Introduction

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War has passed, but it remains appropriate to turn fresh eyes to the experiences of the men who fought it. No one knew how the peace would turn out—either for the country or for the men returning home—and Reconstruction issues, vast economic and cultural changes wrought by the war and its aftermath, even the growing role of the United States in the world, ensured that veterans were confronted immediately and for the rest of their lives with a very different world than the one they left. This special issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era offers snapshots of some of the ways veterans responded to that world and were seen by others.

According to Susan-Mary Grant, the millions of men who fought and survived the war quickly faded from the thoughts of many Americans, replaced by the “reimagined community” that emerged from the conflict. There were really a number of “reimagined communities” brought on by the social, cultural, racial, and economic changes wrought by war, but Grant’s larger point remains valid: military service irrevocably differentiated soldiers from civilians during and long after the war.¹

But the process of “reimagining” postwar communities did not affect everyone equally or in the same ways, as this issue of JCWE reveals. To provide just one example, Confederate veterans are not as well-represented as Union veterans. As I’ve argued elsewhere, “veterans in the North were seen through multiple lenses,” exposed to criticism for opinions stated and choices made, while to southerners, Confederate veterans “would always be those proud, ragged, honorable men who limped home with heads held high.” As a result, as the authors of these essays seek to complicate perceptions of specific elements of the Civil War veteran experience, Yankees drew our attention more than their Confederate counterparts.²

Brian Jordan retrieves the stories of Union veterans from the old chestnut of the “hibernation” period, showing how, scarred nearly as much by victory as Confederates had been by defeat, they reflected bitterly on the sacrifices they believed might have been wasted and vowed to continue to defend the Union they had fought to uphold. My own piece locates Union and Confederate veterans in the popular literature of the Gilded Age (leaking a bit back into the 1860s and forward into the early twentieth century) to show that Americans were aware of the complicated relationships between old soldiers and civilians. Barbara Gannon shows how a later generation of “heroes,” the men who fought in the “splendid little war” with Spain, got under the skin of the fading generation of Civil War veterans, who looked with bemusement and resentment at the attention poured onto Spanish American War veterans. And, with a transnational reflection on the historiography of veterans of other nineteenth-century wars, Wayne Hsieh provides a much larger context to the ways Civil War veterans have been interpreted.

Three examples capture glimpses of the complex places occupied by veterans in the larger society, one from a soldier, one from the son of a soldier, and one from a newspaper unfriendly to old soldiers’ interests:

• • When asked “What has happened to Ambrose Bierce the youth, who fought at Chickamauga?” the famously cynical veteran Ambrose Bierce stated simply, “He is dead.”³

• • Hamlin Garland ended his barely fictionalized version of his father’s return from war by acknowledging that nothing would come easy: “The common soldier of the American volunteer army had returned. His war with the South was over, and his fight, his daily running fight with nature and against the injustice of his fellow-men, was begun again.”⁴

• • And when President Grover Cleveland vetoed the generous 1888 pension passed by the Republican Congress, the anti-pension Chicago Tribune editorialized, “Thank God! The claim-agents, the demagogues, the dead-beats and . . . deserters and coffee-coolers and bounty-jumpers, composing our great standing army of volunteer me[n]dicants have been defeated. . . . It will be a happy day for the republic when the last beggar of the Grand Army humbug is securely planted.”⁵

As these passages imply, there were many aftermaths for veterans of...