Introduction
Before charging into politics, Theodore Roosevelt was a historian. In 1882, the same year he first served in the New York State Assembly, Roosevelt published his first book, a work entitled The Naval War of 1812. His four volume Winning of the West (1889–96) would become his most lasting literary contribution, but he also wrote biographies of political leaders and statesmen such as Gouverneur Morris and Oliver Cromwell. In recognition of his stature as a prominent historian of his generation, Roosevelt was elected president of the American Historical Association in 1912. Despite this long engagement with the historical profession, scholars have paid relatively little attention to Roosevelt’s historical writings and almost none to what he had to say about the Civil War. This is a significant oversight because Roosevelt’s historical writing frequently focused on the Civil War, and his strong commitment to a Unionist interpretation of the war shaped his politics throughout his long career.
This article focuses on Roosevelt’s commentary on the Civil War to explore the politicization of Civil War memory in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It makes two main arguments: 1) that in an era when a “reconciliationist” understanding of the Civil War was becoming more prominent, more often than not Roosevelt used his voice as a historian and political figure to assert an alternative “Unionist” interpretation; and 2) that Roosevelt used this memory of the Civil War to advocate for three specific political causes: American empire, the New Nationalism, and American entry into World War I. Put together, these arguments suggest a third: that our current periodizations do not adequately account for the ways in which the Civil War continued to affect Progressive Era discourse as late as the Great War.
Roosevelt (1858–1919) serves as an ideal figure for such a study because he grew up in a divided house during the war; reflected at length on slavery and secession as a historian; and made implicit and explicit reference to the issues of the Civil War as a turn-of-the-century political leader. Perhaps most importantly, Roosevelt’s political clout allowed him to influence national policy. His linkages between the 1860s and 1900s were no mere academic affair; they resulted in life-and-death actions for him, other Americans, and people abroad. As a president and popular writer, his interpretation of the Civil War mattered. The war and its consequences did not fade from memory and importance. Instead, even after 1900, the nation’s most catastrophic experience continued to shape concrete policy debates in the Progressive Era.
Moreover, Roosevelt’s treatment of the Civil War as a historian and politician challenges some of the predominant understandings of how influential white men exploited the war’s memory in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Although “reconciliation” and “reunion” were always an important part of the national discourse, Roosevelt leant his voice to an alternative remembrance of the conflict. A strong unionist, Roosevelt usually championed the Union’s righteousness and deplored the Confederacy’s unabashed wickedness. Although (in David Blight’s categories) his interpretation could not really be classified as “emancipationist,” Roosevelt set himself apart from many of his white peers by forthrightly condemning slavery as evil, denouncing the Confederacy and its leaders in the strongest terms, and refusing any moral equivalence between the North and the South. When historians grasp how Roosevelt advocated a Unionist understanding of the Civil War and used it to support specific policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they will be better positioned to evaluate the complexities of Civil War memory at the turn of the twentieth century and its implication for Progressive Era politics.
Old and New Directions in Scholarship
The last several decades have produced a cottage industry of works attuned to the memory of the Civil War. “Reconciliation” is one of the dominant themes of the literature, with David Blight’s pathbreaking Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) serving as the classic interpretation. Blight argues that white Americans in the Gilded Age mostly agreed to understand the war in safe, “reconciliationist” terms rather than in pro-African American “emancipationist” ones. “In this collective victory narrative,” Blight writes, “the Civil War … became the heroic crisis survived, a source of pride that Americans solve their problems and redeem themselves in unity.”Footnote 1
Other scholarship on Civil War memory also makes reconciliation and reunion the main stories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As far back as 1937, Paul H. Buck stressed national healing in his Road to Reunion. More modern, sweeping studies like Nina Silber’s The Romance of Reunion (1993) reiterate the message. According to Silber, “politicians, journalists, and even financial leaders usually raised the bridge of sentiment and emotion in elaborating on the ties that now bound the people of the sections together. They all, in effect, paid homage to a romantic and sentimental culture of conciliation that characterized the North-South relationship in the Gilded Age years.” Although Northerners were never completely taken in by the Lost Cause mythology, Silber says, it was especially middle- and upper-class men who promoted reunion. “By the time of the Spanish-American War,” she concludes, “few alternative or dissenting voices could be heard.”Footnote 2
The reconciliationist narrative has plenty of problems, however. As early as 1991, in his Mystic Chords of Memory, Michael Kammen stressed the animosity between North and South that prevailed at the turn of the twentieth century. K. Stephen Prince has rejected the static language of reunion, focusing on the differences between the Old South and New South. Like Prince, Caroline E. Janney has emphasized the differences between reunion and reconciliation. “Reunion” meant the politics of shepherding the defeated South back into the United States while “reconciliation” was more a matter of emotion or “sentiment.” The nation could theoretically have one without the other. In fact, Janney maintains that the North did not “sell out” to Southern Lost Cause understandings. Although there was plenty of reconciliation to go around, Janney argues that it “was never the predominant memory of the war among its participants.” John R. Neff has likewise pointed to efforts to memorialize the Civil War dead as exacerbating, rather than healing, sectional tensions. In an important historiographical article, Robert J. Cook speaks of the “complex and uneven” process of reunification as well as “the persistence of smoldering wartime hatreds and tenacious partisan allegiances.” Adopting categories first developed in a different context by Gary W. Gallagher, Cook has held that “Unionist,” “Southern,” “emancipationist,” and “reconciliatory” interpretations existed in tension.Footnote 3
Thus, although all scholars acknowledge the prevalence of reconciliation, there is no clear consensus on the extent to which it was the dominant Gilded Age and Progressive Era interpretation. That debate may never be fully resolved given the millions of participants, perspectives, and documents that exist from all corners of the nation in the half century following Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Although the first half of this article does speak to the existing debates about the varying camps of interpretation, the second half seeks to move the historiographical conversation in a different direction by focusing on how one prominent political figure used the war for his political goals, how he was similar to and different from other Unionists, and how the war’s memory was still potent as late as the 1910s. This latter discussion will help scholars better understand not only how Americans remembered the war, but also how they continued to use it for controversial political purposes in the first two decades of the twentieth century. That, in turn, can help us think with more sophistication about both continuity and change over time when we periodize the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This article will first look at the ways in which the Roosevelt family was caught up in the war itself. Even though young “Teedie” was only a child during the conflict, the family’s war experiences left a permanent impression on him. It will then examine how Roosevelt interpreted the war as a historian since he authored several books in the late nineteenth century that touched on the war and its legacies. Finally, and at greatest length, it will examine the ways Roosevelt used the war as an empire advocate, president, proponent of the New Nationalism, and enthusiast for American entry into World War I.
