“Victory’s Long Review”: The Grand Review of Union Armies and the Meaning of the Civil War

As the last soldiers of the grand armies of the republic marched out of the nation’s capital at the conclusion of the Grand Review, history took possession of the momentous struggle for Union and freedom that the previous four years had represented. The two days of victory celebration, on May 23 and 24, 1865, were designed to project a definitive statement of what the Civil War had achieved. The parade also set the stage for mid-nineteenth-century Americans to begin to make meaning of the war, a process that consumes the nation to the present day. As the Civil War became the province of historians, so had other great wars, not least those of antiquity. The victory celebration that signaled the end of the Civil War was built on fragments of the classical past—fragments that recalled the great triumphs of Pompey and Caesar and the grandeur that was Rome.

The Grand Review shared in the great tradition of the military victory parade, but its pageantry was designed for a different purpose than the ancient ceremonies—and Americans in 1865 readily noted such differences. The tradition of the military victory parade could be found in the histories of the ancient world and because of the ubiquity of classical texts in the antebellum United States, the context of such celebrations would have been well understood by mid-nineteenth-century Americans.¹ Mark S. Schantz has noted the popularity of the classics in the Antebellum United States, as an antidote that stressed the purity of the historical past in the face of the evils and corruption of Jacksonian politics.² At the close of the Civil War, however, those evils had been defeated and educated Northerners believed the conflict had left the United States in a historical position unlike any other: they had achieved victory in a civil conflict and their democratic republic had been preserved. The parade was, Wilfred M. McClay has written, designed to be “an object lesson in the new civics of nationalism.”³

Thus, both military pride and a sense of American exceptionalism radiated through the commentary on the Grand Review. These points of view matter for understanding how the Civil War changed the way Americans thought about their history and for understanding the place they expected their nation to take in the wider world following the war. In the annals of ancient history, the Roman Republic—perhaps the greatest known bastion of democracy and republicanism—had been crippled by civil conflict and had become an empire, ruled by monarchs and occasional despots. Events much closer to their own time had also suggested to Americans that democracy was difficult to preserve, as reactionary forces had crushed the democratic European revolutions of the 1840s.

And yet, the American Civil War had saved democracy for the United States, and, many at the time thought, for the world. The Grand Review captured this sentiment and offered a host of images and incidents that proved to Americans in 1865 that the Civil War should be remembered as a victory over history, a moment in which the nation had stepped out of the shadow of the past, overcoming the obstacles that had felled the republics that came before. Historians of the Civil War era have not recognized this aspect of the Grand Review, understanding it instead in terms of post–Civil War race relations, the experience of the common soldier and veteran, or nineteenth-century militarism.⁴

Gary W. Gallagher has argued convincingly that the Grand Review should be viewed as a representation of the belief of the Civil War generation that the war was being fought to preserve the Union.⁵ The essay moves beyond Gallagher’s claim, by affirming the Grand Review as an event designed to enshrine Union victory as the greatest achievement of the war—and proving that for the wartime generation the focus remained on that achievement more so than any other result of the war, over a period of fifty years. Conversely, that the emancipation memory of the...