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EPILOGUE: VETERANS’ CONNECTIONS WITH THEIR PAST Almost from the surrender of Confederate forces, veterans talked, argued, and wrote about the events of the war even as they set their sights on new endeavors. Southern veterans in particular were quick to defend their honor when challenged by insensitive Northerners.1 These former Confederates remained unrepentant as they embarked on what they came to consider the evil days of Reconstruction. But the rebel veterans directed the main of their energy to rebuilding their lives, restoring the racial hierarchy , and redeeming their states from theYankee occupiers, not memorializing their war. The past could wait, as they grappled with the present. After the veterans’ return “to their devastated homes, and throughout the entire Reconstruction period, thoughts, time and energies were directed in an entirely different channel from that in which they had so long been engaged,” veteran Robert T. Coles recalled, as he explained why he had waited so long to write his history of his regiment, the Fourth Alabama. “The war was a closed book, there being no leisure moments for writing history.” Indeed, Coles could finally begin his regimental history of the Fourth Alabama Infantry in 1909 because, as he put it, whites had “subdued” black political activity and had “banished” carpetbaggers from the land; only then “the time was right” to become a scholar of the war.2 During the Reconstruction era, Northern veterans also had much to do besides think of the past. However, for those Yankee veterans who understood the connection between the war, its aftermath, and the importance of Reconstruction for preserving Union victory, the present was intimately connected to their earlier experiences. For these men, the memory of the war could not be trivialized or forgotten because the meaning of the war still had a very active role in their lives. As late as 1875, Maine veteran, former Freedmen’s Bureau agent, and Georgia politician John Emory Bryant refused to give up on the goals of racial justice and economic opportunity for African Americans that the war had unleashed. Reconstruction was a continuation of the fight between the two labor systems that had been at the heart of the war, and that fight required the North’s continued commitment.3 Earlier, at the end of 1867, Massachusetts veteran and South Carolina Freedmen’s Bureau officer Erastus 226 EPILOGUE Everson also saw the war’s connection with his work in the heart of the old Confederacy. He offered to stay on with the Reconstruction agency as a civilian if “I might as far as possible be an instrument of perpetuating the principles which caused me to leave home in 1861 & which in part have been my guide and support under the trials & hardships since endured.”4 African American veterans understood that their future was inextricably linked to the past. Henry McNeil Turner and other black veterans who became active in Southern politics believed the promise of equality made during the war still required their attention during the Reconstruction era. So, too, did their comrades in the North, who understood that the freedom and equality promised in the war required tending in the loyal states that still discriminated against African Americans on a number of levels. On occasion, they made public demonstrations of their commitment to the Union cause. In the former Confederacy, during Reconstruction, they celebrated emancipation and Union victory , even in the face of white resentment, by parading in their uniforms. And during the 1860s and 1870s, black veterans in New Bedford, Massachusetts, celebrated the civic holidays in uniform.5 In the Northern states, there were also thoughtful white veterans who understood the connection between the war, its goals, the problems of Reconstruction, and the sacrifices they had already made. Maine veteran Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, writing a year after Lee’s surrender, was adamant on the issue of Reconstruction and its connection to the legacy of Union veterans. “We fought for liberty, in its widest and best sense,” he explained. “If we fail to attain these ends then was the blood of our heroes poured out in vain, and our treasure worse than wasted.” Furthermore, “It seems little else than absolute madness to hasten to reinvest with political power the very men who precipitated upon us the horrors of civil war,” meaning his former enemies, “and a little less than cowardly wickedness to turn our backs upon the millions whose humble and despised condition did not prevent them from befriending the county when it was most in need...

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