CENTENNIAL

Nearly everywhere he went, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant III was asked the same question. He heard it the summer of 1955 in Cincinnati during an annual encampment of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. He heard it the following January in Manhattan, where he addressed the Civil War Round Table of New York City.

“Why all this interest in the Civil War?”

As the grandson of the Union army hero, Grant could speak from authority. He could reach back to his own youth at West Point and his long career with the Army in the Philippines, Cuba, and the Mexican border war. After World War I he helped the Supreme War Council draft terms for peace at Versailles. In the Second World War Grant headed up the protection branch of the Office of Civilian Defense. Soon he would be elected chairman of the newly created Civil War Centennial Commission.

He also could speak from the high advantage of family. He could recall standing next to his famous grandfather at a window in midtown Manhattan seventy summers ago, as together they reviewed a marching parade of Union army veterans from Brooklyn. He could remember his grandfather in upstate New York, too, in a cottage at Mount McGregor, as the family shuffled around the deathbed of the savior of the Republic. The old general and former president was racing against throat cancer to complete his Civil War memoirs. Outside, where he always stood, was Sam Willett, a private in an artillery company of New York State Volunteers. He was now a proud member of the state Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), standing a lone watch over the failing Union hero. Before he died, Grant sent a message to GAR veterans in Maine. “Tell the boys that they probably will never look into my face again, nor hear my voic[e],” he wrote in his weakening hand. “But they are en[g]raved on my heart and I love them as my children.” A few days later, another honor guard of GAR regulars carried the general’s casket.

The grandson knew all this. He understood not just what the war had done but also what the 100 years that followed had meant to America. Speaking in January 1956 to the Civil War Round Table of New York City, he told the armchair history buffs exactly what they wanted to hear.

“The Civil War was our war,” he said. “It all took place right here, where we can visit the battlefields and the countryside in which it occurred. It is a little like the hometown of the man who, in singing its praises and pointing out its importance, concluded with the statement, ‘and most important of all, it contains my home!’ ”

American GIs had returned from World War II eager to learn more of the struggles of their forefathers. Civil War Round Tables discussed generals on horseback, boots on the ground, and complicated battle strategies. The study groups sprang up all around the country” north, south, east, and west.

Another war hero—Dwight Eisenhower—was ensconced for eight years in the White House, and he had hung a portrait of his hero, Confederate leader Robert E. Lee, in the Oval Office. From his earliest childhood memories in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower could remember the faces of old veterans who had fought both for and against the Confederate general.

“If, in Abilene, I never became as involved in the Civil War, this was because it was relatively recent,” Eisenhower wrote in his post–White House memoirs after retiring to his farm in Gettysburg. “After all, when Abilene’s men and women, and boys for that matter, talked about ‘the war,’ they meant the struggle between North and South that had ended only twenty-five years before I was born. There were hundreds in the town who remembered the war’s beginning; its major campaigns and crises and figures; the ebb and flow of battle that reached from the Atlantic into our state; the downfall of the Confederacy; the assassination of Lincoln. For them, these events were not yet history.

“In Abilene, as in other American towns of that time, scores of men still in their fifties and early sixties who ran local businesses, worked nearby farms, or practiced the professions were veterans of the war,” he recalled. “Closeness to it in time made that war appear commonplace to me.”

The old veterans tottering along Abilene’s Main Street, he wrote, could never envision their neighbor boy Dwight in the years ahead visiting Gettysburg to study tactics as a West Point graduate, and then in 1950 purchasing farm property “next to the fields where Pickett’s men had assembled for the assault on Cemetery Ridge.”

Indeed, by the mid-1950s what had once been a mighty force of Civil War warriors had dwindled to less than a handful of aged, sick, and dying veterans. Yet, incredibly, a few still lived. Maybe some would last until April 1961 and help the nation consecrate the 100th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter. It would be a rare privilege to honor one or two of them 100 years after the war.

