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Top blue bar image The American Civil War Era
The primary course blog for HIST 246, Spring 2011
 

Sectional Disunion: The UCV in Houston, 1895

Post written by Ryan Shaver

[NOTE: The author of this post is a student in HIST 300, an independent study group that has been reading historiography about Dowling, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the contested memory of the Civil War. To satisfy one of the requirements for that course, Kat did some additional research about the context for the re-dedication of the Dick Dowling monument.]

If one did not know better, when Miss Winnie Davis took the stage at the United Confederate Veterans Reunion in Houston on May 22, 1895, she might have been mistaken for a deity. The uproarious reception from the 10,000 people packed inside the specially-constructed auditorium, not to mention the auxiliary thousands in the streets, suggested that she was more than a woman; that she was more than the daughter of the late Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. And she was. The jubilant tears and defiant Confederate battle flags visible at the scene signaled that not only was the Southern cause alive three decades after the Civil War, but Houston was its epicenter for a moment in time.

It is undeniable that any study of the American Civil War should go beyond the four-year timeframe of 1861-1865, into Reconstruction, through the installation of Jim Crow and ideally up until present day. Such a study can be called one of the public memory of the War, and only by tracing the steps taken from the past to the present do the most important issues reveal themselves. Indeed one of the more salient debates encountered by not only Civil War historians but by the American public has been the idea of a sectional reunion between the North and the South. The exact nature of this geographical reconciliation has proved itself elusive as the questions of when, how and if a sectional reunion occurred contentiously endure today. The grand scope of history can be overwhelming, but if a single point is examined, the task of assessing the state of reunion at a certain point in time becomes slightly less intimidating.

Formed in New Orleans in 1889, the United Confederate Veterans was the South’s response to the Grand Army of the Republic, the predominate Union veterans’ organization which had thrived since 1866. While only previously possessing small regional fraternal groups, Southern veterans aspired for the UCV to be a more emphatic national organization capable of preserving and protecting Southern memory, providing for Confederate veterans as well as widows and orphans, and assembling reunions such as the one in Houston from May 22-24 in 1895. Resembling the structure of the U.S. government, the UCV’s national headquarters, complete with three branches and a commander-in-chief, allowed the UCV to perpetuate on a grand level, while receiving support from local chapters. Research of the reunion seeks not to isolate it, but to study it in a contextualized manner, with respect to surrounding events as well as the debates between historians such as David Blight, John Neff and W. Fitzhugh Brundage.

The near-ubiquitous consensus among the historians read thus far in HIST 300 is that racial equality was relegated to the background in the wake of the Civil War, while being sacrificed in the name of some other interest. In Race and Reunion, Blight affirms that racial reunion and the emancipationist legacy of the war were largely overshadowed by a politically and economically-charged sectional reconciliation between the North and the South.  While Neff agrees with Blight that African American memory was predominately neglected, his emphasis on the role of commemoration of the dead leads to the conclusion that any reconciliation between the North and South was not without its cracks and ruptures. In the first pages of Honoring the Civil War Dead, Neff shatters the idea of a sectional reconciliation by explicitly declaring that “remembering the dead proved to be an impediment to national healing” (6). Finally in The Southern Past, Brundage insists that racial and section reconciliations were ultimately hindered by various social groups competing for the colonization of public space in which to assert their memory. While southern whites and their Lost Cause ideology certainly dominated blacks in this respect, this “policing of space” remains significant in that is represents the racial, sectional and gender power struggles that undermined a true reconciliation. It is crucial, however, that Neff and Brundage not be viewed interchangeably as the latter is critical of the former for placing too much emphasis on commemoration of the dead, while ignoring several other crucial elements in the battle for public space. Regardless, these varying opinions confirm that the debate of a sectional reunion is a very pivotal one as the 1895 UCV Reunion provides insight into the issue.

In its coverage of the UCV reunion on May 22, The New York Herald-Tribune wrote of “Federal and Confederate veterans mingl[ing] in cordial fraternity…under the blended banners of Union and Secession.” Similarly, The Columbus Daily Enquirer, a southern periodical from Georgia, spoke of “harmonious unity” as the Federal Government “participates in the commemoration of the struggle in which the old conditions pass away.”  Such evidence would certainly charm Blight who claims of large-scale blue-grey fraternalism at reunions, be they UCV or Grand Army of the Republic (356). The Woodson Research Center at Fondren is fortunate enough to possess a “Souvenir Album and History of the United Confederate Veterans’ Reunion, 1895,” a compilation by William Bledsoe Philpott of accounts, songs, and speeches from the reunion. Sifting through the Souvenir Album’s reports of the events from the three-day reunion along with reading the Confederate Veteran‘s monthly newsletter from June of 1895 reveals that although the surface of the 1895 Reunion is clouded with the idea of pacification and reconciliation between the North and the South, a prevailing Southern dissent lurks beneath the exterior. In his address on the first day, General Stephen D. Lee, Commander-in-Chief of the UCV, spoke of honor and glory for both the North and the South, declaring:

“It makes no matter now who was to blame and how plainly the right of a sovereign state to withdraw from the Union is established by legal right…” (Souvenir Album, 16).

Lee praises “a new and more centralized, stronger union” (18), a statement that reinforces the Enquirer‘s claim of the “old conditions passing away.” If the investigation of the reunion stops here, one is left with the conviction of a clean sectional reunion by 1895 in which the blue and the grey put their differences aside in the attempt to form a unified identity. What further insight reveals, however, is that such “harmonious unity” was nothing more than superficial appeasement. The blending of the banners was a facade and the cordial fraternity was cosmetic: both were mere instruments of compromise so that the South could publicly preserve their Lost Cause.