Roosevelt and the War Itself
As a small boy, Roosevelt experienced firsthand one of the war’s central realities: the divided house. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln had adapted that phrase from the Gospel of Matthew to illustrate the impossibility of the slaveholding South continuing to coexist peacefully with the free labor North. But in young Teedie’s home in Manhattan, the phrase took on a more personal meaning. Roosevelt’s father, Theodore Sr., was the latest in a long line of Knickerbockers that stretched back to New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century. He was a Republican with strong Unionist feelings. Roosevelt’s mother, Martha (Mittie), by contrast, had grown up on a plantation in Roswell, Georgia; in her youth her family had owned slaves. Becoming a Roosevelt and moving to New York did not alter her sectional sympathies. During the war she and her sister Annie (who also lived with the Roosevelts) helped smuggle supplies to Confederate soldiers. Unconfirmed family lore also holds that on one occasion she even hung the rebel flag from the family’s house to celebrate a Confederate victory. She was doubtless distraught when she heard news that William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces had torn up the family plantation en route to the sea in 1864. Mittie was adamant that her husband not enlist in the Union Army.Footnote 4
Theodore Sr. remained painfully conflicted about his duty. A devout Christian possessed of a “troublesome conscience,” he agonized over what he should do. In 1861, he chose not to volunteer but instead used his influence to lobby Congress to establish the Allotment Commission. He and several friends secured an appropriation for this organization, which encouraged soldiers to send a percentage of their wages to their families back home. Theodore Sr. himself rode on horseback through Union camps making personal appeals. His sufferings hardly equaled those experienced by the soldiers themselves, but he did endure cold nights and long absences from his family.Footnote 5
Theodore Sr.’s most serious dilemma regarding the war took place in 1863, when Congress declared the draft. Like many of his social station, he purchased a substitute instead of going to war himself. This was a perfectly legal maneuver and a relatively easy way to escape military service. Although four-year old Teedie probably had no understanding of what his father was doing at the time, the decision would haunt him as an adult. In all other respects, he thought of his father as “the best man I ever knew.”Footnote 6 When Theodore Sr. died suddenly in 1878, his son mourned for months. Yet as a grown man, he would come to feel that his father had shirked his duty when the nation’s most momentous event had arrived. It was a feeling that would have consequences for him personally and for the nation as a whole.
Growing up in New York City in the 1860s—with a sometimes-absent father and Confederate mother—it was impossible for Roosevelt to escape the consequences of the conflict. “The war insinuated itself into every corner of his childhood,” historian Kathleen Dalton has written.Footnote 7 The Civil War was not a mere abstraction for Roosevelt; it was an integral part of his most formative years. Exposed to both Northern and Southern viewpoints, as a young historian he came unabashedly to choose a Unionist interpretation.Footnote 8
Roosevelt the Historian
After graduating from Harvard College in 1880, Roosevelt served as an assemblyman from New York’s twenty-first district. He held this position until 1884, when he experienced the death of his wife and mother in the same house on the same day. This tragedy led to his refusal to run for re-election to the assembly, an off-and-on stint as a rancher in the Dakota Territory, and a failed run for New York City mayor in 1886. Nothing seemed to go right for him, so his friend Henry Cabot Lodge helped him get a contract to write a biography of the Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton for Houghton Mifflin’s “American Statesmen” series. When the Dakota blizzards of 1886–87 ruined his ranching investment and threatened to cost him more than $40,000, his pen seemed to be the natural way to keep funds coming in.Footnote 9
Roosevelt’s biography of Benton was published in 1886. Writing about the antebellum era afforded Roosevelt a chance to reflect at some length on the coming of the Civil War. In doing so, he condemned slavery as a “grossly anachronistic and un-American form of evil”; it was “wholly barbarous and out of date.” Rejecting any Lost Cause mythology that would make the war about states’ rights, Roosevelt stated that slavery was the “chief” cause of the war. Whereas previous outbursts of rebellion (like the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions or the 1832–33 South Carolina Nullification Crisis) had affected only individual states, “slavery was an interest common to the whole South. When it was felt to be in any way menaced, all Southerners came together for its protection… .” Like Lincoln in his second inaugural address, Roosevelt identified slavery as the issue that united the white South and prompted the unholy rebellion.Footnote 10
Nor did Roosevelt waste any sympathy on the secessionists. He blamed the peculiar institution for “the coarse and brutal barbarism which ran through the Southern character.”Footnote 11 The young historian also made Jefferson Davis the chief villain of the rebellion. Davis was a controversial figure in this period; his death in 1889 revealed strongly divergent attitudes among Republicans in the North, who mainly viewed him as a traitor, and white Southerners, who lauded him as a hero.Footnote 12 For his part, Roosevelt condemned Davis’s “greedy and reckless ambition,” comparing him to other traitors such as Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr. He then drew a parallel between Davis’s supposed advocacy of repudiation of debts and his role as leader of the Confederacy: “Before Jefferson Davis took his place among the arch-traitors in our annals he had already long been known as one of the chief repudiators; it was not unnatural that to dishonesty toward the creditors of the public he should afterward add treachery toward the public itself.” Footnote 13 Roosevelt’s sharp criticism of Davis provoked a personal letter of protest from the ex-Confederate president himself.Footnote 14 Roosevelt’s historical judgements left little room for ambiguity about which side had the moral right in the war.
