Matthew E. Stanley. Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War.

Abstract

Civil War memory continues to be a burgeoning field in United States history, and in Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans and the Meaning of the Civil War, Matthew E. Stanley approaches this topic from an original perspective. Spanning the Reconstruction era through the first decades of the twentieth century, the book traces the ways in which leaders of the U.S. labor movement recruited Civil War veterans by drawing on the language and imagery of enslavement, hoping to turn workers and farmers into warriors against industrial capitalism. Synthesizing an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, this monograph offers a compendium of evidence that takes readers through the National Labor Union, the Colored National Labor Union, the Readjusters, Greenbackers, the Knights of Labor, the Farmers’ Alliance, various socialist parties, the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and more. Throughout, Stanley proves the resilience of “antislavery vernacular” (a phrase that appears regularly across chapters), a rhetoric that originated with discontented antebellum workers in the North. White men and Black men are the central actors, and while Stanley pays fairly consistent attention to the presence of white women, they fall away toward the end, when he draws conclusions about “workingmen” (226). The place of Civil War memory in Black women’s own labor activism awaits further scholarship.