In June 1952 the journalist William D. Workman Jr. visited the South Carolina home of a man claiming to be 106 years old and a former Confederate fighter. Workman hoped to record the sound of the infamous Rebel yell. Instead he found a man too ill to offer up anything more than a feeble hello. The Library of Congress also tried to record the South Carolina Confederate in full yell. But the old man’s wife stopped them. “He might drop dead on the spot,” she warned.

In 1953 a group of Round Table devotees and Civil War historians created the Civil War Centennial Association in New York. Four years later, President Eisenhower signed a joint congressional resolution establishing the national Civil War Centennial Commission. Its aim was to commemorate four years of war that had bloodied America, and also to give new emphasis to a reunited United States.

The history and romance of the Civil War were suddenly and freshly abloom in America. Battlefield parks in Gettysburg and Vicksburg pulled in record numbers of tourists, and government funds to support the Centennial Commission were funneled through the Interior Department not only to spruce up the battle site parks but also to return them as close as possible to their authentic period. Historians such as Bruce Catton and Allan Nevins produced best sellers about the old war.

“This is a matter of national history,” the historian Robert Henry told a congressional committee marking up the bill to fund the centennial. “After all, it was an American war. It was a war in which we are entitled to glory in the valor and achievements of the men on both sides.” He called it “probably the greatest event and the greatest crisis in the history of our nation.”

Congress, its heart touched by patriotism, appropriated the maximum amount of $100,000 a year for the commission to carry out the centennial between 1961 and 1965. Eisenhower announced the appointment of commission members, including historians, congressmen, and local dignitaries.

After their first meeting in December 1957, the commissioners elected Major General Grant III their chairman. Silver-haired and retired but still bayonet straight from his days on the drill field, Grant seemed the perfect choice. He could bring the Civil War home to the American public through his family’s link to the great general and his own military career. Speaking to that Civil War Round Table in New York, he called the war the first of its kind in the modern age: “the first in which a nation as a whole was engaged, in which everyone had some part or connection.”

He noted that it was the first war fought after the invention of the telegraph, which quickened and enhanced headquarters-to-field communications, and the first to transport large numbers of soldiers and supplies by railroad and over great distances. It was the first to see major improvements in small arms and cannon, and the first in ironclads and submarine mines. Also, Grant said, “it was probably the last in which a general could command his army personally on the field of battle, and the last in which official records were sufficiently few and so scattered that you and I can in our busy days cover the records of an event or operation more or less comprehensively.”

He warned of a tailwind of bitterness fanned by some—Southerners fearing that the North would use the centennial to lord its great victory over them, and Northerners concerned that the South, still smarting from defeat, would distance itself further from the rest of the nation. Some worried that the centennial would propel or sabotage the civil rights movement, which by the mid-1950s was garnering support in the North and resistance in the South.

Grant hoped that the centennial commemorations would instead bury the old hatreds. “One general tendency that I cannot understand,” he had told the New York Round Table, “is the manifest effort to belittle some men or even their side, in order to make the opponent or other side seem more heroic, and which to my mind has just the contrary result. Neither Grant nor Lee gains anything by belittling his opponent. On the contrary each gains by an appreciation of the genius of the other.”

He specifically castigated those in the South who continued to revere Lee and spurn his grandfather. “I cannot help a certain indignation at this unjust vilification of my grandfather and of the man who, after all, did win the war and bring about the reuniting of our country, not only by his victories in the field but also by the magnanimous terms he granted at Appomattox and by his later administration as president.”

Many Southerners wanted no part in remembering the humiliation of their great-grandfathers. A Dallas couple urged their Texas senator, Lyndon Johnson, to “stop this effort to cause further internal hate and disruption between sections and races.” In the North, a Delaware woman wrote to Grant, arguing that “at this crucial time we should be united in our beliefs” and that to revisit the tragedy of the Civil War and a nation divided would “cause nothing but harm and hard feelings.”