Roosevelt continued to elaborate on these themes in other historical writings of the 1880s and 1890s. His next book, an 1888 biography of Federalist leader Gouverneur Morris, did not naturally lend itself to reflections on the Civil War. Nevertheless, as the reconciliationist historian William A. Dunning complained in reviews of Roosevelt’s historical works, the future president had an irritating penchant for presentist digressions and an unquenchable one for moral judgements. Thus, Morris’s participation in the 1814 Hartford Convention—where New England secession was discussed—allowed Roosevelt to return to some of the themes of Thomas Hart Benton. He again boldly declared that the perpetuation of slavery was the raison d’être of the Confederacy: “The secession movement of 1860 was pushed to extremities … and the revolt was peculiarly abhorrent, because of the intention to make slavery the ‘corner-stone’ of the new nation… .” He allowed that Americans could be proud of the “gallantry” and honest intentions of ordinary Confederate soldiers; however, “the man who fought for secession warred for a cause as evil and as capable of working lasting harm as the doctrine of the divine right of kings itself.” Striking at the Lost Cause mythmakers, he mocked efforts to turn Davis into a “hero.” Then, in classic Roosevelt language, he once more hammered the Confederate president: “Emasculated sentimentalists may try to strike from the national dictionary the word treason; but until that is done, Jefferson Davis must be deemed guilty thereof.”Footnote 15
In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Roosevelt to the Civil Service Commission. Although he would hold this position for the next six years, he still found time for historical work in the 1890s. New York (1891) and Hero Tales from American History (1895) once again offered space for Roosevelt to reflect on the Civil War.Footnote 16 New York was a history of his home state from the seventeenth century down to the present. In his discussion of the early nineteenth century, Roosevelt pointed out the hypocrisy of white New Yorkers who called for universal suffrage for even the poor and ignorant but still excluded qualified African Americans from voting. Democrats had been especially unfair to Black citizens, the staunch Republican concluded. Roosevelt also strongly decried the 1863 New York Draft Riots, the aftermath of which he probably had some childhood memory. He correctly maintained that “unfortunate negroes” had been the chief victims of “the most horrible outrages” committed by white mobs. Never one to shrink from violence, he thought the eventual deaths of twelve hundred rioters “an admirable object-lesson to the remainder.” He did go out of his way to praise the Union League Club (to which he, like his father, belonged) as a pillar of New York social stability and “political influence.”Footnote 17
Hero Tales was Roosevelt’s last truly historical work to pay attention to the Civil War. Co-written with Henry Cabot Lodge (but with each chapter’s author clearly identified), the book consisted of short accounts of the battles and deeds of great white men from American history. Roosevelt’s treatment of Stonewall Jackson’s death allowed him to praise the valor of the Confederate soldiers while still distinguishing between those who fought “for the right” as opposed to those who fought “for what they deemed the right.” He conceded Southern bravery but insisted that “it was vital … that the Union should be preserved and slavery abolished.” Indeed, the war was “the greatest struggle for righteousness which the present century has seen.”Footnote 18
It would be going too far to argue that Roosevelt saw the war primarily in emancipationist terms, or that he cared a great deal for the sufferings of African Americans. Although he excoriated slavery, he could still in the same breath traffic in racist stereotypes about ignorant Black voters and characterize abolitionists as impractical visionaries. Occasionally he invoked reconciliationist language as when in the Stonewall Jackson chapter, he spoke of the “common fund of glorious memories” shared by North and South alike.Footnote 19 Nevertheless, the main thrust of Roosevelt’s extensive historical work was to identify slavery as the main cause of the war, unequivocally condemn secession and its leaders, and to repeatedly deny the moral equivalence of the blue and gray.
Roosevelt was certainly not alone among Northern Republicans in maintaining a Unionist view of the war. His close friend Lodge also published anti-Confederate views decades after the Civil War came to a close. In an 1884 appreciation of William H. Seward (subsequently reprinted in 1892), Lodge used standard Republican rhetoric to denounce the South and its rebellion. He praised the men who “stopped the extension of slavery, saved the Union, and destroyed human bondage in the United States.” He frankly denounced “the slave power,” referring to “the absolute criminality of the slave-ridden South in plunging the country into war.” Like Roosevelt, Lodge forthrightly condemned the Confederacy.Footnote 20
Roosevelt and Lodge also translated their historical reflections into concrete actions. In 1890, Lodge sponsored the Federal Elections Bill, intended to strengthen Black voting rights in the South and guarantee fair elections throughout the country. The measure narrowly passed the House before being filibustered to death in the Senate in 1891. Civil Service Commissioner Roosevelt lamented that the bill had failed to become law. In March 1891, he told a group of Republicans that “I am for radical measures” to ensure “honest elections.” He praised Lodge, decried the filibuster, and stressed his desire for fair elections everywhere in the country. This was not all that surprising since seven years before the pair had worked together to have John Roy Lynch, a Black Congressman from Mississippi, made chairman of the 1884 Republican Convention. Lodge had nominated Lynch while Roosevelt’s speech on his behalf invoked Lincoln and Republican abolition. Lodge and Roosevelt agreed that the secessionists bore moral responsibility for the conflict, and that African Americans in the South through the 1890s ought to be supported in their desire to vote.Footnote 21
The Spanish-American War and Empire
In 1895, Roosevelt left the civil service commission to become a police commissioner in New York City. He remained there until 1897, when President William McKinley appointed him assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt famously resigned this post in 1898 to serve as lieutenant colonel of his hand-picked Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. His charge up San Juan Hill in July turned him into a national celebrity and propelled him to the governorship of New York in the fall. After a tumultuous two-year term, the New York Republican bosses exiled him to the vice presidency in 1900, where they hoped he would become a mere figurehead. No one counted on McKinley’s assassination and death in September 1901, an event which made the forty-two-year-old Roosevelt the youngest president in American history.Footnote 22
In these years leading up to his presidency, Roosevelt left behind his previous pursuits to become a political leader of national reputation. Yet he did not leave behind his Unionist understanding of the Civil War; instead, he continued to deploy it as a politician to advocate for concrete policies. The late 1890s were a period when the reconciliationist understanding of the war was becoming more prominent; indeed, the Spanish-American War is said (not without reason) to be the great moment of sectional reconciliation where national healing carried the day for white Americans.Footnote 23 However, in contrast to these trends, Roosevelt continued to use the Civil War for partisan purposes as well as reconciliatory ones.
