Early Civil War Commemoration in St. Louis

Not surprisingly, given that the city had been strongly Unionist during the Civil War, the very first commemorative events held in St. Louis after the war were also strongly Unionist in tone. Although St. Louis had been strongly Unionist, the state of Missouri itself was highly divided during the Civil War.Footnote ⁴ Approximately 100,000 white Missourians and 8,000 Black Missourians fought for the Union during the Civil War, and about 30,000 white Missourians enlisted in the Confederate army. Many other pro-Confederate Missourians took to the bush, fighting as non-enlisted guerrilla soldiers against the Union Army presence in Missouri. Many of the major conventional battles in the state took place at the start of the war, as Union and Confederate forces struggled for control, and in 1864, when Confederate general Sterling Price led a raid into Missouri to try to recapture it, although conventional forces were operating in Missouri throughout the war. The irregular guerrilla forces provided an additional element of chaos to the picture, and as a result, Missouri experienced martial law during the war as authorities attempted to subdue Confederate sympathizing forces within the state.Footnote ⁵

The divisions this conflict engendered continued into the postwar period. As a Union state, Missouri did not undergo Reconstruction in the same way that the states of the former Confederacy did. Missouri was covered by the Freedmen’s Bureau, however, which was established by Congress in 1865 to assist with Reconstruction and provide aid to freedpeople.Footnote ⁶ Furthermore, unlike some border states, Missouri continued electing Republican governments after the war, and as a result, had a homegrown Reconstruction experience of its own. The widespread guerrilla conflict and gradual destruction of slavery during the war pushed white Missourians, who feared a return to the chaos of the war years, to desire a more active state government.Footnote ⁷ To ensure that disloyal forces did not take control of the state, the Radical Republicans urged Missourians to support measures such as the disfranchisement of former Confederates and the enfranchisement of Black men. While conservative Unionists did not always embrace these measures—Black men would not receive the vote in Missouri until the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, and the disfranchisement of former Confederates was controversial—Radical Republican politicians were actively campaigning to achieve these goals.Footnote ⁸ Civil War commemorations provided a venue for these campaigns, and advertisements for them frequently invited all “loyal” or “radical” citizens to attend.Footnote ⁹

The first commemoration of the Civil War to be held in St. Louis—while the war itself was still going on—was the anniversary of the capture of Camp Jackson. That incident had begun when Missouri’s Confederate-sympathizing governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, called the Missouri militia to meet outside St. Louis, ostensibly for an annual review but in actuality in hopes of capturing the St. Louis Arsenal for the Confederacy. At the same time, there were four regiments of U.S. volunteers in the city, most of them Germans, which had been formed in response to Lincoln’s call for troops. Despite any hopes Governor Jackson may have harbored, it soon became clear that the volunteer regiments outnumbered the militia by at least ten to one, making any real attack on the arsenal impossible.Footnote ¹⁰ Nonetheless, on May 10, 1861, Captain Nathaniel Lyon decided to demand the surrender of Camp Jackson, marching to the camp with the four volunteer regiments. The surrender was peaceful, but as the U.S. regiments were marching the militia prisoners back to the arsenal, an angry crowd gathered around them. Confederate sympathizers began to berate and throw things at the volunteers, and in the confusion, shots were exchanged, leaving between eighteen and twenty-five dead and a larger number wounded.Footnote ¹¹

Unionists in St. Louis held formal celebrations of this event both during and after the war. The St. Louis Germans, in particular, tended to take a very militant pride in the participation of their ethnic group in capturing the camp and took the lead in organizing these commemorations. Formal celebrations of the anniversary of the capture of the camp were held in 1862 and 1863, and as might be imagined, these wartime commemorations focused primarily on the necessity of continuing the fight.Footnote ¹² The day continued to be strongly connected to Unionist—and in particular, Radical Republican—politics in the immediate postwar period. William Blair described how the environment in the South right after the war was “hypercharged,” with public acts being scrutinized for what they revealed about the loyalty of the participants. Although the city did not undergo Reconstruction in the same way as other places, the guerrilla warfare that Missouri endured throughout the war did similarly endow people with a lasting fear of disloyalty that can be seen in the political tone of the Civil War commemorations held immediately after the war.Footnote ¹³ For example, the 1866 celebration of Camp Jackson’s anniversary was largely a political meeting of citizens opposed to President Andrew Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction and concerned about opposition to the disfranchisement of former Confederates in Missouri.Footnote ¹⁴ As a result, the tone of the meeting was not in any way conducive to reconciliation with former Confederates, and likely would have alienated more conservative Unionists as well. The Missouri Democrat described the meeting as “the celebration of the first victory of loyal men over traitors in Missouri.” The meeting took place at the courthouse, which was decorated with Chinese lanterns and illuminations bearing various slogans supportive of Radical Reconstruction and the continued disfranchisement of former Confederates, including, “Loyal men shall rule, not rebels.”Footnote ¹⁵

A similar large gathering was held in 1868. The Grand Army of the Republic organized a daylong event featuring a parade, a festival in Union Park with speeches in English and German, and fireworks and a ball in the evening. Again, the day had explicitly political overtones, as the Westliche Post noted that not only the GAR, but also “all the radical citizens of our city” would be taking part.Footnote ¹⁶ As an overtly political event, the planning appears to have been primarily organized by white men—in this case, members of Hassendeubel Post of the GAR. Women appeared in the event primarily as symbols, such as the young white women who rode on a wagon in the parade, dressed as Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, and her nymphs.Footnote ¹⁷ The Radical Republican affiliation of the event was evident in the speeches given. One of the speakers, Gustav A. Finkelnburg (then a member of the Missouri House of Representatives), noted that the Union dead “fell in the cause of a great principle, but the chief thing which they fought for has not been accomplished.” He further warned, “There is still a contest to be fought, with the ballot. The Union of these States has been preserved, and now you must fight the battle for equal rights to all men.”Footnote ¹⁸