Even in the nation’s capital, uncertainty hung over what good a nationwide Civil War remembrance would bring. Virginia Livingston Hunt, a well-to-do Washington society doyenne, dashed off a letter to a New York congressman decrying plans for the centennial. Her grandfather had lost his left arm in the U.S.–Mexican War. As a major general in the Union army during the Civil War, he fell during Virginia’s Battle of Chantilly in 1862.

“I have no desire to help celebrate a tragic war in which my grandfather Philip Kearny of New Jersey lost his life when my mother was just six months old,” she wrote. “The South is only just recovering from northern devastation after ninety years. Congress is struggling with the problems of States’ Rights. That was exactly the same in 1861. The Negro will just be further inflamed. What is the purpose; what is to be gained?”

Others strongly defended the centennial effort. They said it would help bandage the last festering wounds from a war a century old. “There was glory and honor for all who fought in the war,” argued Karl S. Betts, the commission’s executive director. In a January 1959 interview in the Nation magazine, he tried to allay Southern fears that the centennial would promote the Union’s cause to end slavery over the South’s desire to preserve states’ rights. “There’s a bigger theme,” he said: “the beginning of a new America.”

Historian Bruce Catton told a Round Table in Washington, D.C., that “in a strange and mystic way, the Civil War united us,” because those who fought and the generations that followed shared “a great and unique experience.”

After their first meeting to elect Grant, the Civil War Centennial Commission sat down to business in the spring of 1958. In the years ahead, they recorded their activities in a monthly newsletter, “100 Years After,” mailed to thousands of state and local officials, donors and fund-raisers, historians and Round Table members, and an American public growing fascinated with the coming anniversary. That May they asked people to search their attics, basements, and garages for any diaries, photographs, newspapers, and books dealing with the war: “The commission recommends that these historical documents be sent to state archives or local museums and libraries for display.”

By June thirty states had appointed local Civil War centennial organizations. In July Grant urged vacationers to visit some twenty-eight major battlefields in ten states in advance of the anniversary. In the North, Maine opened a museum that included relics ranging from musket balls to a razor used by President Lincoln. In the South on the Fourth of July, in the first sanctioned event of the coming centennial, “Taps” was played at a ceremony on a James River plantation in Virginia. (“Taps” reportedly first sounded there during the Union’s Peninsula Campaign of 1862.) In August the federal government began microfilming Civil War records in Washington. In the South, V. C. Jones, the commission’s liaison officer, completed a 3,000-mile automobile swing through the region to drum up interest.

In October Grant received a letter from Florence Sillers Ogden of Rosedale, Mississippi, thanking him for her appointment to the commission’s advisory council and signaling that some of the sectional harsh feelings might be on the mend. “I am deeply interested in the Centennial and feel sure it will be a great success under your chairmanship,” she wrote. “That is, if you are anything like as good at centennials as your grandfather was running a war.”

She added that “since your grandfather shelled my grandmother’s plantation as he steamed down the Mississippi on his way to Vicksburg, I know a lot about your family. You may be interested to know that I still operate that plantation, raise cotton on it. It is located one hundred miles south of Memphis. My father, a ten-year-old boy, was on the levee on his pony when your grandfather’s fleet rounded a bend in the river, and he saw and heard Confederate sniper fire on the gunboats and the boats then let loose their works. I did not think I would ever receive an appointment from General U. S. Grant, but time and the river have run a long span since that August day in 1862 and the bitterness of those days is long spent. I consider it an honor to serve on your commission.”

By the six-month point in the fall of 1958, the commission had created a speakers’ bureau, printed a centennial guide, compiled a war chronology, and published a booklet answering that overarching question presented to Grant over and over: “Why study the Civil War?” In December the commission led a drive to help restore the battlefield at Antietam, Maryland. The National Park Service, working closely with the commission, announced a $690,000 facelift for Fort Sumter. A 1911 painting of an old Yankee and an old Rebel enjoying cigars together under a canopy of drooping moss was reprinted. Its title: “Bygones.”