First, Roosevelt’s own involvement in the Spanish-American War can be traced to the legacy of the Civil War. Historians have long indulged in speculations about the Rough Rider’s warmongering as psychological compensation for his father’s hiring of a substitute soldier in 1863.Footnote 24 While such theories cannot be conclusively proven, there is some concrete textual evidence to support them. For example, in March 1899, Roosevelt wrote to his friend Winthrop Chandler of his pride in serving in Cuba the previous year. “We have both cause to feel profoundly satisfied that in the biggest thing since the civil war we did actually do our part, and had the luck to get into the fighting,” Roosevelt stated. “It was great luck, and we and our children will always be thankful for it.” To another correspondent, the American novelist Winston Churchill, Roosevelt wrote a letter of appreciation for Churchill’s The Crisis (1901), a novel about St. Louis in the Civil War Era. Yet the vice president did note one criticism that suggested strong parallels to Theodore Sr.’s decision forty years before: “I do not think your hero had any business, no matter what his devotion to his mother, to refuse to go in [to the war] at the very outset.” When duty called, American men must answer. As he put it as late as 1914 in a letter to Rudyard Kipling, “(I have always explained to my four sons that, if there is any war during their lifetime, I wish them to be in a position to explain to their children, why they did go to it, and not why they did not go to it.)” These comments, all made in private correspondence, suggest Roosevelt’s eagerness to distance himself from what he perceived as his father’s dereliction of duty. The Spanish-American War in 1898 afforded him the opportunity to make up for what Theodore Sr. had not done in 1861.Footnote 25
Second, Roosevelt exploited the memory of the Civil War to justify expansion and American empire in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. Brief analysis of five speeches and articles written between April 1899 and April 1900 illustrates the point. Roosevelt delivered the first address in this vein, his famous “Strenuous Life” speech, before the Hamilton Club of Chicago on April 10, 1899. The thesis of “The Strenuous Life” was that duty called the United States to take its rightful place in the world. For Roosevelt, this meant unabashedly championing the birth of American empire in the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Although the Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo rejected American conquest and fought for independence, his resistance must be stamped out, Roosevelt said. If the American military did not subjugate the Philippines and rule the inhabitants for their good, then the archipelago would sink into “savage anarchy” since the Filipinos were ostensibly “utterly unfit for self-government.”Footnote 26
To defend this position, Roosevelt appealed to his Unionist memory of the Civil War. If mere peace had been the ultimate goal in 1861, Roosevelt declared, then Northerners could have allowed the Confederate states to secede peaceably, and thus could have avoided much bloodshed and destruction. But such a course would have also proved that Union men were “weaklings” who were “unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth.” Instead, the “iron in the blood of our fathers” impelled Northern soldiers to end slavery, save the union, and return self-respect to the United States. Although Roosevelt admitted that the present-day imperial question did not equal the drama of civil war, he argued that his generation must carry on the praiseworthy legacy of those who rejected “ignoble counsels of peace” in favor of military victory.Footnote 27 The implication was that what had been done to Davis and the Confederacy must now be done to Aguinaldo and the Filipino resistance. This was a lesson—albeit a deeply ironic and contradictory one—drawn from the legacy of the Civil War.
Roosevelt continued teaching these lessons when he spoke to a group of Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) veterans at the tomb of Ulysses S. Grant on May 30, 1899. Full of admiration for Grant, Roosevelt took the occasion to apply to the present day what he perceived as Grant’s legacy. For the New York governor, that meant Grant’s tenacity and his insistence on total victory. For Americans at the turn of the century to “follow the example of General Grant,” they must “insist that no armed enemy within the territory that has come into our possession through the war with Spain” be allowed “to dictate terms to it.” Afterward, however, they could afford to be generous to their foes as Grant had been to Lee at Appomattox Courthouse. For the anti-imperialists, Roosevelt had another Civil War villain in mind: the Ohio Democrat Clement Vallandigham. The GAR men must resist the “Vallandighams of to-day” who were only “a feeble foe.”Footnote 28
Roosevelt reiterated that the anti-imperialists were traitors in an address on October 21, 1899, in Cincinnati entitled “The Copperheads of 1900.” Here, Roosevelt made explicit what he had merely implied to the GAR: that the anti-imperialists were the fin de siècle equivalent of the antiwar Northern Democrats of the 1860s. Those who cheered Aguinaldo and encouraged his opposition to the American occupying forces would be responsible for American deaths just as surely as the Copperheads bore responsibility for New York’s Draft Riots. The expansionists, by contrast, were carrying on the legacy of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. Advocates of expansion were not really “imperialists,” Roosevelt protested; instead, they merely insisted that the United States rule absolutely in the territories fairly won in war. Echoing Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge’s sentiments in his famous “March of the Flag” address, Roosevelt maintained that the whole history of the United States was one of western expansion and annexation.Footnote 29
Roosevelt repeated these themes in the winter of 1899 and the spring of 1900 as the Filipino rebels refused to fade away. In a December article for the mainline Protestant publication Independent, he again called his compatriots to follow in the footsteps of the Union men who were unafraid to fight for national unity. “Anarchic warfare” would erupt in the Philippines if the natives were left to follow their own course just as surely as it would have in the South if the Confederacy had not been opposed.Footnote 30
