In the spring of 1883, Erastus G. Bartlett, a veteran of the 12th West Virginia Infantry and assistant inspector general for the Grand Army of the Republic’s (GAR) Department of West Virginia, submitted his annual report to John W. Burst, the GAR’s inspector general. Bartlett, a resident of Martinsburg, W.V., saw not only steady growth throughout the department, but also a significant decline in the animus among former Confederates toward the establishment of GAR posts throughout the state and in neighboring Virginia. “New Posts are springing up in different parts of the Department, and old Posts, many of them, are increasing in numbers… The comrades of this Department,” Bartlett explained, “like those of the Department of Virginia, have about outlived the odium placed upon them by the FFV [First Families of Virginia] who were in or sympathized with those who fought for the ‘lost cause’ and consider the GAR a good order,” Bartlett explained to Burst.
While Bartlett viewed some positive developments in former Confederates’ attitudes toward the GAR by 1883, that was not so following the organization’s establishment in 1866. Those who once supported the Confederacy looked askance at the GAR and thought it organized solely “for political purposes.”
Distrustful that the GAR’s principles of charity, fraternity, and loyalty served as a cover for, as historian Stuart McConnell wrote, “a Radical front group,” the life of most GAR posts in the South established in the late 1860s-early 1870s was short-lived. For example, the GAR claimed 35 members in Tennessee in 1871. Six years later, it reported zero. Virginia, the former Confederate state with the largest GAR membership, boasted 387 members in 1871. That number declined precipitously seven years later to 184. The GAR’s decline in the South, however, proved temporary. By the early 1880s membership