The Election of 1896 and the Restructuring of Civil War Memory

Abstract

The country is in greater danger than it has been since 1861. This is not merely our opinion, and is not merely a party opinion. It is the profound belief of patriotic men without distinction of party and in every section of the country.

A War for Principle? Shifting Memories of the Union Cause in Iowa, 1865-1916

“…However, as Patrick Kelly has observed, there were signs in this overwrought contest that even the most orthodox Republican leaders were beginning to shift their ground. 72 The threat to sound money and social stability allegedly posed by the opposition's pro-silver presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, induced pro-business Republicans to target conservative Democrats as potential allies in the campaign. In September a Marshalltown-based railroad manager wrote to Major General Grenville M. Dodge, the state's preeminent living war hero and a powerful Republican in his own right who was heavily involved in the business of Civil War commemoration at the national level.…”

“Not Buried Yet”: Northern Responses to the Death of Jefferson Davis and the Stuttering Progress of Sectional Reconciliation

“…In the second half of the 1890s, Republican leaders, convinced that voting rights enforcement was both impossible to achieve and most likely a vote loser, embraced a reconciliatory discourse, best evidenced when President William McKinley sought, and to an extent secured, southern backing for the war against Spain and his subsequent policy of empire. 112 By 1898 the die was cast. Although most Union veterans continued to reject the moral equivalence of the Union and Confederate causes until the day they died, the majority of them joined their fellow northerners in accepting southerners' claims to be loyal, brave, and patriotic fellow Americans at the precise moment when those same southerners were disfranchising, segregating, and murdering African Americans with impunity.…”