Lee is in fact speaking on behalf of the UCV Historical Committee and woven into his speech, in between his calls for reconciliation, is his true message about preserving a distinct Southern identity. When discussing the Union’s record of the Civil War, Lee blatantly claims that Northern writers are:

“utterly destitute of information as to events leading to the war” and “incorrect in every way” in their accounts of southern sacrifices, battlefield statistics, and the “barbarity practiced upon an almost defenseless people”  (Album, 15).

Lee’s mention of “barbarity” is almost certainly an allusion to the total war practiced by General William Tecumseh Sherman during his “March to the Sea,” a campaign whose memory is quite apparently an impediment to sectional reunion. Lee goes on to make the aforementioned claims of mutual glory and honor for Confederate and Union soldiers, yet in his call for reconciliation he contradicts himself by continually referring to the alleged Northern manipulation of memory, declaring that:

“the record of history will contain many errors and false indictments against the South, which have originated with Northern writers with that partiality for their section” (Album, 18).

Indeed there are notions of reconciliation on the surface, but more obvious are the prevailing cracks in the reunion. Lee is in fact not contradicting himself at all, but rather employing reconciliation sentimentalism to disguise his call for the Southern people to correct the historical record, to vindicate the Confederate cause and overall to preserve a distinct white southern identity. What is surprising is that to call it a “disguise” is perhaps an overstatement as these cracks in the reunion are anything but subtle. While Lee’s words are relatively blatant, Texas Governor Charles Culberson delivered an address that began with a reference to the defiance of the American Revolutionaries in the face of British tyranny. Culberson juxtaposes the Confederate struggle with the American Revolution, and while he does not outright label men like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis as the Confederacy’s “founding fathers,” he does not have to, for the message of the Lost Cause is already sent. So conspicuous are the cracks in the reunion, that one wonders how the idea of a true harmonious blue-grey reunion could be reported. Assuredly a journalist from the Herald-Tribune or the Enquirer could fail to see past the blended banners in the moment, but Blight makes reference to Lee’s speech at the 1895 UCV Reunion (281) and still concludes that racial equality was overtaken by sectional reunion, often citing other UCV Reunions such as the 1897 Reunion in Nashville and the 1903 Reunion in Georgia as evidence.

As declared, I have not chosen to isolate the 1895 UCV Reunion in Houston but to contextualize it and when the event is viewed where it occurred in history, exactly thirty-years after Appomattox and right before the turn of the century, the idea of a sectional reunion seems absurd. Not only had no sectional reunion taken place by 1895, but the white Southern people appear to have desired no such thing, at least not on the North’s terms. Accordingly, I do not wish to have my research of the 1895 UCV Reunion be seen as a sole criticism of David Blight. His theory of a “reunion on Southern terms” remains relevant here as that is possibly what the UCV was pushing for; perhaps reconciliation with the North was not entirely dismissed (for economic reasons) but the issue of vindicating the Confederate cause remained predominant at this time.

In addition to shattering the idea of a true sectional reunion, the Houston Reunion also proves that the South was very much concerned with de-emphasizing slavery as a cause of the Civil War. The only mention of slavery in any of the speeches on the first two days (which were all from southern leaders) was with the purpose of removing it from the equation, and maintaining that the true cause of the War was the South’s dignified withdrawal from the Union in order to protect interests promised by the Constitution. Day three potentially saw a moment of redemption when Colonel E.T. Lee, a federal veteran, delivered a speech to the masses. Instead of utilizing the public arena to bring the racial issue into the foreground, the northerner merely called for reconciliation between the blue and the grey. This northern allowance for slavery to slip away from the conversation is indeed discussed by Blight, but what seems apparent from looking into the events surrounding the speech is that many Southerners probably looked on with glazed eyes regardless. E.T. Lee’s call for the blue and grey to pleasantly reunite at the Shiloh battlefield seems preposterous in light of Neff’s assertion that time was undoubtedly not enough to weaken the sectional animosities that soldiers had died for on the battlefields.

Perhaps the best place to conclude is where the Souvenir Album begins. On the first page is a colorful and decorative picture of the various flags of the Confederacy entitled “Flags of the Nation that Fell.” Amongst the gloriously depicted battle flags are the Southern Cross and the battle flag adopted by the Confederate Congress in 1863. Nowhere are flags of the Union or any other than those that evoke nostalgia for the Lost Cause. As a result, when Dr. J William Jones spoke at the reunion, claiming that “we are ready to unite, but we are not ashamed of the cause for which we fought,” (Album, 44) the last part of that declaration remains the most significant. In 1895, the Confederacy had not furled their battle-flags, they had not retired their uniforms and they had not reunited cleanly with the North. Indeed the 1895 UCV Reunion speaks only to a certain amount of sectional reconciliation that pleased economic needs and conveniently dismissed racial equality, while a true blue-grey reunion was certainly not the case at this point. Even more so, it seems hard to imagine how a sectional reunion could take place as long as General Stephen Lee accused the North of manipulating the War’s memory, tears and battle-scarred flags greeted the arrival of Winnie Davis, and Confederate hymns such as “Dixie” and “Bonnie Blue Flag” prevailed over the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (“Rebel Reunion” The Daily Olympian, 5/23/1895). Turning back to the historiographical debate, the reunion seems to best support the case of W. Fitzhugh Brundage. A competition between social groups for public space is evident as the UCV reunion appears to be an act of Confederate conservation. The absence of any African-American voice only further speaks to their silencing throughout history. For three days in May of 1895, the United Confederate Veterans met in Houston not to reminisce on the past, but to plan for the future. Annual reunions such as this were opportunities for the South to reassert to their memory, to regenerate the Lost Cause and to preserve their way of life. An authentic sectional reunion was nowhere to be found in 1895 and, at least for a moment in time, Houston was the pivot of sectional disunity.

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