Research

Many western Unionists situated the Civil War as the pinnacle event in a long chronicle of republican development and western expansion. The incompatibility of slavery with long-term territorial acquisition, exploration, and settlement, as they remembered it, was central to national disunity and eventually war. Southerners seceded from the Union and threatened the American republican experiment in order to protect the extension of slavery into western territories. Western Unionists, in part, stressed the role of territories in creating national disunity because it gave westerners a direct link to the causes of the war.

Western Unionists also asserted that slavery’s existence had threatened their own dreams of free-soil white expansion and settler colonialism. They described both slavery and indigenous Americans as barbaric, and claimed they were dual barriers to the spread of white civilization. They further contended slavery had to be eliminated in order for free-soil northerners to successfully extend and maintain white civilization in the West. Arguing slavery was incongruous with western expansion, western Union commemorations magnified events such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Missouri Compromise, and Bleeding Kansas.

Therefore, their narrative of the Civil War celebrated the death knell of slavery as the first step toward settler colonialism and created a uniquely western emancipationist legacy of the war. In the process they masked, and in some cases erased, the violence of irregular warfare on the border and violence against indigenous Americans.

In their post-war commemorations, western Unionists intertwined the American Civil War and military conflicts with Native peoples fought between 1861 and 1890. They appropriated the military service of Indian War veterans and characterized these western military conflicts as a continuous effort to establish a nationwide free labor economy. The defeat of the Confederacy and indigenous Americans, according to their remembrances, were both essential to the development of white civilization.

Western Unionists commemorated events—including the Dakota Wars in Minnesota, the battle at Beecher Island in Colorado, the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota, and Christopher “Kit” Carson’s military service in the Southwest, among others — as an extension of the war against the Confederacy.

Consequently, they deemed the violent colonization of Native Americans acceptable as part of the larger struggle for the federal Union and free labor’s supremacy. By equating Native peoples with slaveholding Confederates, they rebranded massacre as warfare, violence and peace, and colonizing as civilizing to support contemporary allotment and other assimilationist programs.

Western Union veterans and their families crafted a narrative of the Civil War that elevated the West and western veterans’ importance to the Civil War’s legacy. They celebrated their military service in the Civil War by arguing it preserved the trans-Mississippi West for the possibility of free-soil settlement, and they glorified western Union veterans as pioneers who fulfilled the promise of free-soil settlement throughout the region.

Relying on gendered language to bolster their western-centric narrative, many argued the establishment of white gender patriarchal constructions—particularly separate spheres ideologies—were integral to the success of white western development. Arguing that white women represented refinement and “civilization,” Union veterans maintained that the establishment of white gender roles in the West provided the ultimate symbol of the Union’s dual victory over barbarism. In western Civil War commemorations, Union veterans argued barbarism was not only exemplified by the institution of slavery in the Confederacy but also by the existence of unassimilated indigenous peoples in the West.

Finally, they drew a connection between protecting republicanism through their Civil War military service and later extending republicanism to the trans-Mississippi West by commending veteran pioneers for building republican institutions—like churches and public schools, civil governments, and agriculture and industry—throughout the region.

Union veterans and their families used gender to shape their western collective Civil War remembrances. Western Unionists credited themselves with building republican foundations like governments, schools, industry, and agriculture in the West, but they considered homes the most important of these institutions. They extolled the construction of permanent, single-family homes westward in their Civil War remembrances not simply to argue westward expansion was a legacy of Union victory, but their commemorations of the home supported US assimilation programs. As they commemorated it, the home embodied and modeled Anglo-American gender ideals which were intrinsically “civilized.” Consequently, they further celebrated western Union veterans and their wives dwelling within these homes as exemplars of civilized American manhood and womanhood.

Situating settler colonialism in the shadow of the Civil War and the establishment of Anglo-gender ideals worked to erase the violence of colonization. Beyond modeling Anglo-gender roles, western Unionists employed Civil War commemorations in their attempts to assimilate American Indians. Indigenous members of Union commemorative associations, however, used their membership to create relief networks on reservations, resist ethnocide, and expand Native citizenship.

By imbuing their organizational practices and collective remembrances with racial and gendered concepts, western Union veterans and their families wielded commemoration and memory building as a tool of colonization.

Union veterans and their families employed their collective memories of the Civil War to elevate their place in western society and defend colonization. Union soldiers fought against Indigenous nations between 1861–1865, and as veterans they engaged in postbellum Indian Wars on the frontier in provisional military companies. As western settlers, Union veterans and their families were also part of an ongoing effort to colonize and assimilate American Indians. By intertwining these roles with a western legacy of the American Civil War in their collective remembrances, western Union veterans and their families defended their part in the violent colonization of American Indians as virtuous and beyond reproach.

Furthermore, they leveraged their collective war remembrances for their own political, economic, and social gain by arguing for entitlements for ex-Union soldiers and an increased role in post-war commemorative work and suffrage for western Union women. By placing westward territorial expansion within the shadow of the Civil War, they manipulated this narrative to claim Union veterans were the most deserving of western lands and legitimized U.S. territorial control in the West.