American fraternal organization of Civil War veterans (1866–1956)
This article is about the U.S. veterans organization. For other uses, see Grand Army of the Republic (disambiguation).
Grand Army of the Republic
Abbreviation
GAR
Successor
Woman's Relief Corps and Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War
Formation
April 6, 1866 (1866-04-06)
Founder
Benjamin F. Stephenson
Dissolved
August 2, 1956 (1956-08-02)
Type
Veterans' organization
Purpose
Social, literary, historical, benevolent
The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) was a fraternal organization composed of veterans of the Union Army (United States Army), Union Navy (U.S. Navy), and the Marines who served in the American Civil War. It was founded in 1866 in Decatur, Illinois, and grew to include hundreds of "posts" (local community units) across the North and West. It was dissolved in 1956 at the death of its last member, Albert Woolson.
According to Stuart McConnell:
The Grand Army of the Republic, the largest of all Union Army veterans' organizations, was the most powerful single-issue political lobby of the late nineteenth century, securing massive pensions for veterans and helping to elect five postwar presidents from its own membership. To its members, it was also a secret fraternal order, a source of local charity, a provider of entertainment in small municipalities, and a patriotic organization.[1]
Linking men through their experience of the war, the GAR became among the first organized advocacy groups in American politics, supporting voting rights for black veterans, promoting patriotic education, helping to make Memorial Day a national holiday, lobbying Congress to establish regular veterans' pensions, and supporting Republican political candidates. Its peak membership, at 410,000, was in 1890, a high point of various Civil War commemorative and monument dedication ceremonies.
^Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
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