Five ex-presidents or former First Ladies were appointed honorary commission members. In Georgia the state historical commission set up a Confederate museum to honor where Confederate President Jefferson Davis held his last meeting and, with defeat at its doorstep, the Confederate Treasury buried its gold reserves. By spring 1959 commission volunteers were “more carefully marking” the graves of Civil War soldiers, including a cemetery in Warrenton, Virginia, where Col. John Singleton Mosby, the “Gray Ghost” of the Confederacy, lay buried.

Plans for reenactments were announced at Antietam, Gettysburg, and up and down the great swath of Virginia. A drive was launched to locate descendants of Union soldiers awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Baseball slugger Harmon Killebrew, leading the major leagues in home runs for the Washington Senators, stepped forward as the grandson of the “Union Army’s finest physical specimen from the state of Illinois.” In the South organizers raised money for a memorial to Stonewall Jackson and to restore some of the battle sites where his name became a legend.

“I am very interested in the Civil War,” Richard Moore of Connecticut wrote to the commission. “I am a Confederate fan.… I have my own library books and I have just finished reading Robert E. Lee and young Stonewall Jackson. I have my own Civil War collection of bullets and other things. My mother is very interested in the Civil War, too. I have gathered newspapers and rags. I sold them to the junk man and got a dollar. I hear that you need money to buy the battlefields which Stonewall Jackson fought on. So I am enclosing my dollar. Sometime later I will send another one for the cause. Because right now I haven’t any.” He closed with “I am eight years old and in the third grade.”

Centennial headquarters opened its doors at 700 Jackson Place, NW, across from the White House and next door to Blair House, where Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was staying during a September 1959 visit. Washington police and Secret Service agents closely watched things out front, and one day they noticed a car pull up in front of the centennial offices. A man began unloading guns and sabers on a grassy plot by the sidewalk. Hands on their weapons, security officials surrounded him. “What’s going on here?” they demanded.

“Nothing,” replied Harry B. Elkins, the commission’s administrative assistant. “General Grant is going on television, and these are his props.”

“But guns?”

“Sure,” Elkins said. “All this is Civil War vintage.”

Thirty-seven states now had created their own centennial committees. The national Sons of Union Veterans, in a bow to the South, adopted resolutions stating that the centennial should be referred to as a commemoration and not as a celebration of one side’s victory over the other. But fences were not repaired so easily. The South Atlantic Quarterly, published by Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, announced that it was “tired of the Civil War” and would not be printing a commemorative issue. The Richmond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch warned against a “centennial orgy of sectionalism” and suggested that the 100th anniversary of the American Civil War should only be used to observe that “out of that titanic struggle a nation was forged, a nation which has emerged stronger than ever from two world conflicts.”

But in Yadkinville, North Carolina, the descendants of Theophilus C. Hauser and his African American slaves gathered together at the old homestead for an outdoor picnic. Souvenir napkins were passed around, embossed with a message from the ancestors of the former white overseers: “Welcome back to the old plantation. Many of you were born here where your parents remained faithful and true after the War Between the States. Your fathers and mothers are buried here. It is as dear to your hearts as it is to ours. Come again.”

By spring 1960 the new theme was “A Centennial for All Americans.” New York became the forty-first state to establish its own local committee, and in Washington, D.C., the national commission boasted six hundred members from all fifty states on its advisory council. Thirty commemorative postage stamps were soon to be issued, and a 16 mm, thirty-five-minute film on the centennial was in production. In Alabama, women sewed antebellum hoopskirts for upcoming balls and reenactments. Arkansas license plates were painted in Confederate gray and red. Students in Rockland County, New York, competed in Civil War essay contests; gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded to the winners, much like the Army Civil War Campaign Medals that suddenly were all the rage. The Gimbels Department Store on Market Street in Philadelphia announced that it would turn over many of its display windows and prime shopping space to a centennial exhibit.

