Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

On Decoration Day in Boston in 1874, the Charles Russell Lowell Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) assembled for a sermon in West Church by the Reverend C. A. Bartol. In an effort entitled “The Soldier’s Motive,” Bartol honored the blind faith of warriors who forget themselves in devotion to a cause. Conviction, duty, and obedience with an “abandonment that neither reserves its resources nor counts the cost,” said Bartol, “is the all-surpassing reason for our approval and love.” This theme, what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., would later famously term the “Soldier’s Faith,” would become a standard feature of memorial and reunion rhetoric. The soldierly virtue of devotion, whatever the cause, was within a decade of the war already well-rehearsed as a means to sectional peace.