A similar tone prevailed at the first Memorial Day in St. Louis, celebrated in 1868, the first year that the Grand Army of the Republic sent out orders that May 30 should be taken as a day to decorate the graves of Union soldiers. Even at its onset, Memorial Day in St. Louis included most of the features that would characterize the day for the rest of the century. A procession out to the national cemetery at Jefferson Barracks, followed by speeches and the decoration of the graves, formed the program.Footnote ¹⁹ The first Memorial Day speakers in St. Louis were primarily focused on establishing that the dead had died fighting for a just cause—and emphasizing that loyal citizens had to continue to support that cause. For instance, Carl Schurz emphasized in his speech that in order to truly honor the dead, the living had to make sure they had not died in vain by continuing to fight for the cause for which they had died. Wilhelm Stängel remarked that “forwards!” against the enemy had been the rallying cry during the war, and that it still should be in 1868 as they contended with many of those same enemies in the political arena.Footnote ²⁰ Even when these early Memorial Day speeches were not overtly calling for political action, they were still very clear that they were only honoring the loyal dead and spent most of their time discussing the cause for which those men had died—reuniting the country and destroying slavery. For example, although he said it was “scarcely necessary” to explain the cause for which the Union soldiers had died, Dr. John G. Eberhardt spent a considerable portion of his German-language 1869 Memorial Day speech doing just that. He described how the war had been caused by the “shame and curse of slavery” and how “by treason against the general government they strove to make that great evil perpetual.” He further emphasized the value of the Union, describing it as “the shield of liberty, the asylum of all the oppressed.”Footnote ²¹ Similarly, in 1870, General Isaac Shepard described how the Union dead “gave themselves a willing sacrifice, and laid down their lives in the defense of immutable principles, of equal rights, of universal freedom.”Footnote ²²

These early Memorial Day celebrations were organized in whole or in part by Missouri’s first Grand Army of the Republic posts and the Ladies’ Union Aid Society. The GAR grew quickly in Missouri in the wake of the war; by 1867, there were already seven posts in St. Louis.Footnote ²³ It is unclear which group dominated the planning, if either; some newspaper coverage noted that the Ladies’ Union Aid Society would be planning the celebration, while others attributed the leadership role to the GAR.Footnote ²⁴ But it is clear that the men and women of these two organizations were working together cooperatively to secure donations of flowers and money, arrange for transportation, and line up speakers.Footnote ²⁵ Particularly singled out for their leadership roles in 1868 were Anna Clapp and Janette Crippen Fisk of the Ladies’ Union Aid Society and Col. Fred T. Ledergerber, Col. Frank H. Fletcher, Col. A. Albert, and Col. John McFall of the GAR, who collectively made up the executive committee that had led the planning of the day.Footnote ²⁶ The women were the ones who did the actual decorating of the graves, although the men were asked “to be of assistance to them.”Footnote ²⁷ As Anna Clapp put it in 1870 when she invited women to donate flowers, “you were ever ready to stand at the beds of the suffering and dying soldiers, and now you will not fail to respond to the call to ‘bring flowers’ to strew o’er this army of sleeping dead.”Footnote ²⁸

The early GAR had a reputation for being involved in Republican politics, and this was particularly true in Missouri, so the connection of these early commemorations with the goals of Missouri Radical Republicans is not surprising. Throughout the summer of 1868, for example, the Missouri GAR was directly supporting Radical Republican Joseph W. McClurg in his bid for governor, and was actively involved in efforts to win delegates for him at the Republican convention.Footnote ²⁹ Ultimately, this political connection would work against the GAR nationwide, and especially in Missouri. Veterans who did not share Radical Republican political goals were unwilling to join, shrinking their pool of potential recruits. In Missouri, the population of the state gradually turned against Radical Republicanism—and the GAR with it—in the late 1860s, with the result that the GAR steadily lost members during these years. Even the formerly radical Germans had joined the Liberal Republicans in opposing the continued disfranchisement of former Confederates by 1870.Footnote ³⁰ In that year, a coalition of Democratic and Liberal Republican voters elected a more conservative Liberal Republican state government, which re-enfranchised former Confederates. The Liberal Republican candidate for governor, Benjamin Gratz Brown, received majorities in every ward in St. Louis, but particularly large ones in the heavily German wards.Footnote ³¹ By 1872, Democrats won control of the state government in their own name.Footnote ³²

The GAR declined along with the Radical Republicans. In 1870, the Jefferson City People’s Tribune noted that men were becoming unwilling to join the GAR, listing its political nature as the main reason for this hesitancy.Footnote ³³ By 1871, there were no active GAR posts in the state of Missouri.Footnote ³⁴ At the 1872 National Encampment of the GAR, Adjutant-General Roswell Miller maintained that the GAR in Missouri was “a hopeless waste” and that it and the GAR in the neighboring state of Illinois had been “ruined by political cliques, who abandoned it as soon as they had accomplished their selfish purposes, and left to their successors a mere shadow, without life, without influence, and still worse, without even the respect and good-will of the soldiers and people.”Footnote ³⁵

