The Won Cause by Barbara A. Gannon

Author:Barbara A. Gannon [Gannon, Barbara A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780807877708
Google: SyaZgXQpcssC
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2011-05-30T00:41:57+00:00

While recognizing that defeating slavery was key to saving the Union, members of the GAR and their associates went even further, and arguing that slavery “blotted” the prewar Union. The Massachusetts commander in 1915, John M. Wood, looked back fifty years to what had been accomplished at Appomattox. “The Union was restored,” he explained, but not as it was. “Human slavery, the foulest blot and greatest curse in our national life, has been forever removed.” An LGAR official in Indiana maintained, “The conditions that existed which caused our Civil War will remain a black blot upon our nation forever, but what comfort, gratification and relief to know that you men rose in one mighty body, a solid phalanx as it were, to set aright and make recompense for that terrible evil.” A nonveteran welcoming the GAR men to their encampment, the Honorable R. F. Downs, reminded them, “You fought for a principle; you fought for freedom; you fought to remove the one black spot that remained on American institutions; for the abolition of human slavery; for the freedom of all mankind in this our country.” The notion that the prewar Union needed to be cleansed of slavery in order to survive was not a view held by merely a handful of aged veterans.12

Advocates for the northern cause invoked the image of a national flag stained by slavery. In 1901, Commander in Chief Leo Rassieur asserted that the Federal victory “made it possible to keep the flag stainless . . . as it is today as it was not in '61 in the South where human beings were held in bondage.” Rassieur's belief that slavery stained the flag flying in the South was unusual; most GAR commentators indicted the flag, wherever it waved. Ohio's WRC president described how slavery debased this banner. The flag that had “fostered, protected, and defended human slavery from the foundation of the government came out of that struggle . . . cleansed and baptized in the blood of 300,000 patriots . . . not a slave to gaze upon its folds and mock the flag that says ‘you are free.‘” The Massachusetts chaplain argued that on Memorial Day comrades plant “above their sleeping dust . . . the loved colors under which we marched together, and the ensign of a country they died to save. . . . The last foul stain upon [the flag] has been removed by the combined valor of the volunteer armies of which they were a part. Through their sacrifice it is the flag of the free.” A prominent nonveteran repeated this argument. Mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston greeted the GAR in Boston twenty-nine years later and contended that these men “went out to fight for the black man, in order that there might no longer be the stain of slavery upon the flag.” Both men, from two different generations, agreed that only emancipation cleansed the American flag.13

According to some GAR men and women, the blame for this stain rested upon the shoulders of the founding fathers.

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