Across the Divide: Union Soldiers View the Northern Home Front

Epilogue

>> 169 Epilogue Although wartime divides isolated soldiers from civilian communities, differences of opinion soon vanished, making the soldier/civilian divide a lost narrative of the Civil War. Wartime debates caused major divisions between Union soldiers and the civilian communities around them, but the divisions lasted only as long as the war. When peace came in 1865, the divisions between soldiers and civilians closed as the pressures of wartime existence disappeared and citizen-soldiers became just citizens again. Soldiers who only a short time before had risked death in battle, criticized Northern civilians, and viewed Southern civilians as potential enemies now faced the long-desired transition back into civilian life themselves. Consequently, the wartime divisions disappeared from the historical memory of the war. Eager to put the war behind them, soldiers either ignored the earlier debates or believed them resolved by the war itself. The end of the war brought a cessation of conscription, a policy that did not resurface until World War I. Soldiers no longer had to worry about families fending for themselves because they were home to shoulder the economic burden with them. The mail became just a means of communication instead of a vital source of what was happening at home. Membership in the Democratic Party went from a status tantamount to treason to a common political affiliation, and a Copperhead referred only to a snake. The outpouring of Northern enthusiasm at the arrival of peace certainly aided the closing of soldier/civilian divides. Antagonisms and differences of opinion became easier to forgive and forget when soldiers received the grateful embrace of the victorious Union, and a welcome they believed they deserved. The reestablishment of relationships strained by the conflict began as soon as the war ended, and soldiers performed their final acts as members of the army by accepting the public’s acclaim before their final discharge. The Grand Review held in Washington, D.C., on May 23 and 24, 1865, was but the most notable of countless public events to commemorate the end of the war. 170 > 171 replacing individual recollections with more publicly palatable ones.5 As with the hibernation mode, the revival mode had no place for reminders of the unpleasantness that had existed between soldiers and civilians. By the time the revival phase was flourishing, soldiers had moved on with their lives, and the separations that generated such passionate clashes during the war now seemed petty in the larger sense. As time passed, the problems that drove a wedge between soldiers and civilians became a forgotten element of the war, as the issues evolved or disappeared . The end of the war, for instance, caused a cessation of anti-war activities. Furthermore, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln turned the former President from an object of scorn into a martyr of the Union cause, a total transformation of Lincoln’s image. Emancipationism achieved success in freeing the slaves, but the quest for racial equality promoted by the abolitionists proved a more difficult process. As the nineteenth century progressed , Northerners who had fought for the rights of slaves favored reconciliation over continued internal strife, a position embodied in Ulysses Grant’s presidential slogan of “Let us have peace.” The common cause and purpose of the war shared by Northerners and African Americans during the war became a unity of white Americans after the war, leaving African Americans the victims of growing Jim Crow segregation.6 Northern women, so successful in maintaining the Northern economic home front during the war, became partners in the economy once again. Women’s rights in the workplace remained limited, but the importance of female labor in agriculture remained vital, as reflected in the considerable number of female claimants to the Homestead Act.7 The divides that separated the soldiers of the Union Army from civilian populations proved, in the end, to be a byproduct of the economic, political, and social fractures caused by the Civil War. Peace brought about a reconciliation and reconnection between those separated by distance and military service in a new postwar America that had been changed forever by the war. Future conflicts would see similar disconnections, but not to the extent of those in the Civil War. Divides of distance and political opinions appeared in subsequent wars, but the conflict of Americans fighting other Americans created divides that only peace could bridge. This page intentionally left blank ...