Memorial Day and Reconciliation

The increasing desire among Missourians for Reconstruction to be over, evident in the growing support for the Liberal Republicans, can also be seen in the turn toward reconciliation that took place in Civil War commemorations in St. Louis in the 1870s. These commemorations came to feature more cooperation between Unionists and Confederates and less discussion of politics or the cause of the war. Such a shift would not necessarily indicate that either side had become less devoted to their own side’s cause, but rather that the political benefits of reconciliation had come to outweigh the alternative.Footnote ³⁶ The celebration of a Union victory posed few opportunities for reconciliation, and as a result, after one last celebration in 1871, Camp Jackson Day was not publicly celebrated again in St. Louis until 1884.Footnote ³⁷ Memorial Day, on the other hand, had considerable potential for reconciliation in the city, particularly given that the National Cemetery at Jefferson Barracks included both Union and Confederate dead.Footnote ³⁸ The Missouri Democrat maintained in 1871 that decorating the graves together could contribute to national peace, remarking that “perhaps nothing is more necessary for Americans than to visit these graves of their Union and Confederate dead.”Footnote ³⁹ Although the speeches in 1871 still emphasized the value of saving the Union, the program called for all of the graves to be decorated. As the Missouri Democrat put it, “the graves of Union soldiers, in commemoration of their noble and heroic patriotism in giving their lives to the salvation of their country; the graves of Confederate soldiers, in token of forgiveness, and appreciation of their bravery in battling for what they doubtless conceived to be the right.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Journalist Logan Uriah Reavis wrote in the Missouri Democrat that Memorial Day should be “not a revival but a burial of the strife that should be buried with these fraternally sleeping Union and Confederate dead.” He argued that “death has made peace between them, and their graves should cement peace between the living.”Footnote ⁴¹ At the 1872 Memorial Day ceremony in St. Louis, former governor Thomas Fletcher said, “Comrades, just over there, I am informed, are graves of men who were our enemies in war. I would that their surviving comrades, and their wives and children were here with us to day that we might mingle our offerings of flowers upon all these graves without distinction. I would that they were here to unite their voice with ours in songs of thanksgiving and praise to God for the profound peace and great prosperity with which we are now blessed as a nation.”Footnote ⁴²

Fletcher’s wish was soon realized. By 1873, Memorial Day in St. Louis had become a completely joint affair, with a combined ceremony that featured the decoration of the graves of both Union and Confederate dead. The event was jointly planned as well, with former Confederates joining Unionists on the planning committee. As part of this joint ceremony, the program included English-language speeches from both a Union and a Confederate veteran, as well as a speech in German. Union Colonel John A. Joyce took credit for this change in his autobiography, claiming that he had introduced the resolution to include Confederates on the planning committee and among the speakers, saying that “it would not be right and just to invite them to participate without extending every privilege we claimed ourselves.”Footnote ⁴³ The speeches themselves shifted away from the causes of the war and toward a general idolization of the courage of the average soldier, regardless of for which side he had fought.

In doing so, speakers were marginalizing one particular element of Missouri’s Civil War experience: guerrilla warfare. Speakers made no mention of guerrilla fighters, whether to praise or condemn them, and all speakers were former regular members of the Union or Confederate armies.Footnote ⁴⁴ The terrible bitterness that remained in the wake of Missouri’s guerrilla conflict was perhaps too divisive to fit a reconciliationist framework.Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, as in other parts of the country, these reconciliationist speakers avoided mentioning the cause of the war. If the war’s causes were mentioned at all, it was to emphasize that they were no longer important or to claim that both sides had been equally right—or equally wrong—thus saving either from having to bear the blame for the thousands who had died or face the stigma of having the justice of their cause publicly called into question.Footnote ⁴⁶

For example, the first speaker in 1873, Colonel Joyce, described the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery as “an everlasting temple to heroism.” He ended by making a call for continued reconciliation, stating, “year by year, let us assemble at this Mecca, and kneeling by the graves of brave men, let the living clasp hands in fervency of friendship and strew sweet flowers upon the mouldering remains of the blue and the gray.” The speech by former Confederate colonel Alonzo W. Slayback was similarly reconciliationist, and although the speaker defended the Confederate cause, he praised the Union cause as being similarly admirable. The Missouri Republican described the speech by saying, “the speaker paid an eloquent tribute to the belligerents on both sides, whom he depicted as moved by the same patriotic impulses, sacrificing life and property to maintain the inviolability of the national constitution, the only difference being that they interpreted it differently.” Slayback concluded his speech by asking, “why should not we, too, boast that our enmities are mortal as the garlands that we bring, and our friendships as enduring as the grave that they adorn?”Footnote ⁴⁷

In holding a joint commemoration such as this one on Memorial Day, St. Louis’s Union veterans were going against the orders of the Grand Army of the Republic, which condemned combined Union-Confederate ceremonies. In 1873, the national headquarters of the GAR issued a statement that the thirtieth of May was a day designated for the decoration of Union graves and that “any attempt by the friends of the rebel dead to strew flowers on their graves will be regarded as an interference with the programme of the day, and will not be tolerated.” Both the English-language and German-language press in St. Louis expressed opposition to this stance and support for the combined ceremony. The Missouri Republican condemned the GAR’s decree stating that in Missouri, “arrangements have been made for a common indulgence in the sweet and mournful duty, by the friends of the Union and the Confederate dead; but this friendly and fraternal spirit is something that the Grand Army cannot comprehend and will not tolerate.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The Westliche Post similarly condemned the GAR for this, stating that it “was once an honorable body,” but had become a group of “office hunters” who “exploit the memory of their dead comrades for selfish ends,” while considering it an “outrage” to place a flower on the grave of a Confederate.Footnote ⁴⁹

