Those Who Have Borne the Battle (14 page)

In the beginning, the Confederate dead had no place, at least no honored place, in the national cemeteries. They were not remembered by their reunited nation, but they were mourned by their families and eulogized by the former states of the Confederacy. White Southerners, largely women, founded memorial associations. Because the South was excluded initially from the national cemetery movement, these groups
by their existence asserted the justice of the cause and the heroism of the sacrifice of the white Southern dead. The Southern associations exhumed and brought together the Confederate dead, returning many from temporary graves in the North. For many white Southerners, this ceremonial act of bringing bodies “home” from places like Gettysburg was an important assertion of pride and an act of repatriation. Similar in many ways to the themes in the North, those honoring the Confederate war dead reminded all white Southerners of their dominant heritage and their values. And Southern cemeteries, like Northern ones, “contained ordered row after row of humble identical markers, hundreds of thousands of men, known and unknown, who represented not so much the sorrow or particularity of a lost loved one as the enormous and all but unfathomable cost of the war.”
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At least down to the First World War, the South resisted Memorial Day as a Northern and largely Republican celebration and as a symbol of Southern alienation. As the South increasingly emphasized the “lost cause” as a means of mourning and of affirming the justice of their action, the North tolerated and finally even joined in some of this sentiment. By the 1880s Union and Confederate veterans began joining together to remember together and to salute the courage of their comrades and of their former foes. On Memorial Day 1884 in Keene, New Hampshire, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. expressed his respect for the Confederates he fought: “The soldiers of the war need no explanations; they can join in commemorating a soldier's death with feelings not different in kind, whether he fell toward them or by their side.” So, on Memorial Day, “Every year—in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life—there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.”
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Of course, the freed slaves had no place in the “lost cause” narrative. Black veterans who had sacrificed and fought for the Union and for the freedom of all Americans had no place in the Northern narrative and therefore no role in the celebrations. Virginian Richard Henry Lee argued in 1893 that the war was not about slavery but about “liberty” for his region: “As a Confederate soldier and as a citizen of Virginia I deny the charge, and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels; we did not
fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes.”
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These indignant lapses in memory and convenient accounts of history were essential components in the “lost cause” narrative.

In these generalized, even abstracted accounts, where many of the dead remained anonymous, service itself was synonymous with sacrifice, and battle death was by definition heroic. By the 1870s towns in the North began to erect monuments to remember and to salute. Parks and town squares were marked by memorials that listed the names of those from the community who had served—and recognized those who had died in the war.
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In the midst of heroic narratives and allegorical imagery, of the democratization and anonymity of service and sacrifice, there remained millions of surviving veterans. Their needs were quite different. In 1862 Congress approved legislation that provided medical support, pensions, and survivors' coverage for all members of the Union armed forces, whether volunteer or regular, state or national. Wounded veterans would receive pensions, as would the widows or orphans of those who died as a result of their military service. Of course, these payments did not extend to Confederate veterans. In fact, in 1861 the War Department had ordered the Pension Bureau to cease payments to all veterans or eligible survivors of veterans of the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War who resided in the South.

On March 4, 1865, President Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, just a little more than a month before his assassination. It was a remarkably eloquent speech, even for this remarkably eloquent man, praying then for a quick resolution of the war. Lincoln pledged, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds.” He went on to conclude with his commitment to the Union veterans “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” The nation would keep this commitment, at least to the veterans and survivors.

In the years following the Civil War, Congress regularly expanded eligibility and enhanced benefits packages for wounded veterans and for survivors of those who were killed in the war. In every instance, they acted earlier and more generously than legislators had for prior wars. This process culminated in 1890 with passage of a comprehensive pension act. Union veterans who had served for at least ninety days and had any disability as a result of the war—or any other disabilities that were not war related, as long as they had not resulted from “vice”—were eligible for a pension. This was also available for the widows and orphans of eligible veterans who were deceased.

