The 1880s brought a stunning reversal as veterans approached middle age. Membership in the GAR jumped to 233,000 in 1884, 428,000 in 1890. When The Century magazine in 1884 launched a series of articles on “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” circulation doubled. It was the right “psychological moment,” Century’s editor Robert Underwood Johnson calculated, the war twenty years distant, many of its key participants still alive but passions cooled enough
