UC Santa Cruz

Following the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the U.S. War Department discharged an unprecedented 1.6 million personnel. While scholarship on soldiers’ lives is vast and varied, the historiography on soldiers’ lives as veterans is much less developed. Over the past thirty years, a subfield of scholarship on Civil War veterans has emerged. This dissertation, the first modern history of Union veterans in California, contributes to that scholarship by investigating how the state’s Union veterans marshaled their service to form fraternal organizations, memorialize the dead, lobby for pensions, and play prominent roles in popular and political culture. This dissertation contributes to the ongoing Western turn in Civil War-era scholarship by investigating the powerful, if protean, ideology of unionism in Reconstruction-era California. Although California has until recently been treated as marginal to the central problems of Reconstruction, uncovering how the state’s Union veterans adapted unionism to fashion communities and reshaped state politics enriches our understanding of the national struggles of the Civil War’s legacies. This research revealed that Union veterans in California employed unionism as the basis of their fellowship to promote nationalism, attack (and defend) Chinese immigration, justify imperialism, memorialize the war in public spaces, and provide medical and financial support to veterans and their dependents.