This stance remained the attitude of the GAR throughout the nineteenth century. In 1874, for example, a resolution was introduced at the GAR National Encampment, stating, “That hereafter no Department or Post of the Grand Army of the Republic shall be permitted to commit the Grand Army, through the public press or otherwise, to the decoration of the graves of the Confederate dead in connection with the decoration of the graves of our fallen Comrades,” and complaining that some posts had been doing this. The resolution was not adopted, not because the committee on resolutions did not think its complaint had merit, but because, in their view, GAR rules already made it clear that Memorial Day was “for the commemoration of the deeds of our fallen comrades only.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Similarly, in his address at the 1879 GAR National Encampment, Commander-in-Chief John C. Robinson maintained that on Memorial Day, “we do not seek to commemorate valor, but patriotism.” He argued that “when we wreath garlands for our heroic dead, we call to remembrance the holy cause for which they died. Our countrymen North and South are equally brave, and personally may be equally deserving, but Memorial Day and its ceremonies lose their significance when we make no distinction between those who died to preserve the Union and those who sought to destroy it.” He concluded by saying that although he had friends who had been Confederates and would definitely be willing to lay a flower on their graves, he would not do so on Memorial Day.Footnote ⁵¹

Regardless of the GAR’s complaints at the national level, for the rest of the 1870s, Memorial Day in St. Louis would be an explicitly joint affair, with both sides helping to plan the event.Footnote ⁵² Former Confederate A. W. Slayback actually chaired the planning committee in 1875, and John S. Marmaduke, the former Confederate general who would be elected governor of Missouri in 1884, was chairman in 1878 and grand marshal of the parade in 1877.Footnote ⁵³ Other elements of reconciliation that appeared in these ceremonies in the 1870s included having Union and Confederate veterans participate together in decorating the graves, reading the poem “The Blue and the Gray” at the ceremony, and printing the program on blue and gray paper.Footnote ⁵⁴ The speeches given at the event during these years, both the English and German ones, all supported the idea of reconciliation, and press commentary on the event continued that theme. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch made which side a man fought on during the war sound like a minor matter of personal preference, when they wrote that participants were decorating “the graves of those who died for the cause they loved best.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Republican politician Chauncey I. Filley, who gave a brief welcoming address in 1874 before introducing the main speakers, commented that “without regard to past difference or reference to which side you took in the conflict of armed forces, you have come to honor the sleeping heroes who lie buried here, and by so doing honor yourselves.”Footnote ⁵⁶

St. Louis Germans participated actively in this reconciliation as well, despite their reputation for radicalism during and after the war, as can be seen in the German-language speeches given at Jefferson Barracks on Memorial Day. For example, Eugene Weigel, who gave the German speech in 1875, remarked “how many of those whose bones are moldering in this cemetery would have closed their eyes forever more easily and departed this world with more peaceful hearts if they in their hour of death had in mind the collective celebration of the present day.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In the German-language speech in 1876, E. D. Kargau argued that “may the cloth that covered those men’s breasts have been blue or gray, brave hearts did beat under the gray as well as the blue—hearts filled with love and fidelity for their country, all alike if this country was theirs by birth or by choice.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Valentin Grimm, who gave the German speech in 1877, even tried to claim credit for reconciliation for the Germans. He argued that although the Germans had been the first to take up arms for the Union in Missouri, they had also been the first to stretch out the hand of friendship to their former enemies and to proclaim that the old quarrels were buried and forgotten.Footnote ⁵⁹ While there is no evidence to back up his assertion, speeches like these show German willingness to associate with the cause of reconciliation in the 1870s.

Black St. Louisans, however, were mostly excluded from the process and ignored in the commemorations during the 1870s. Unlike the Confederates and German Americans, they were not given the chance to have a speaker at the ceremony. With the shift away from political speeches, the day no longer even featured discussions of politics that sometimes included at least some support for Black rights. While Black St. Louisans could, and likely did, hold their own private events to honor their memories of the Civil War and the Black veterans who had died, they were unwilling to simply cede the field of public Civil War commemoration to white reconciliation. Although not the only way to remember and honor their dead, being able to participate in a public commemoration gave their community and their memories additional legitimacy, an important concern during Reconstruction. As a result, Black St. Louisans strove to obtain representation and some control over the program of the day. For instance, in 1874, local Black leader Charlton H. Tandy contacted the Memorial Day planning committee, asking if there was any Black representation on that body. They adopted a motion to add Tandy himself to the committee.Footnote ⁶⁰ Tandy also served on the Memorial Day planning committee in 1877, when he was on the subcommittee responsible for gathering and transporting flowers.Footnote ⁶¹ A Black militia company, the Attuck Guards (also referred to as the Attuck Blues), participated in the Memorial Day parade in 1873 and 1874.Footnote ⁶² Despite this modicum of representation, however, they were not given the chance to have a Black speaker, or participate directly in the program at Jefferson Barracks in some other fashion, during the 1870s.Footnote ⁶³

Reconciliation in St. Louis in the 1870s was also gendered, with white men on both sides reconciling around a common definition of masculinity that praised the bravery of the soldiers (or at least the regularly enlisted soldiers) of both sides. Not only did white men have this commonality of their military experience to bind them, while women did not, but they often experienced an additional impetus toward reconciliation from the pragmatic reality that, in a border state like Missouri, they often had to do business with people who had supported the other side.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the late 1860s and early 1870s, during the early days of Memorial Day in St. Louis, the Ladies’ Union Aid Society played an active role in planning and carrying out the event.Footnote ⁶⁵ By 1871, however, the committee planning Memorial Day was exclusively male and the Ladies’ Union Aid Society was no longer mentioned.Footnote ⁶⁶ Reconciliation in St. Louis was thus apparently more able to cross lines of ethnicity or immigration status than those of gender or race, since German American men were able to play very active and public roles in the ceremony still, while women and Black men were nearly completely excluded.