President Benjamin Harrison signed the 1890 pension bill. In his 1888 campaign he had argued against then president Grover Cleveland, who had vetoed a pension bill in 1887, that this was “no time to be weighing the claims of old soldiers with apothecary's scales.” In fact, it was quite a comprehensive and generous bill. One Grand Army of the Republic officer described it as “the most liberal pension measure ever passed by any legislative body in the world, and will place upon the rolls all of the survivors of the war whose conditions of health are not practically perfect.”
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Civil War pensions evolved from disability and survivor benefits to a comprehensive pension program for veterans and their families. By 1905 some 80 percent of living Union veterans were receiving federal pensions. In the South, on the other hand, where Confederate veterans were dependent upon state programs, only some 20 percent of the surviving veterans in 1905 received pensions. And these were more charity than pension, often defined as support for the “truly indigent.” A study in 1917 determined that from the Revolutionary War to that point, the US government had paid veterans and their eligible survivors some $5.2 billion in pensions; $4.9 billion of this amount had gone to Civil War veterans and eligible survivors.
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There were few immediate benefits offered to veterans of the Spanish-American War (the War of 1898), except for the generous plans intended for those who suffered disability as a result of war service and for the widows and orphans of those killed in action. The government at the outset of the war determined that there would be no distinction between volunteer
troops and regulars. The entire expedition seemed to go well. Ambassador to Great Britain John Hay wrote his friend Theodore Roosevelt, describing it as a “splendid little war.” Pride over the success and the brevity of the war, though, was soon tarnished by the Filipino resistance to American occupation there. This turn of events, and increasing numbers of stories of some atrocities committed by American troops in the Philippines, surely moderated the national elation. There were some monuments and memorials, with the memory of the
Maine
and the glorified, and often fictionalized, battle for San Juan Hill at the center of these memorials.
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If no American war would equal the Civil War for sustained cost and emotions, World War I would exceed it in terms of scale and rapidity of mobilization. It seemed an exhilarating experience—at least until the US troops found themselves in the trenches.

Americans moved quickly to organize a military force and provide the matériel and ammunition to defend western Europe from the now barbaric “Huns.” Woodrow Wilson called for a crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.” He promised that this would be a war “to end all wars.” If there had been no direct threat or attack on the United States, there had been assaults on American shipping and ominous whispered plans that seemed frightening. And in the absence of a direct attack, ironically the sense of idealism may have even the greater. “Lafayette we are here”: the statement, attributed to General John Pershing, reminded Americans—and the French—of a historical debt now to be repaid. The New World would secure the Old World.

European nations might have warned the Americans of the difficulty of sustaining idealism in the midst of trench warfare. The world saw more individuals killed in this war than had died in all of the wars from 1790 to 1914. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme campaign, the British had suffered fifty-seven thousand casualties. There were two and a half times as many killed in the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916 than had died in Napoleon's Russian campaign.

The war was marked by tremendous new technology, with powerful artillery firing deadly shrapnel shells, with lethal chemicals and gas, with
machine guns and then tanks. And this new killing power was made the greater as it was superimposed upon traditional fixed battlefields occupied by massive armies grouped together and facing each other from trenches.
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Following the declaration of war in April 1917, it took nearly a year for the United States to mobilize and train a substantial force to enter these battles. Then at Château-Thierry, Belleau Woods, Saint-Mihiel, and the climactic Meuse-Argonne campaign, these young men encountered the brutal reality of twentieth-century warfare. As one remembered, “The poor boys were getting slaughtered as fast as sheep could go up a plank.”
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A chaplain recalled, “In the front line trenches awaiting the orders that would send them into the jaws of certain death,
let's go
was the phrase that was impatiently circulated down the trenches. . . . [A]s they charged over the top with their buddies falling about them, it was still
let's go, let's go
against the German machine fire.” One man saw thirty-four of the forty men in his unit killed or wounded in one shell attack. “From then on I never spoke of the future.”
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When the war ended on November 11, 1918, there was more a sense of weariness than of celebration. The war had drained the emotions in Europe over four bloody years, and any sense of American idealism and of elation was swiftly lost. US troops in Europe simply wanted to come home. In 1919 Woodrow Wilson declared November 11 as a day of national celebration, Armistice Day, and it would continue to be that even if it took until 1938 to become an official national holiday. In the United States veterans and their families turned to this day as an occasion to remember more than one to celebrate. It never evoked the emotional power that the equivalent “Remembrance Day” did in England and throughout the Commonwealth. But in the United States, even though the idealism of 1917 was not sustained, there was a full recognition of those who had answered the call to duty.

At the outset of the war, the assumption had been that the US government would repatriate all of the Americans killed in combat back to their families. But by November 1918, tens of thousands of dead Americans remained in France. Shipping the bodies home proved logistically complicated, and the War Department encouraged the development of some US cemeteries on the Continent and in England. Some insisted
that these American cemeteries with their “sacred dust” would symbolize forever the American sacrifice on behalf of Europe. Most families nonetheless wished that the bodies of their loved ones be repatriated. In the end, 70 percent of the war dead were reinterred in the United States. For those who remained in the American cemeteries in Europe, the United States now formally adopted the practice of the English: officers and enlisted would rest side by side, as comrades, with death abolishing all hierarchy.
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The democratization of the national narrative of war and sacrifice was complete.

During the war the federal Committee of National Defense urged mothers not to wear black in mourning their lost sons but to display a gold star as an emblem of patriotic sacrifice. This led to the organization of the Gold Star Mothers, as a unit separate from the “War Mothers” organization, each group having government support. In the 1920s these two organizations pressed Congress to finance a trip to France for those mothers whose sons had remained buried there. In 1929 Congress agreed and appropriated money for the pilgrimage.
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