“Weakness and Lack of Patriotism:” Resolutions of the Granville Moody Post, G.A.R.

Questions over how American society remembers the Civil War are not unique to the 21st century, having been around since the war ended and the decades immediately following it. 

That issue is not usually a major emphasis of my writing, but one example involving men from Campbell County appeared in the early 1900s, not quite 50 years after the war had started, and recently came to my attention. It is among the most unexpected local stories I have uncovered. 

The Granville Moody Post of the Grand Army of the Republic was based in Bellevue, Campbell County. During my research, I’ve seen many mentions of this post, including names of group members and mentions of post meetings and officer elections, all in various local newspapers I have perused. I must say that coming across this in the National Tribune, of Washington D.C., was certainly out of left field.

To me, it is intriguing that this otherwise quiet group of veterans made such strong and public resolutions on this situation and that a newspaper in the nation’s capital published these concerns. The men of this post certainly left no doubt of their feelings on the proposed homage to their wartime enemies. 

Two accounts, basically the same information, but with different wording, appeared in the Tribune.

The first, on November 25, 1909, consisted of these few lines.

Then, a few months later, on March 17, 1910, it printed another version.

One surprise was in finding this in a paper from out of the area instead of one of the local journals, but after another search, I did find this mentioned in the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune on November 9, 1909. Perhaps my research had not been good enough at first, but I’ll take a lead to a good story anywhere I find it.

A major part of this complaint concerned the statue of Robert E. Lee shown below. The state of Virginia had provided it for the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol in 1909, the same year that the G.A.R. men expressed their disapproval. It was removed from the Capitol on December 21, 2020, more than a century after the Moody Post had made its feelings known. 

The Robert E. Lee statue that stood in the US Capitol, photo courtesy of Wikipedia. 

It may seem surprising that a group in Kentucky, which had supplied thousands of men to the Confederate army and which a cliché claims “joined the Confederacy after the war” would issue such a statement against Confederate iconography, but perhaps this was a reaction to such feelings. True Union men like these did live throughout the state despite its reputation, and it would not be hard to believe that these men were frustrated at (or embarrassed by) the state’s split loyalties and reputation. Perhaps the plans to give national honors to Confederate leaders was the proverbial "straw that broke the camel’s back” that convinced these men to express their feelings. Were they pushing back against the “Confederate Kentucky” narrative or did they look at this as a purely national issue of loyalty? Did they believe the concept of reconciliation was going too far? It is too bad none of their meeting minutes or other comments are known to exist.

Whatever the exact motivation the men of the Moody Post held, they did issue this statement, and though it had no immediate effect as the Confederate displays continued to exist long into the future, the sentiments they expressed became far more widespread in the second decade of the 21st century, eventually leading to the removal of the Lee statue and other Confederate symbols from public places. These Union veterans did not live to see it, but their wish eventually came true as part of a new fight of public memory 150 years after the fighting on the battlefields had ended.