Commemoration in the 1880s

Memorial Day in St. Louis became considerably less reconciliationist during the 1880s, as the Grand Army of the Republic reorganized in Missouri and reclaimed the holiday for the Union cause. The return of the GAR to Missouri—this time with much greater numbers and organization—was part of the dramatic growth the organization experienced nationwide during the 1880s. After being seriously weakened by accusations of political involvement in the 1870s, the GAR successfully rebranded itself as a non-political organization focused on encouraging patriotism, providing opportunities for veterans to socialize, and distributing charity to widows, orphans, and the wounded, which increased its membership by allowing it to recruit both Democrats and Republicans.Footnote ⁶⁷ This rebranding was particularly useful in Missouri, where many of the state’s veterans had been conservative Unionists who supported the Democratic Party, not the Republicans. As a sign that they were no longer associated with Republican politics, the first GAR post formed in St. Louis during this reorganization in 1879 was named after Frank P. Blair, the prominent Missouri politician and 1868 Democratic candidate for Vice President.Footnote ⁶⁸ The GAR grew more successfully in Missouri than in other border states, going from just nine posts with 596 members in 1881 to peak in 1891 with 437 posts and 21,028 members.Footnote ⁶⁹

The shift away from a joint Union-Confederate Memorial Day celebration began immediately. The GAR’s ability to take control of the day’s agenda was likely facilitated by a fading interest in the reconciliationist ceremonies after Reconstruction ended, which can be seen in shifts in who was planning the ceremonies and their increasing disorganization. In 1878, although the speeches given maintained the reconciliationist pattern, local clergy played a much larger role in organizing the event and gave all of the speeches.Footnote ⁷⁰ In 1879 and 1880, as the GAR began re-founding posts in St. Louis, the day was predominately organized by former soldiers, but the program no longer included former Confederates, and the planning took place in a much more last-minute and haphazard fashion. Multiple complaints appeared in the press during these years about the late announcement of the program, the incompleteness of the preparations, and that many associated with the program did not even show up on the day in question.Footnote ⁷¹ The editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted in 1879 that interest in Decoration Day seemed to be declining. The editor attributed this shift to the lack of sentimentality in the American character, although it more likely can be attributed to changing political priorities after the end of Reconstruction.Footnote ⁷² Regardless, as the GAR reorganized locally, this lessening of interest in the day presented an opportunity for the organization to step in and control it.

The shift in tone from reconciliationist to Unionist can be seen in the speeches given in 1879 and 1880, few though they were. The single speech in 1879, given by Seymour Thompson, gave no praise to Confederates and did not shy away from discussing the Union cause. Thompson praised the Union army and cause effusively, stating that “no body of men ever marched to battle with loftier purposes or clearer aim.” He also praised southern Unionists for remaining loyal in the face of great danger.Footnote ⁷³ Similarly, in 1880, the speaker Edward Kehr characterized the day as one to remember those who had given their lives fighting for “Einheit” and “Freiheit”: union and freedom.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although many complaints were raised, as noted, about inadequate preparations or missing speakers, no complaints were raised in the press about the speeches that were given or their Union focus.Footnote ⁷⁵

Beginning in 1881, Memorial Day in St. Louis was structured around the ritual of the GAR.Footnote ⁷⁶ The source of this ritual was a brief book published that year, titled Services for the Use of the Grand Army of the Republic. The services to be used on Memorial Day included a number of variations, for services held solely at the local GAR post, for those that included a decoration ceremony at the cemetery, and for those that involved a large gathering in a public hall. Regardless, the form was similar. After the officers had called the post to order, the chaplain read the opening prayer, which thanked God for their own survival and that of the nation and asked for comfort for veterans and the families of veterans who were in distress. At that point, the post commander would read the orders of the day, stating their intention to “honor our dead and to deepen our reverence for their worth.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The chaplain read a second prayer at the cemetery, asking God to “teach us to honor our dead by serving the country for which they died.” This prayer included a certain amount of reconciliation, since it did urge forgiveness of the former Confederates, but it was very much reconciliation on the Union army’s terms, saying “may we give them a soldier’s pardon, not forgetting the wrong that was done in the charity we accord.”Footnote ⁷⁸ After the second prayer, the post commander again read a brief address, talking about how the day was the festival of their dead and how they had gathered together both to honor the dead and to promote patriotism. After this, the graves would be decorated and “My country ‘tis of thee” sung.Footnote ⁷⁹