On April 27, 1900, Roosevelt spoke in Grant’s hometown of Galena, Illinois, which again provided him with an occasion to reflect on the contemporary relevance of the general. Roosevelt continued to see in the great military leader the virtue of persistence in the face of trial. Grant had besieged Vicksburg into surrender and had famously pledged to subdue Virginia in 1864 “if it [took] all summer.” According to Roosevelt, Grant possessed an admirable “doggedness” and “felt nothing but impatient contempt” for those who would compromise with the enemy. Now, Roosevelt went on, the problems of empire needed to be met “in the very spirit of Grant.” If the United States backed down now and abandoned the Philippines, “we shall show ourselves weaklings unfit to invoke the memories of the stalwart men who fought to a finish the great Civil War.”Footnote 31
This commentary illustrated that Roosevelt saw American empire as a continuation of the noble legacy of the Civil War. It also showed how Unionist memory could change over time. Roosevelt was certainly a militarist who rarely met a war he didn’t like.Footnote 32 But, for a professed disciple of Lincoln, Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for armed conflict was ironic. Lincoln had opposed the Mexican-American War as an unholy conquest in the interest of the Slave Power and thus opposed it. Likewise, antebellum abolitionists rarely associated violence with manly virtue. Roosevelt, however, used the Unionist memory of the Civil War in the service both of manliness and empire.Footnote 33
Roosevelt’s Presidency
Roosevelt’s Unionist interpretation was the rule—however, in the early days of his presidency he did exploit the more typical reconciliationist understanding of the Civil War. For a short period he seemed to abandon the seminal themes that in the previous decades had appeared consistently in his historical and political commentaries about the struggle. This change in emphasis must be attributed to the political necessity of conciliation and to his desire to boost the comatose white Republican Party in the South.Footnote 34
Tellingly, Roosevelt struck the reconciliationist note mainly in a series of speeches in the South during his presidency. Addressing the citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1902, he spoke of little else besides the happy reunion the North and South now supposedly enjoyed. “The wounds left by the great Civil War … have healed,” the president announced, “and its memories are now priceless heritages of honor alike to the North and to the South.” Both Yankees and Rebels could “glory alike in the valor” of the soldiers. He himself had served with the former Confederate General Joseph Wheeler in the Spanish-American War and had made ex-Confederate Luke Wright the Governor-General of the Philippines. “Of course” Roosevelt was “proud of the South” as were all good Americans: “we are indeed a reunited people.”Footnote 35
Addresses at Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1902, and Richmond, Virginia, in 1905, gave further evidence of these themes. At Chattanooga he repeated his regard for certain ex-Confederates and praised “the valor, the self-devotion, the loyalty to the right as each side saw the right.” Touring the Chickamauga battlefield, he quoted with approval a tribute inscribed on a Kentucky monument erected by Union and Confederate veterans: “As we are united in life, and they united in death, let one monument perpetuate their deeds, and one people, forgetful of all asperities, forever hold in grateful remembrance all the glories of that terrible conflict which made all men free and retained every star on the nation’s flag.” Speaking at Capitol Square in Richmond, Roosevelt studiously avoided any discussion of the causes of the conflict or its moral stakes. Instead, he offered platitudes about the bravery of the blue and the gray, rejoiced that all rancorous feelings between the sections had disappeared, and praised the New South for its economic development. It was reconciliationist rhetoric par excellence and it was rhetoric he was not afraid to employ during several presidential tours of the South.Footnote 36
Roosevelt did not mention that this reunion had been built solidly on the backs of the nation’s African American citizens.Footnote 37 The supposed rebirth of the postbellum South had only been made possible because of the success of the Redeemer governments in instituting a Jim Crow regime that reduced the South’s Black residents to virtual powerlessness in the political realm. To be sure, Roosevelt knew all about terror, lynching, and the widespread disenfranchisement of Black voters—and opposed them when he could—but he chose to avoid discussing them in favor of a safe, sublimated version of white reunion.
Indeed, as president Roosevelt sometimes stood up for African Americans and sometimes contributed to their oppression. He tried to show respect to African Americans when he invited Booker T. Washington to dine in the White House in 1901, and defended his actions in the wake of howling Southern criticism. Roosevelt also insisted on appointing a Black man, William D. Crum, to the position of Collector of Customs in Charleston, South Carolina. Furthermore, when the white citizens of Indianola, Mississippi, harassed their Black postmistress and harried her out of town, Roosevelt closed the Indianola post office in retaliation.Footnote 38
But Roosevelt also only appointed a tiny percentage of African Americans to patronage posts, contented himself with words rather than deeds in his opposition to lynching, and summarily dismissed a regiment of Black soldiers in 1906 on trumped up charges. This last act was a serious miscarriage of justice that observers at the same and since have denounced, yet Roosevelt never apologized or admitted to having erred. Historian Xi Wang considers Roosevelt mostly ineffective in his attempt to promote Black rights during his presidency.Footnote 39 It must be stated clearly that Roosevelt’s seven-year presidency and his Unionist interpretation of the Civil War did little to stop Jim Crow from progressing in the South.
