Explorations of war commemoration in the Gilded Age of the United States have suggested a growing public infatuation with military history.1
Beginning in the early 1880s, veterans' reunions, memoirs, and popular histories of the war had begun to influence the development of America's patriotic culture. By the 1890s, Victorian Americans had eagerly read Civil War memoirs, fiction, and poetry; visited Civil War battlefields; and dedicated public soldier monuments.
The legacy of America's martial past, in particular the American Civil War, heavily influenced developing ideals of citizenship and nationhood. War commemoration glorified the martial achievements of American manhood and offered Victorian men the opportunity to reaffirm their virility and vitality through patriotic connection with their martial forebears.2 By the century's end, the cult of martial manhood in America was strong enough that hundreds of thousands of young men volunteered for service in the war with Spain in 1898. Most did not see active service, but the vehicles through which they volunteered were the state-based militia organizations that made up the nation's parttime military reserve, commonly known as the National Guard. In this chapter, I suggest that the National Guardsmen were an important but overlooked agent of late-nineteenth-century war commemoration and the popularization of martial ideals in the Gilded Age.Of particular relevance to this collection is that the fascination with martial culture was a peacetime phenomenon—its development was largely supported by noncombatants, including those in the ranks of the Guard. Apart from the veterans who joined Guard units after the Civil War and members of the few regiments that eventually saw service in 1898, the majority of Gilded Age Guardsmen never saw combat. Indeed, their knowledge of war came from listening to the stories of veterans, absorbing representations of war in popular culture, and participating in mock battles during their part-time military service.
In the last decades of the century, increasing numbers of civilians with no direct military experience were drawn to service in the Guard. This trend reflected a growing fascination with warfare that emerged from Civil War commemoration and the fraternal and martial attractions of Guard service.The process of establishing warfare at the center of American life began soon after the Civil War's end. Southern writers romanticized the Old South and celebrated the martial prowess of Confederate soldiers, a movement that became known as the Lost Cause.3 The victorious North was slower to recognize the importance of its martial heritage, but from the early 1880s, veterans' reunions and commemorative events aimed at reconciling both North and South occurred with increasing frequency. While veterans may have disagreed on the rights and wrongs of the conflict, they found common ground in celebrating the martial prowess of American soldiers. Participation in these events gave the Guard a new national focus. Historians, however, have rarely looked at the Guard from this perspective. America's citizen soldiers have been widely discussed in terms of the failure or success of U.S. military policy, viewed with contempt in relation to their military effectiveness, or examined in their role as instruments of social control, particularly during the industrial troubles of the late 1870s.4 These approaches have provided a convenient way to put the “national” into the National Guard.
The essential problem with making broad national claims about the Guard's influence is that Guard units were reflections of the local communities and state political structures that supported them. Jerry Cooper, a historian of the Guard, has noted that the “most significant problem in writing the history of the militia and the National Guard... is to combine the purely local, then colonial or state experience, with that of Imperial or National history.”5 Paradoxically, much work remains to be done on both their importance to local communities and their role in social, cultural, and political issues of national scope.
While New York Guardsmen, for example, represented the often parochial interests of their state, they were also heavily involved in the organization of the National Rifle Association in the early 1870s and campaigned for recognition of the Guard as the nation's military reserve. Through their participation in commemorative events with a national focus, the martial pageantry of their displays, and their symbolic and military associations with the Civil War, Guardsmen were influential in maintaining the centrality of war among late-nineteenth-century Americans. The Guard's regular martial displays reinforced to an often enthusiastic public, which was steeped in the mythology of Americans at war, the view that the exemplar of martial manhood was the citizen volunteer, a view sustained through nationwide war commemoration.6Alongside the dedicating of public soldiers' monuments, writing memoirs, and joining veterans' organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), veterans supported commemoration through reunions. Nonveteran Guardsmen and civilians were often present at these events. One of the earliest recorded reunions of Northern and Southern veterans occurred in 1881 when members of the 71st Regiment of the New York National Guard, the focus of this chapter, traveled to New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras with Southern veterans and militia. The historian Paul Buck, in his 1937 work The Road to Reunion, notes that the visit of the 71st was the forerunner of the reunions of the 1880s and 1890s, which culminated “in two great spectacles,” the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg in 1888 and the dedication of the national military park at Chickamauga and Chattanooga in 1895.7 The importance of this statement is that the experience of the 71st was not an isolated one and should be viewed against the broader background of a developing culture of commemoration and romantic sentiment about warfare, in which Guard units across the nation took part in events similar to those described here.
The 71st was formed in the 1850s as a volunteer militia unit in New York City and fought in the first major engagement of the Civil War, at First Bull Run in 1861. For the remainder of the war, it served largely as a home guard force, although many of its members volunteered for duty in the Union army. In post—Civil War America, citizen volunteers were broadly known as National Guards although some states and many commentators still called them militia. New York, in fact, formalized the term “New York State National Guard” during the war, and the 71st became part of the official civil-military apparatus of the state. As part of the Federal expeditionary force sent to Cuba in 1898, it was the only Guard unit to fight at San Juan Hill alongside regiments of African American regulars and Teddy Roosevelt's famous Rough Riders.8
This chapter, however, looks beyond the battle history of the regiment, placing it, and the Guard more broadly, within a framework of war commemoration, to explore the development of martial culture in the United States in the late nineteenth century. It examines the impact of war upon noncombatants: on the young Guardsmen who would never see battle but who were in day-to-day contact with veterans of the Civil War; on their friends and families who socialized with them at Guard encampments; and on the public who became increasingly enthusiastic about their martial displays as the mood of commemoration, reunion, and adoration of America's military past took hold in the 1880s and 1890s. Looking through the lens of a unit of citizen volunteers, a complex process of negotiated cultural memories is revealed, whereby regimental traditions of volunteering and Civil War service are mixed with a developing national patriotic martial culture.
Of broader relevance to this collection is that the celebration of a romanticized martial past maintained the centrality of war for Victorian Americans and, by instilling martial ideals in civilian society, supported the rise of an industrialized and militarized United States after the Civil War.
The martial enthusiasm behind the imperial adventures of the turn of the century has been seen as an immediate result of the late-nineteenth-century crisis of masculinity, whereby war was seen as a panacea to male effeminacy.9 Theodore Roosevelt warned that the “greatest danger that a long period of profound peace offers to a nation is that of [creating] effeminate tendencies in young men.”10 In response, Roosevelt and many other Victorian men looked for models of independent, vigorous manhood. The martial valor of Civil War soldiers was a perfect fit. In this chapter I suggest an alternative view that the martial enthusiasm that supported America's quest for empire in 1898 was the culmination of decades of war commemoration and a developing cultural identification of national progress with the cultivation of martial ideals. This chapter contributes to our understanding of the ways in which societies utilize the martial enthusiasm of noncombatants in order to organize themselves for conflict and encourage their youth to volunteer for war, which would become a key factor in the ability of western nations to fight the total wars of the twentieth century.