Based on the overviews of the day’s events published in the newspapers, the St. Louis Memorial Day ceremony followed this pattern quite closely. Memorial Day services generally began with each local GAR post gathering at its own hall, and then moving in procession through the city toward some central gathering point. After gathering together, the GAR posts, along with local militia companies and other veterans’ organizations, would move in procession to the levee or train depot to embark for Jefferson Barracks. Once they arrived at the barracks, they would form in procession again, often with the participation of the soldiers stationed at the barracks, and march to the speaker’s platform set up by the cemetery. After going through the prayers and addresses of the ritual, the graves were decorated and a hymn sung—generally, “My country ‘tis of thee.”Footnote ⁸⁰ It is hard to know for sure if the practice of decorating Confederate as well as Union graves continued after 1881. The Missouri Republican’s coverage of the event that year did note specifically that “some of the Confederate dead at Jefferson barracks were relatives and warm friends of members of the Grand Army of the Republic” and that while “there were not roses enough to go all round,” nevertheless “the graves of the boys in gray were remembered.”Footnote ⁸¹ After 1881, however, the press coverage made no further mention of decorating Confederate graves until after the Spanish-American War. And although other Union organizations, like the Sons of Veterans and the Woman’s Relief Corps, participated in Memorial Day alongside the GAR, none of the various Confederate associations in Missouri did so.Footnote ⁸²

Publicly asserting a Union-cause memory of the Civil War on Memorial Day may have felt increasingly urgent to GAR members as Missouri politics continued to be dominated by Democrats in the late 1870s and 1880s. It should be noted that Democratic dominance in state politics did not necessarily indicate that Missourians were rejecting a Unionist memory of the war; in fact, many of the Democrats being elected had been conservative Unionists.Footnote ⁸³ However, in 1884, former Confederate general John Sappington Marmaduke was elected governor. Not all Missouri Democrats approved of having a former Confederate in the governor’s office—the previous governor, Democrat Thomas T. Crittenden, a conservative Unionist, had won eighty-five counties and the city of St. Louis, while four years later, Marmaduke only won sixty-five counties and did not win in St. Louis.Footnote ⁸⁴

As an additional venue for promoting the memory of the Union cause, the GAR in St. Louis also began commemorating Camp Jackson Day again in 1884, holding a major annual event featuring a parade, a military festival with martial exercises, a concert, a ball, and fireworks. The entire event was focused on the justice and success of the Union cause, including “re-enactments” of Union victories, both traditional battles and the capture of various bands of guerrillas.Footnote ⁸⁵ Generally, Hassendeubel Post of the GAR, known as a German post, took the lead in organizing this commemoration, usually at Concordia Park, but sometimes at a local beer garden, like Koerner’s Garten or Schneider’s Garten.Footnote ⁸⁶ The German veterans were particularly proud of Camp Jackson, given that the majority of the U.S. troops participating in the capture were German Americans, but the other GAR posts were also active in celebrating this anniversary, both by participating in Hassendeubel’s celebration and by holding their own events. In some years, multiple posts held commemorations—in 1887, for instance, Hassendeubel Post held a military festival in Concordia Park and Lyon Post held a celebration at Koerner’s Garten. After Hassendeubel, Lyon Post was the most frequent host of Camp Jackson events, honoring their namesake, Nathaniel Lyon, who had led the Union volunteers at Camp Jackson and died in the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. In other years, a separate commemoration was held in Lyon Park, featuring the decoration of the monument to Gen. Nathaniel Lyon.Footnote ⁸⁷ By 1890, most years typically featured two major Camp Jackson celebrations: one planned by Hassendeubel Post that involved an all-day festival in Concordia Park, with a parade, military demonstration, speeches, concert, ball, and fireworks that took place on the Sunday closest to May 10, and one planned by the Lyon Memorial Committee that took place in Lyon Park on May 10 itself, and which featured the decoration of his monument by the various local GAR posts as well as speeches in English and German.Footnote ⁸⁸

The return of Memorial Day to GAR control in St. Louis affected the participation of women and Black Americans in the day’s ceremonies. For Black Americans, this change was gradual and by no means assured. The city’s Black population had grown during the Civil War and Reconstruction; by 1880, there were 22,256 Black St. Louisans, out of a total population of 350,518.Footnote ⁸⁹ Many white Unionists in Missouri had opposed emancipation, however, and had not welcomed the impact of Black enlistment on the institution of slavery.Footnote ⁹⁰ Charleton Tandy served as chairman of the invitations committee in 1880, but other Black representation was sparse.Footnote ⁹¹ However, after 1887 when Colonel Shaw Post No. 343 was mustered into existence as an African American GAR Post in St. Louis, Black participation began to grow.Footnote ⁹² By that time, the Memorial Day ceremonies were planned by a committee consisting of one representative from each GAR post in the city, including Shaw Post.Footnote ⁹³ In addition to having each post march in the parade, each one also provided one member to serve as an adjutant to escort the grand marshal at the head of the parade.Footnote ⁹⁴ Once at the cemetery, each post provided one member to read part of the GAR’s official Memorial Day ritual. In 1888, the first Memorial Day during which Shaw Post was in existence, its commander, H. R. Taylor, read part of the ritual, and in 1889 and 1890, Chaplain T. C. Brown of Shaw Post offered the opening prayer at the cemetery. In 1891, Henry Clay said the benediction to close the ceremony.Footnote ⁹⁵ Beginning in 1894, a Black Sons of Veterans Camp also participated in the Memorial Day ceremonies—Lovejoy Camp No. 100.Footnote ⁹⁶ This continued to be the case for the rest of the century, with Shaw Post being represented with the others on the executive committee, in the grand marshal’s staff for the parade, and in the program at the cemetery, and Lovejoy Camp participating with the rest of the Sons of Veterans in the parade.Footnote ⁹⁷

