A Curious Namesake: The Jeff Davis Post of the Grand Army of the Republic at Fort Davis, Texas, 1889–1895

The three cardinal principles of the Grand Army of the Republic. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., LC-DIG-pga-02019.

On May 24, 1865, the residents of Washington, D.C., witnessed a “Grand Review” of the victorious Union Army. The parade of 150,000 soldiers suspended the military tribunal being conducted for the assassins of the President Abraham Lincoln. Across the front of the Capitol hung an oversized banner that read, “The only national debt we can never pay is the debt we owe the victorious soldiers.” The Union Army had enlisted a tenth of the population of the northern states. By the war’s end, about 360,000 of those troops had given their lives to preserve the Union.¹

Veterans’ organizations quickly formed after the war. The most successful and influential of these was the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), founded in 1866 in Illinois. At first the group was more of a political club than a fraternal organization. For more than a decade, General John A. Logan, an Illinois senator and Radical Republican, served as its national head. During this period, the association functioned as a “Praetorian Guard” standing in reserve in case of renewed threats to the Union. Through the end of the century, no president was elected without the support of the GAR.² Political clubs like the GAR supported Republican efforts to reconstruct the South, but once Reconstruction ended in 1877, the GAR declined in membership and in 1879, restated its mission. The reorganized fraternity then resembled other secret brotherhoods such as the Masons, focusing more on rituals than politics, and its membership grew.³

Not surprisingly, given Texas’s commitment to the Confederate States of America, the GAR did not develop quickly in the Lone Star State. In fact, the GAR had no posts in Texas until March 25, 1885, approximately twenty years after the end of the war. Then, at its largest, the organization had sixty-seven posts, most located in the urban centers of Dallas and Houston. Membership was open to all honorably discharged veterans of the Union Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. Applications and military discharges were reviewed for qualifying service and proven loyalty. Chapter members voted on candidates with a “black-ball” secret ballot.. Any rebel service, even if involuntary, automatically precluded membership. Also left out were loyal citizens who had not served in the military, no matter their contributions to the war effort.⁴

The GAR remained in operation until the death of its last surviving member in 1956. At that point, the official records of the association were transferred to the Library of Congress. Remarkably, however, the “Descriptive Book” and Minutes of one Texas post—GAR Post No. 36 at Fort Davis—remained in private hands and are now in the possession of the author. Those records, which are entrusted to the Museum of the Big Bend at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, provide a candid snapshot of the activities of a curiously named post of Union Army veterans in late nineteenth century Texas.⁵

Fort Davis was established in 1854 as one of a string of army posts from San Antonio to El Paso created to guard the Trans-Pecos section of the southern route to California. Named for Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the fort and the town that grew up nearby provided the naming inspiration for Jeff Davis County when the legislature created it in 1887.⁶ In 1889 former Union soldiers organized perhaps the smallest post of the Grand Army of the Republic at Fort Davis and adopted Jeff Davis as its namesake honoree. The Jeff Davis the soldiers were honoring, however, was not the President of the Confederacy. Instead, Jefferson “Jeff” Columbus Davis, its namesake, was a Union general who served at Fort Sumter, Wilson’s Creek, Pea Ridge, Chickamauga, Atlanta, and Savannah. The name chosen was obviously intended to confuse the Texans...