ABSTRACT
In the late 1880s, as Civil War veterans celebrated the conflict’s silver anniversary with monument dedications and reunions on their old battlefields, Billy Yank and Johnny Reb seemed to embrace a common vision for a peaceful future. The old soldiers planned to live out their lives enjoying social and civic progress in a nation united and at peace. Thousands who wore the Blue and Gray had cheered former Confederate Colonel William R. Aylett, who, at a reunion at Gettysburg in 1887, averred that “we have come forth from the baptism of blood and fire in which we were consumed,” and “over the tomb of secession and African slavery we have created a new empire, and have built a temple to American liberty.” Never forgetting that war’s exaction in life and treasure, when Union veteran Thomas Barr pondered a simple question – “What has been gained?” – he concluded: “Everything.” He then enumerated the compensations that had accrued to the nation since 1865:
slavery gone, labor dignified . . . the Republic accepted at home and abroad as a demonstration of man’s capacity for self-government; and a people filled with an earnest purpose to build strongly and for all time upon the foundations laid by the fathers a nation to serve as a beacon-light to all the peoples of the earth.1