The GAR Posts altered the order in which they marched each year to give a different post the honor of leading the parade. In 1892, Shaw Post was in that position. The Post-Dispatch’s coverage of Memorial Day noted that “The first to swing into sight was Col. Shaw Post, the society of colored veterans, who turned out some sixty strong.” They noted that this was the first time the colored post received that honor, and that “there was much comment over the lead given to the colored contingent. The white posts marched after the Col. Shaw comrades as though a matter of course. The colored populace appreciated the prominence accorded their race.”Footnote ⁹⁸ As it was the customary practice for the leading post to provide a band, and given that Shaw Post was not in a strong financial position, the executive committee voted that it would cover the cost of providing a band, so that Shaw could march at the head.Footnote ⁹⁹

The participation of women also increased after the Grand Army of the Republic reclaimed Memorial Day for its own. In 1883, Paul Van Der Voort, the Commander-in-Chief of the GAR, called in his general order regarding Memorial Day for the GAR to reach out to “the loyal women of the nation” to help with Memorial Day, stating, “They will toil with willing hands and grateful hearts. Though others may have forgotten the dead, the women have never ceased to remember them and treasure in their pure hearts their heroic services.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Several women’s Civil War organizations were active in St. Louis. The most prominent and active was the Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC), the official auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic. This group, which held its first national convention in 1883, was open to any loyal woman, regardless of whether or not her male relatives had served in the war. Corps soon began to be organized in Missouri, and the WRC Department of Missouri was established in 1885.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By 1886, the Missouri Department Convention of the WRC noted the participation of several corps in Memorial Day, including for St. Louis, Frank P. Blair Corps No. 3 and Hassendeubel Corps No. 19.Footnote ¹⁰² The WRC was smaller than the GAR, but again Missouri’s department was larger than the other border states. The WRC reached peak membership in 1893 with 2,244 members.Footnote ¹⁰³

By the late 1880s, the role of the WRC in Civil War commemoration in St. Louis was becoming more regularized. The WRC routinely participated in the planning and execution of the celebration of Camp Jackson.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The WRC also participated frequently in Memorial Day, providing flowers and helping to decorate graves, particularly those of the unknown dead.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In 1888, the Hassendeubel WRC led a group of sixty school children from Carroll School in singing “One by One,” and the African American WRC affiliated with Shaw Post organized a group of forty Black school children from the No. 4 school who sang “Sleep Soldiers Sleep” as the procession marched into the cemetery and “Strewing the Flowers” while the graves were decorated.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In 1891, Ransom WRC joined Ransom GAR Post in presenting a program at St. Louis’s Exhibition Hall, and also decorated the grave of General William Tecumseh Sherman—Ransom Post’s most famous member—in Calvary Cemetery.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Beginning in 1890, the WRC added a new feature to the Memorial Day program: decorating the monument of Ulysses S. Grant with evergreens and flowers, sometimes with the assistance of school children who sang patriotic songs as the GAR passed by during the parade.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This monument, then located in the middle of Twelfth Street between Olive and Locust Streets, had been erected in 1888 by the Grant Monument Association, a group of prominent businessmen who began fundraising not long after Grant’s death in 1885. In 1898, the monument was relocated to the newly completed City Hall, and the women continued to decorate it.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 1892, the newspaper commented on the elaborateness of the decorations, remarking that the process had taken more than two hours and that it showed the “tender, loving touches of woman’s hand.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

After 1893, delegates from the Woman’s Relief Corps were included on the GAR committee that planned Memorial Day.Footnote ¹¹¹ In addition to decorating the Grant statue, the WRC took on responsibility for communicating with the public schools about Memorial Day, arranging for a half-day holiday for the school children so they could attend the ceremony, for the flags at the schools to be flown at half mast, and for the children to be taught about Memorial Day.Footnote ¹¹² Women dedicated monuments to the deceased veterans, with Hassendeubel WRC dedicating a column in Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery “In Memory of our dead Heroes” in 1887, and Annie Wittenmyer, Tent of the Daughters of Veterans, erecting a memorial stone to the unknown dead in 1894, and dedicating a marble monument to them on Memorial Day 1898.Footnote ¹¹³ It is not clear exactly how the WRC and the Daughters of Veterans paid for the construction of these monuments; however, they frequently held public events that raised money for charitable purposes, including balls, musical, and literary entertainments.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The WRC even marched in the parade in 1895. As the St. Louis Globe-Democrat put it, the members of the WRC, “imbued with the new woman idea, took their place in line and marched over the granite streets under a blazing sun like veterans.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ By 1898, the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, another women’s organization which limited membership to wives and blood relatives of honorably discharged Union soldiers, was also operating in the city and met with the WRC for Memorial Day planning and decorating.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The WRC’s activities are less well documented through the press than those of the GAR, thus making it less clear when Shaw WRC was participating in meetings and activities. Barbara Gannon notes in her study of Black and white comradeship in the GAR that although Black men experienced comradeship with white men through their common army service, Black women joined the WRC not in comradeship with white women, but in solidarity with the Black GAR men in their community. As a result, the WRC generally demonstrated more segregation than the GAR.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In 1894, the WRC committee did not list a delegate from Shaw WRC, although Shaw was represented on the GAR committee, as was the Black Sons of Veterans Camp.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The same was true in 1897.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In 1898, however, the committee included two delegates from Shaw WRC—Anna Lane and Ella Smith—just as from the other local corps.Footnote ¹²⁰ Similarly, in 1900, Mrs. M. Newsom and Mrs. J. Coleman of Shaw served on the WRC committee, as did Mrs. H. M. Robinson, representing the Lovejoy Ladies’ Aid Society, the auxiliary of the Lovejoy Camp of the Sons of Veterans.Footnote ¹²¹ In 1895, the Memorial Day report of Shaw Corps to the WRC Department Chaplain indicated that they had joined in the ceremony to decorate Grant’s monument.Footnote ¹²² At least part of the time, the white and Black women of the WRC were working together for Memorial Day.

