military officers, and the new president. Along the freshly paved footpaths lining the nation’s avenue, thousands of civilian spectators jockeyed for a glimpse of the returning blue-coated soldiers. Never before had Americans witnessed such a dazzling display of military might. Private residences were festooned with American flags, while neatly lettered banners along the parade route avowed that the republic owed its victorious citizen soldiers an “unpayable debt.” The entire procession seemed an appropriate end to the war—and a definitive announcement that peace had arrived. Yet, from the marching ranks, the Grand Review looked rather different. For men who had plodded over bone-strewn Virginia battlefields en route to Washington, the parade seemed little more than an “empty exercise” of martial splendor. The absence of slain comrades—not to mention their beloved “Father Abraham,” martyred just blocks away only five weeks before—was palpable. The road ahead was unsure. Their perfectly dressed ranks and glinting muskets offered the illusion of confidence but cloaked a gnawing uncertainty.¹

The months and years immediately following the war were restive ones for Billy Yank, encumbered by memories of the past and anxieties about the future. “We cannot forget the past, or fail to appreciate its lessons for the future of our country and kind,” John Shanks professed three years after the guns had been muzzled. “I believe I shall fitly and truly interpret the predominant sentiment of every soldier’s thought, the prevailing prayer of his heart,” Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Wood echoed in an address to the Society of the Army of the Cumberland in November 1872, “when I say that . . . his simple, earnest, unselfish desire is, that . . . the results achieved by his efforts, his sufferings, his sacrifices for the salvation of the Nation, the preservation of the union of States, and the maintenance of

Figure 1.

The men of the Army of Georgia process down Pennsylvania Avenue on May 24, 1865, the second day of the Grand Review. Veteranhood—and uncertainty—awaited them. The Grand Review of the Army: Gen. Henry W. Slocum (Army of Georgia) and staff passing on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Treasury. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-cwpb-02941.

the just and constitutional authority of the national government, shall not be lost.” Believing that their victory had neither settled the war’s deepest issues nor assured the security of the Union, vexed by civilians who seemed unappreciative of their sacrifices, and eager to assist their many comrades in need, only some Union veterans “found solace” after Appomattox. For the victors, the war’s demands persisted—mocking the peace that they had fought so hard to achieve.²

While a number of historians have written about the “trauma” of Confederate defeat and the process by which white southerners forged the Lost Cause mythology, comparatively few have considered the myriad challenges that attended victory. Some scholars have simply circumvented these trials, recommending that when the men of the Union armies folded their tents, they slinked into a decade-and-a-half-long “hibernation.” In these years, the veterans allegedly refused to mull over their participation in the conflict—let alone the war’s personal and political legacies. In Embattled Courage, his powerful study of Civil War combat, historian Gerald F. Linderman concludes that veterans “felt impelled to turn rapidly from the war.” Stuart McConnell’s penetrating analysis of the Grand Army of the Republic, Glorious Contentment, largely concurs. “Northern soldiers,” he writes, “showed little inclination to dwell on the war” in the early postwar period. David Blight’s Race and Reunion also accepts claims that Union veterans “hibernated” for a decade, discerning a so-called renaissance of remembrance in the 1880s and 1890s. The scholarly orthodoxy is that with the exception of the vocal minority who brandished the...