“The Veterans of ’62; The Boys of ’98:” Connecting Two 19th-Century Wars

Hunting through newspapers always reveals some unique primary sources, offering a look into the past. Recently, I was reminded not only that the past was not so far away, but that very different events in the past might not have been too far removed from each other. The article that sent me down that thought was a 1905 poem comparing veterans of the Civil War to another conflict.

Published for Memorial Day in the New Jersey Morris County Chronicle, James Arthur Edgerton’s poem “The Veterans of ’62; The Boys of ‘98” draws a clear line between soldiers of the Civil War and those of the Spanish American War. Memorial Day began as “Dedication Day” shortly after the Civil War. Though it began explicitly as a day to honor Union soldiers fallen in the Civil War, it came to represent American military conflicts beyond the Civil War. This poem is thus an interesting mark of the transition to including other soldiers in the holiday and tying them to the legacy of the Civil War.

Writing seven years after the close of the Spanish American War, Edgerton described placing wreaths on the graves “of both the old and new,” before he continued to describe the two generations of soldiers:

Each offered up his little all

That others might be free.

Forgetting self, he heard the call

To serve humanity,

A prouder title none can claim

Since this old world began

The most beloved sons of fame

Are those who die for Man.

One faced a fratricidal war

To lift a bondsman’s yoke;

The other on a foreign shore

A tyrant’s shackles broke.

One battled that his native land

Might still united be;

One ‘gainst oppression made his stand.

Both fought for liberty.

Edgerton then closed the poem with praise of both generations for their sacrifices at home and abroad. A prolific author in his time but not much remembered, much of his work focused on the common man. In 1910 he published “Labor’s Call: a Lyric for Labor Day,” and his 1903 “The Man Behind the Pick” has been republished in anthologies of working-class literature.[1] While his 1901 “A Song for Peace” and “When the Cannon’s Roar Shall be Heard No More” may have made him seem a pacifist, he clearly made an exception for what he saw as just and necessary wars: the Civil War and the Spanish American War.

While modern scholarship on American colonialism and the aftermath of the war in Cuba and the Philippines complicates the memory of the Spanish American War, contemporary Americans like Edgerton saw it as a humanitarian cause to intervene against Spain. He recorded it in this poem as a war equal in value to the Civil War’s dual moral causes of union and emancipation and knit together the soldiers of two conflicts a mere thirty years apart. Sometimes when we look back upon the past we can see it as distant and separate from other events; we must endeavor to remember that people who lived during one event lived through others as well and would draw connections between them.

[1] Edgerton was born in Plantsville, Ohio in 1869. He published his first collection of poems by age 20, and in addition to writing served as a progressive politician in Nebraska. See The Aspen Tribune, Colorado, June 26, 1898.