Existing comment:
Reconciliation and Reunions:
In 1889, 26 years after the bloodiest two-day battle of the Civil War, veterans met again at Chickamauga by the "River of Death," in a grand reunion of the two once-hostile armies.
Twelve thousand people attended the 1889 reunion barbecue at Crawfish Springs. Their meeting formally launched the effort to preserve and memorialize the battlefield at Chickamauga as a "shrine for patriotic devotion for the future generations of American youth."
The 50th anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga occurred in 1913. In September, the 17th US Infantry staged an elaborate reenactment for Union veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. For most veterans, now in their late sixties and early seventies, the rigors of travel by horse and train made this their last celebration held at the battlefield.
The United Confederate Veterans celebrated the 50th anniversary of the battle not in September but in May, the month during which much of the old Confederacy conducted Memorial Day observances beginning in 1866.
It took great men to win that battle, but it takes greater men still, I was say morally greater, to wipe away all the ill feeling which naturally grows out of such a contest.
-- Major General William S. Rosecrans, USA, September 1889
The Society of the Army of the Cumberland, Chattanooga, 1908: Leaders of this Union veterans' group conceived the idea of a national military park in 1889. The venerable Chickamauga hero John T. Wilder (front row, third from right) served as the first president of the Joint Chickamauga Memorial Association -- an organization founded by this society and the United Confederate Veterans.
The Lost Cause:
In economic and political shambles after the war, the South had also lost its social and cultural bearings. During the 20 years after the war, Southerners mourned and attempted to reconcile themselves to their loss. Many people asserted that secession had been constitutional, that the war had not been fought to preserve slavery. Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson were revered as noble heroes.
Popular, patriotic celebration of the war grew during the last two decades of the 19th century, spurred in part by the united efforts of North and South to preserve and commemorate the battlefields at Chickamauga and Chattanooga.
The Confederate battle flag, like this one sewn by Mrs. Mary Bachman Anderson, waved proudly at many reunions. To many Southerners, it represented an honorable struggle for self-determination and states' rights. For other Americans, the controversial battle flag became a symbol of the perpetuation of racism.
Carving canes was a popular pastime of the late 19th century. Quartermaster Sergeant B.F. Shepard, 96th Illinois Infantry, recorded events from his military service on this sapling cut from the banks of the Tennessee River. He was wounded at Chickamauga on September 20, 1863.
"These bullet holes were received in the Battle of Chicmauga [sic] Sept. 20, 1863 Sergt. T.J. Duckett, Col 1 3rd SC"
Artifacts kept war memories alive. This high-crowned, beehive-style slouch hat, worn by South Carolinian Sgt. TJ Dockett at Chattanooga and many reunions, served as a reminder that the differences between life and death on the battlefield was sometimes a matter of inches. |