Existing comment:
Politics and Reconstruction: The Birth of Veterans' Organizations:
-- "Vote the way you shot." -- Campaign slogan -- 1876-1877.
The large number of Civil War veterans offered an attractive band of potential voters for soldier-politicians to court after the war. Who better understood the needs of the recently mustered-out citizen-soldier? Who could better see that the nation recognized its "debt of gratitude" to Union veterans? According to politicians who had served in the war, who better, indeed, than a fellow comrade in arms, particularly one who had been wounded in battle. The veterans began to view themselves as a group distinct from the rest of society.
In Wisconsin, Lucius Fairchild, who had lost an arm at Gettysburg, became the state's first Civil War veteran governor, largely due to the support of former soldiers. Fairchild served for three terms during Reconstruction, an intensely political period following the war when veterans' spokesmen in the North affiliated themselves with the Republican party and its plan to reconstruct the ex-Confederate states. Union veterans in 1866 organized the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the nation's first mass veterans' organization.
The GAR dominated the affairs of the Union veterans' community until its decline in the twentieth century. GAR politicians, like their counterparts in the South, "waved the bloody shirt," promoting wartime memories and hatreds in order to garner local political support. |