The first inclination was to forget. Fewer than 2 percent of Union soldiers initially joined the Grand Army of the Republic, the major Northern veterans’ group. Three years after the war’s end, a third of its posts were inactive; as of 1878 it had only 30,000 members. When Mary Livermore was approached at the close of the war to publish her experiences, she refused. People were still in the throes of bereavement and anguish,