Thus, Roosevelt’s only inconsistent advocacy of Black rights set him apart from some other opponents of reconciliation and the Lost Cause. When the House of Representatives debated Lodge’s voting rights bill in 1891, some members referenced Black soldiers’ loyalty in their speeches in support of the bill. When that bill failed to pass the Senate, other veterans leant their support to fellow veteran Albion W. Tourgée’s efforts to found a civil rights advocacy group, the National Citizens’ Rights Association. Another former soldier, McKinley, used his presidency to appoint African Americans to office (more than Roosevelt would) and forged an unlikely alliance with the Black congressman George Henry White. According to historian Benjamin Justesen, McKinley’s support for Black citizenship “was undeniably catalyzed by his Civil War service.” John Marshall Harlan, by 1896 the only Union veteran on the Supreme Court, even referred to Blacks’ honorable service in his lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. These examples illustrate that Roosevelt’s Unionist memory was not always put to the service of racial equality in the same manner as some of his peers.Footnote 40
Yet Roosevelt mostly continued to beat the drum of Unionism in his intellectual understanding of the Civil War. Crucially, while the president spoke in glowing reconciliationist language to Southern audiences, his private correspondence revealed the persistence of his Unionist outlook. In September 1904, Roosevelt wrote to the aptly named George Brinton McClellan Harvey in defense of his negative views of Jefferson Davis. “If secession was not a crime, if it was not a black offense against humanity to strive to break up this great republic in the interest of the perpetuation of slavery,” Roosevelt argued, “then it is impossible ever to commit any political crime… .” He characterized the Confederate president as “an unhung traitor” and again compared him to Benedict Arnold.Footnote 41
This criticism of both slavery and secessionist slaveholders (Roosevelt did not always distinguish the two) was in keeping with other remarks he had made back in 1899. At that time, Roosevelt had finished reading Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (1898) written by the British officer and historian George Francis Robert Henderson. Advocating the Lost Cause interpretation, Henderson believed slavery had little to do with the coming of the Civil War. He argued that slaves were better off than Northern laborers, and that Harriet Beecher Stowe had spread unwarranted “calumnies” against the South in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While Roosevelt praised the book, he took issue with Henderson’s characterization of unfree labor. “I know what a good side there was to slavery,” he said, “but I know also what a hideous side there was to it, and this was the important side.” He went on to denounce the “revolting” practice of white slave owners selling their own (illegitimate) children into bondage. While the Confederates believed they were fighting on the right side, Roosevelt plainly stated that “my own belief is that there never was a war in which the right was so wholly on one side.”Footnote 42
In a 1906 letter to his friend, the novelist Owen Wister, Roosevelt again condemned Davis (and John C. Calhoun) in the harshest terms: “I am unable to see wherein any conscienceless financier of the present day is worse than these two slave owners who spent their years in trying to feed their thirst for personal power by leading their followers to the destruction of the union.” Since Roosevelt had expended a good bit of political capital opposing the Robber Barons of his own day, this was a damning comparison. He told another friend in 1906 that it would have been “eminently righteous” (although perhaps unwise) to have executed Davis for treason. By this point, Roosevelt’s severe judgment of Davis contrasted with the growing reconciliationist mood that had gradually taken hold in the North in the 1890s. Despite having been only a child in the 1860s, Roosevelt’s interpretation more closely resembled those of Northern veterans, who tended to emphasize slavery and emancipation in their Civil War memories. Barbara Gannon has shown how the GAR, for example, honored both Black and white veterans. Even when Roosevelt spoke the language of reconciliation during his Southern tours, he also showed support for African Americans when he visited Tuskegee Institute, viewed African American sculptor Meta Warrick’s depictions of racial uplift, and praised the work of the Colored Jamestown Company.Footnote 43
Roosevelt’s position as president also allowed him to carry on correspondence with the untrained historian James Ford Rhodes, whose seven-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1893–1906) greatly influenced turn-of-the-century scholarship on the Civil War. Roosevelt told Rhodes in 1904 that he had revisited his first four volumes during the presidential campaign and that he now had completed the fifth volume. Although the president was quite complimentary in general, he wanted to push Rhodes on a crucial point: “As regards the actual act of secession, the actual opening of the Civil War, I think the right was exclusively with the Union people, and the wrong exclusively with the secessionists; and indeed I do not know of another struggle in history in which this sharp division between right and wrong can be made in quite so clear-cut a manner.” Roosevelt then offered his standard disclaimer of being “half southern,” proud of his uncles who had fought for the Confederacy, and respectful of Southern soldiers’ bravery and good intentions. “And yet,” he insisted, “I think that on every ground—that is, on the question of the Union, on the question of slavery, on the question of State rights—[the Confederacy] was wrong with a folly that amounted to madness, and with a perversity that amounted to wickedness.”Footnote 44 This strong language represented his core convictions.
Lincoln, moreover, was Roosevelt’s lodestar. The twenty-sixth president “identified closely with Lincoln and quoted him frequently,” says historian Peter J. Parish.Footnote 45 Roosevelt told Rhodes that his History of the United States “brings out the essential greatness of Lincoln ever more and more.” As president, Roosevelt asserted he was trying to deal with issues of race and equality “in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln.”Footnote 46 On March 3, 1905, the day before the inauguration of his second term, Roosevelt received a ring from John Hay. The ring contained a few strands of Lincoln’s hair. Hay wanted Roosevelt to wear the ring for his inaugural ceremonies, saying “you are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln.” Given his admiration of Lincoln, Roosevelt was delighted to do so. “I suppose you know,” Roosevelt wrote to the British historian George Otto Trevelyan a few days later, “Lincoln is my hero.”Footnote 47
The New Nationalism
In 1908, Roosevelt decided not to run for re-election since he believed doing so would amount to seeking a third term and would dishonor George Washington’s precedent. Instead, he supported his close friend and advisor William Howard Taft, who defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan. With Taft installed in the White House, Roosevelt departed for a year-long safari in British East Africa where he mainly stayed away from political engagements. Upon returning to the United States in the summer of 1910, Roosevelt found himself at odds with Taft. The ex-president was offended that Taft had fired his friend, U.S. Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot, and complained that Taft lacked the executive energy a president needed. Roosevelt also desperately missed the power and excitement that he had voluntarily given up. But ideology also factored too, as Roosevelt moved farther to the left in his political beliefs in these years. Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” would come to define the principles of the Progressive Party and his attempt to regain the White House in 1912.Footnote 48
The Colonel (as he was now called) announced his new political platform at a location central to the Civil War Era: Osawatomie, Kansas, the site where pro-slavery and antislavery forces (under John Brown) had clashed in 1856. In fact, Roosevelt’s occasion for being in Osawatomie on August 31, 1910, was to dedicate the battlefield where the skirmish occurred. His audience was to include GAR veterans. Roosevelt held an ambivalent view of Brown and his violent abolitionism. On the one hand he considered the raider of Harper’s Ferry a “bloody-minded fanatic” and a “fifth monarchy m[a]n,” whose “criminal folly” blighted his reputation. On the other hand, Roosevelt admitted that Brown had done “real good, partly by accident,” and had played the role of a martyr when the North needed one.Footnote 49 It was telling that Roosevelt could at least give partial praise to a radical like Brown while he showed only scorn for a figure like Davis.
