Provides vital new evidence that Union veterans remained stubbornly opposed to the nation’s reconciliationist tendencies and unwilling to surrender the causes for which they foughtUnion soldiers’ service to the nation did not end in 1865. Instead, it persisted well into the twentieth century as hundreds of thousands of veterans joined the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and directed the reform and improvement of their communities through their fraternal membership...

In recent years, Civil War veterans have emerged from historical obscurity. Inspired by recent interest in memory studies and energized by the ongoing neorevisionist turn, a vibrant new literature has given the lie to the once-obligatory lament that the postbellum lives of Civil War soldiers were irretrievable. Despite this flood of historical scholarship, fundamental questions about the essential character of Civil War veteranhood remain unanswered. Moreover, because work on veterans has ...