Memorial Day in St. Louis did not include noticeable gestures of reconciliation again until the Spanish-American War in 1898, and even then, this was limited. In particular, newspaper coverage of Memorial Day, as in most places in the United States, made much of the fact that the Blue and the Gray were now united in fighting a common foe.Footnote ¹²³ The Post-Dispatch resolved that today, “there will be no talk of rebels,” and remarked that Americans “can clasp hands over the graves of Grant and Lee and glory in their mighty genius, their magnificent courage, their sublime devotion. They may say, ‘How great were we in opposing each other, how tremendous are we together!’”Footnote ¹²⁴ Similarly, a poem by William Hamilton Cline, published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1899, urged the “Men of the last generation” to “Forget not the Nation’s martyrs, whenever they served and where” and to “remember that joined together ye are by the blood of your sons.”Footnote ¹²⁵

In the years after 1898, some minor elements of cooperation and reconciliation began to reappear in the program for Memorial Day, although nothing on the scale of the cooperation that existed during the 1870s.Footnote ¹²⁶ The Post-Dispatch noted in 1899 that “for the first time the veterans North and South will decorate the graves of men who wore the blue and the gray,” although clearly this was not the first time this had happened in St. Louis.Footnote ¹²⁷ Plans for Memorial Day also called for the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and the Veterans of the Blue and Gray to march in the parade, along with the GAR and the Veterans of the Spanish War.Footnote ¹²⁸ The Veterans of the Blue and Gray was a short-lived fraternal society of elite St. Louisans from both sides of the war that sought to encourage reconciliation as a way of promoting business prosperity. Founded in 1896, its membership peaked at about one hundred, with roughly equal numbers of Unionists and Confederates.Footnote ¹²⁹ The UCV had many more members but struggled more than the GAR to recruit in Missouri, and had peaked at 2,400 members in 1887, when it was still known as the Ex-Confederate Association of Missouri.Footnote ¹³⁰ The UCV represented the major Confederate veterans and Blue-Gray organizations in the city and had not been previously invited to participate in Memorial Day.

Even this fairly minor gesture toward reconciliation was apparently gendered, because the Memorial Day organizers made no mention of the Confederate women’s organization in the city, the Daughters of the Confederacy (DOC). Organized in St. Louis in 1890, the DOC focused most of its efforts in the 1890s on fundraising for the Confederate Veterans’ Home in Higginsville, Missouri.Footnote ¹³¹ This group later became part of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which created its first chapter in Missouri in 1897, although not all members had merged by 1898, leaving both groups briefly in existence.Footnote ¹³² While the Confederate veterans’ groups were invited to join the Union men in the parade, the Confederate women, whether UDC or DOC, do not appear to have been invited to join the members of the WRC and Daughters of Veterans in their decorating efforts.Footnote ¹³³

Some reconciliationist gestures were also incorporated into the parade in 1899. As the parade moved through the city, just before reaching the Lindell Hotel, the band played a few bars of “Marching Through Georgia” before changing to “Dixie.” The Globe-Democrat’s coverage of the event noted that “The great feeling of reconciliation between the soldiers of both sides that has swept over the country in passing years and the new ties created by a new war brought recognition of the sentiment of the music and applause. The air played at the head of a parade of the Grand Army of the Republic was a tribute to the soldiers of the South.”Footnote ¹³⁴ At the cemetery, the Ransom Howlers, a GAR glee club, sang a song titled “The Blue and the Gray.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Similarly, in 1900, the UCV was on the list of groups the GAR invited to participate.Footnote ¹³⁶ In both 1899 and 1900, however, it is not clear that the Confederate Veterans chose to take the GAR up on this invitation. They are listed as being invited and even in the initial parade lineup. However, articles written after the fact do not list them as being present in the parade.Footnote ¹³⁷ Perhaps despite the fact that the Post-Dispatch claimed that there was such a “feeling of fellowship” in the Memorial Day observances of 1900 and that “the heroes in blue and in gray are honored” with “no discrimination between the sections,” the ex-Confederates still felt this was very much a Union activity.Footnote ¹³⁸

St. Louis thus experienced considerable change in its Civil War commemoration during the first three decades after the war, demonstrating the context that local studies can bring to traditional models of Civil War commemoration. Unionists were able to celebrate the reunification of the nation openly in St. Louis during the immediate aftermath of the war, when the existence of organized Union veterans and the control of local politics by Radical Republicans allowed them to dominate the war’s memory in the city. This did not last, however; as time went on and more St. Louisans sought an end to Reconstruction, commemorations sought to reconcile Confederate and Union veterans around a shared mourning based on masculine honor. After the Liberal Republican movement ended and the GAR returned to Missouri, this time with greater strength and numbers, Memorial Day returned to being a day devoted to the Union cause, as per GAR ritual. This shift in the commemoration of the day opened new opportunities for Unionist women and Black Americans to participate, as Union supporters united through the rituals of the GAR and WRC, regardless of sex or race, to honor the Union cause and those who had died for it. Even the shared sacrifice of the Spanish-American War and the highly sentimental portrayals of the Civil War that accompanied it nationally did not shift local dedication to using the GAR ritual to shape the event, and brought only minimal nods toward reconciliation. Memorial Day in St. Louis was, and would remain into the twentieth century, a day devoted to reunion on Union terms.