In his “New Nationalism” speech to the GAR, Roosevelt played up the virtues of Brown and the GAR men themselves. The Northern veterans had done nothing less than “justif[y]” the American Revolution because they held the Union together in its darkest hour. Bleeding Kansas had been the “first act” of the Civil War drama, and Brown and his followers had made sure Kansas became free. Roosevelt understood the central contradiction of the early republic: that the Declaration of Independence had guaranteed freedom to all, but that the toleration of slavery “gave the lie by our acts” to the Declaration’s noble principles. In a plea for the contemporary generation to honor the legacy of the Civil War leaders, the ex-president even referenced Brown and Lincoln together—the highest praise he could give. Although he threw in some reconciliationist rhetoric, the burden of Roosevelt’s opening was to praise the abolitionists and Union men as he attempted to link their principles to his “New Nationalism.”Footnote 50
Beyond mere rhetoric, Roosevelt applied at least two lessons from the Civil War to his current campaign for Progressivism. First, he compared the unfair “special privilege” that twentieth-century corporations enjoyed with the “special privilege” that the Union Army had fought to destroy. He was explicit about this: “Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit.” The solution to this problem was to treat capital and labor equally. Yet, if he had to favor one at the expense of the other, he would choose labor, since (according to Lincoln), “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.”Footnote 51
Second, an efficient federal government would be necessary to ensure equality. Roosevelt reminded the GAR veterans of the necessity of strong and wise leadership in time of war. The GAR men “could not have won simply as a disorderly and disorganized mob.” Instead, “you needed generals; you needed careful administration of the most advanced type.” If that was true, Roosevelt reasoned, then government needed the proper tools to put down corruption and carry out reform.Footnote 52
Roosevelt expanded on these themes at the Lincoln Day Banquet in New York City on February 12, 1913. Despite losing the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt was trying harder than ever to link the principles of the Progressive Party with those of his hero. “Lincoln and Lincoln’s supporters were emphatically the progressives of their day,” Roosevelt averred, “and their violent opponents the Bourbon Democrats and Cotton Whigs of that time” could now be found in the “reactionar[y]” leadership of the Republican Party, which had denied him the presidential nomination the previous summer. Roosevelt quoted extracts from Lincoln’s 1854 speech in Peoria, Illinois (where he criticized the Kansas-Nebraska Act and tried to persuade Whigs to join the Republican Party), to illustrate “how fundamentally and basically alike the Progressive movement of to-day and the Republican movement of 1854 are.” Both stood for a “sane and tempered radicalism.”Footnote 53
Roosevelt found other parallels with Lincoln and the Progressive Party as well. As in the “New Nationalism” speech, he used Lincoln’s espousal of free labor to enlist the sixteenth president on the side of the people against the corporations of Roosevelt’s day. He also compared Lincoln’s criticism of the 1857 Dred Scot Decision with contemporary progressive schemes to initiate recalls of unpopular judicial decisions. Lincoln had been branded a radical for his desire to overturn Dred Scot, Roosevelt reminded his audience. The Progressive Party’s support for judicial recall was thoroughly in keeping with the Lincolnian spirit of conferring supreme authority on “the people” rather than on legislatures or courts.Footnote 54 In these speeches related to the Progressive campaign, Roosevelt did more than merely reference Lincoln as a generic figure worthy of patriotic appreciation. Rather, he invoked Lincoln and the mid-nineteenth century Republican Party to advocate for specific political causes in the present.
World War I
In the aftermath of the 1912 election, the colonel headed off to South America on a speaking tour that turned into an exploration of Brazil’s River of Doubt. Although Roosevelt and his crew successfully navigated and charted the river, the expedition almost killed him, and he returned to the United States in the spring of 1914 a weakened man. In August, Europe erupted in war, an event that provided the final opportunity for Roosevelt to exploit the memory of the Civil War in the service of contemporary American politics and armed conflict.
Roosevelt wrote about the Great War extensively in newspaper columns, magazine articles, and public speeches that he eventually compiled into four books: America and the World War (1915), Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916), The Foes of Our Own Household (1917), and The Great Adventure (1918). Fifty years after its conclusion, the Civil War was consistently present in all these works as Roosevelt tried to apply its lessons to the modern-day United States.
The first lesson Roosevelt drew in his advocacy of American involvement in World War I was that his heroes in the Civil War had always put “righteousness above peace.” They thus stood in stark contrast to present-day antiwar advocates, who wanted to keep the United States neutral at any price. As he had done in the debates over empire fifteen years before, Roosevelt compared those opposed to American intervention to the Copperheads of 1864. In that year, Roosevelt said, “there were in the North some hundreds of thousands of men who praised peace as the supreme end” and who opposed Lincoln’s re-election. Although leaders in France and Britain considered using diplomacy to negotiate an end to the Civil War, Lincoln and his followers opposed such interference, and “we can now see clearly that Abraham Lincoln and his supporters were right.” Roosevelt believed a Civil War that did not end in an unambiguous Union victory would have been disastrous: “The men who clamored for unrighteous peace fifty years ago this fall were the enemies of mankind.”Footnote 55
Roosevelt reiterated these ideas in a March 31, 1915, letter to the English statesman James Bryce. Complaining that his friend Bryce was supporting impossible peace plans, Roosevelt reminded him of New York minister Henry Ward Beecher’s pro-Union speeches in Britain in 1863:
I had very earnestly hoped that in the strongest and most unequivocal fashion you would have appealed to the American people now as Henry Ward Beecher appealed to the English people during the Civil War. This appeal could not be made save by fervently setting forth that the Allies are right; that Germany has been terribly wrong; and that America should not be neutral between right and wrong. Henry Ward Beecher did not take an interest in peace movements while the Civil War was on. The only Americans who then took an interest in peace movements were the Copperheads of the North; and to a man they voted against Abraham Lincoln.Footnote 56
While an immediate armistice might appeal to lovers of humanity, lasting peace could only be achieved by defeating evil.