Karl Betts, the commission’s executive director, could feel the momentum cresting. “We have nothing to sell,” he said in the fall of 1960. “We just want Americans to read their history books and to take note and understand better some of the important events connected with the Civil War. We want as dignified and as reverential an observance of this era of our past as possible. We frown on the term ‘celebration’; to us it is commemoration.”

Then at last the nation awoke on Sunday morning, January 8, 1961, to the tolling of church bells—exactly 100 years after Southern guns had fired on the Northern steamer Star of the West in a prelude to four years of civil war. Giving a rare radio and television address, President Eisenhower formally announced that the Civil War Centennial would soon be upon America and stressed that the greatness of the nation did not lie so much in its bounty of natural resources as in the devotion of its citizens to duty and honor.

“No event in our history ever tested that devotion, that understanding, and that determination more profoundly than did the American Civil War,” the president told the nation. “The memory of that event is shadowed with its story of sacrifice, of loss, of dark tragedy long endured. Yet somehow, today, it is the magnificent unity of spirit that came out of it, and the realization that every man is made for freedom and accountable for the freedom of his neighbor, that should be most clearly remembered.… Let us join in the forthcoming centennial observances with pride. The tragedy is passed, but the way in which Americans of North and South met and eventually overcame that tragedy is a living memory forever.”

Dignitaries in New York City laid four wreaths at Grant’s Tomb on the Upper West Side, the first placed by the general’s grandson. Above them was inscribed Grant’s statement upon accepting the nomination for president: “Let Us Have Peace.” Church bells pealed on Riverside Drive. “We humbly repent the bitterness that turned brother against brother,” the Reverend William R. Robbins said in benediction at the tomb overlooking the Hudson River. “We recall those who fell in battle.” Light snow melted on the shoulders of 1,500 troops assembled in front of the granite steps. A battalion of West Point cadets in long blue coats and white belts stood in tight formation. Another row lined the front steps in old Union blue jackets and kepi caps.

In Midtown Manhattan a fifth wreath was placed at the statue of Abraham Lincoln in Union Square. Army troops stood rock still; a volley of rifle shots rolled overhead. The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War directed the observance. Some from the 79th New York Volunteers, the “Cameron Highlanders,” wore kilts. A Boy Scout drum and bugle corps played somberly. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was read aloud, the 272 words carried aloft in the chill winter air. Speaking as the former New York state commander of the Sons of Union Veterans, Maj. William F. Bruckel concluded the ceremony with “we reverently bow our heads at this time to all who made the supreme sacrifice.”

In Lexington, Virginia, at Gen. Robert E. Lee’s burial site, the sons of the South gathered to pay their homage. Virginia Military Institute cadets and visiting dignitaries crowded into the white pews of the campus chapel at Washington and Lee University, on the grounds where Stonewall Jackson taught philosophy and artillery before the war and Lee afterward ran the school. The United Daughters of the Confederacy set a wreath next to Lee’s crypt, where his remains lie in the basement of the chapel he built.

Grant’s grandson sent a telegram praising Lee as “a great and knightly American soldier and citizen.” William M. Tuck, a former Virginia governor and now a congressman, read Grant’s telegram honoring Lee’s humility, which helped to fashion “the reunited country.” Then Tuck had words of his own. “A large part of the concord and harmony which we as a nation enjoy today is due to the righteousness of spirit and the nobility of character of the great Southern chieftain at whose tomb we stand now,” he said. “He sought to inculcate these priceless principles into the hearts and minds of those whom he led on the battlefield, as well as those whom he taught here.”

The school chancellor, Francis Pendleton Gaines, said Lee should be remembered for looking beyond defeat in the South, an accomplishment particularly difficult for a man who in the war lost his home in Arlington, Virginia, and his citizenship upon his surrender. But, Gaines observed, Lee “closed resolutely every door of yesterday” and “busied himself about opening doors of tomorrow for a reunited country.”

If Robert E. Lee had had a slogan for all the veterans after the Civil War—blue and gray, North and South—the chancellor said, it would have been: “We are all Americans now.”