Thus, Roosevelt conjured the memory of Civil War soldiers to spur Americans to sacrifice and suffering in a noble cause. He dedicated Fear God and Take Your Own Part “to the memory of Julia Ward Howe,” whose “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862) had encouraged generations of Americans to engage in righteous war.Footnote 57 As in 1899, Roosevelt appealed to the descendants of “Washington and Lincoln, of Jackson and Grant, of Lee and Farragut” to hold Congress accountable for seeking the easy and safe way out of world problems. He quoted an article in the Woman’s Home Companion written by the wife of a Civil War soldier who had gone blind due to his war wounds. Although this woman had seen war’s privations firsthand, she now encouraged preparedness, strong defense, and universal military service as the best preventative against future war. Roosevelt noted approvingly that “we celebrate Decoration Day and Independence Day on the 30th of May and the 4th of July. We believe in the men of the Revolution, in the men of the Civil War, and in the women who did ‘raise their sons to be soldiers’ for the right.”Footnote 58
Roosevelt also used the Civil War to demonize his political foes from 1914 to 1918. Chief among these was President Wilson, his Democratic antagonist in the 1912 election. On November 3, 1916, Roosevelt addressed supporters at Cooper Union in New York, the site of Lincoln’s 1860 speech that had laid out a historical case for the Founding Fathers’ opposition to slavery. On cue, Roosevelt announced that “the times have needed a Washington or a Lincoln,” but, he added acidly, “we have been granted only another Buchanan.” In defense of his harsh criticism of Wilson, Roosevelt declared that Wilson “has played a more evil part than Buchanan and Pierce ever played in the years that led up to and saw the opening of the Civil War.” In Roosevelt’s view, Presidents Pierce, Buchanan, and Wilson all refused to use bold action to meet the crisis of their day.Footnote 59
Roosevelt trotted out other figures from the 1860s as well in his wartime commentary. If Wilson was Buchanan, then Wisconsin antiwar senator Robert La Follette reminded Roosevelt of another Midwestern opponent of war, the Copperhead Vallandigham. Just as Vallandigham had injured the war effort and thus aided the Confederacy, so the contemporary German-American newspapers were quoting La Follette’s antiwar utterances with delight. Even John Wilkes Booth could serve as an apt illustration of misplaced sincerity: “Wilkes Booth was an honest man; when he assassinated Lincoln he was doubtless sincere in the belief that he was doing right; and great courage was needed to perform the evil feat. Yet surely Wilkes Booth did a worse deed than the most corrupt politician or business man of his time.” Pacifists might be honest in their beliefs, but that did not stop them from working deadly mischief in the country, Roosevelt concluded.Footnote 60
Even though the vast majority of Americans had no literal memory of the Civil War during the World War I era, Roosevelt continued to see the Union as unambiguously moral and to invoke the war in his own political crusades. In context, his use of the Civil War mirrored other pro-war advocates. William Jewett Tucker, a former minister and retired president of Dartmouth College, observed that Civil War analogies were prevailing in debates about the Great War. He thought “the re-appearance of Mr. Lincoln in connection with the issues and events of the present war” was “a singular intellectual and moral phenomenon.” But after all, Tucker concluded, there was a great “similarity between the fundamental issues at stake in the present war, and those of the Civil War.”Footnote 61
Roosevelt’s friend Lyman Abbott, the editor of the liberal Protestant weekly Outlook, gladly outlined those similarities. Like Roosevelt, Abbott also thought Wilson’s indecisiveness after the Lusitania’s destruction resembled James Buchanan’s weakness in the late 1850s. A retired clergyman, Abbott tried to persuade his perhaps-skeptical readers that war very often was permissible. Neither Lincoln, Grant, nor Beecher, he claimed, ever showed “any expression of hatred for the South,” implying that the Civil War was a “[war] of love.” Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Abbott argued in another editorial, was just as appropriate for any freedom-loving nation in 1917 as it had been for the Union in 1862.Footnote 62
Although Northerners like Roosevelt, Tucker, and Abbott continued mostly to remember the conflict on Unionist terms, Southerners could enlist the Civil War for martial purposes as well in 1917. Woodrow Wilson had been raised in the South and his father had served as a Confederate chaplain. But addressing a gathering of Confederate veterans in Washington, D.C., in June 1917, Wilson delicately linked the Civil War and Great War together as conflicts fought for liberty. The United States was now “a great united, indivisible, indestructible instrument” for God to use to advance freedom. The nation’s internationalist duties today were “why this great nation was kept united” a half century before, Wilson told the veterans.Footnote 63
Pacifists seemed to avoid Civil War analogies. Although some might have used the horrors of that conflict to caution against further bloodshed, there is little evidence they did so.Footnote 64 At one level, Roosevelt’s ongoing use of the Civil War revealed his enthusiasm for American militarism in general. But at another, it revealed that at the time of warm, reconciliatory blue-gray reunions, the war’s memory could still be used for partisan purposes.
Conclusion
Periodizations are necessary and unavoidable; they help us divide historical time into eras with commonalities. Sometimes, however, they conceal as much as they reveal. In this case, historians outside the subfield of Civil War memory need to reckon more with the lasting consequences of the conflict, consequences that stretched into the early twentieth century. A figure like Theodore Roosevelt, whose entire life was spent thinking about the Civil War, illustrates the point well.
Yet Roosevelt is also interesting because he complicates the “reconciliationist” narrative of Civil War memory. For most of his private and public life, Roosevelt was unafraid to maintain a Unionist interpretation of the conflict where the North was right and the South wrong. As recently as 2016, Nina Silber lamented that “scholarship addressing the progress, or not, of reconciliation among nonveterans remains surprisingly undeveloped.”Footnote 65 This article helps answer Silber’s call by expanding the number of voices included in our understanding of Civil War memory. There was hardly a more popular or influential figure than Roosevelt by the early twentieth century.
Even more significantly, scholars should pay more attention to how political figures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used the war’s memory in their contexts to support or oppose specific partisan causes. Quite a few studies of Civil War memory end in 1900 or in the mid-1910s, and tend to give short shrift to the way political figures like Roosevelt still used the conflict’s memory to advocate for specific causes like the New Nationalism and World War I.Footnote 66 The historiography might thus shift away from impossible-to-resolve debates about the prevalence of Reconciliationism or Unionism and instead pay greater attention to the ways in which contested Civil War memories still shaped policy debates in the era of the automobile and airplane. Indeed, there is already a move in the literature to think about 1860–1920 as a distinct period marked by continuity as well as change over time.Footnote 67 As Confederate statues are toppled and racial justice issues are emerging at the forefront of national debates in the early twenty-first century, the time is ripe to reconsider the way Civil War memory has always been deployed for specific political ends.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Andrew Mach, as well as the journal’s two anonymous readers for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of this article.
