Page 232 - Arkansas Confederate Women

Origin of United Confederate Veterans 205

ORIGIN OF UNITED CONFEDERATE VETERANS.

By J. M. Lucey.

The originator of the idea which culminated in the organ-
ization of the United Confederate Veterans is Capt: J. F. Shipp,
Commander of the 1ST. B. Forrest Camp, U. C. V., of Chatta-
nooga, Tenn., who was quartermaster general on the staff of
General J. B. Gordon, and who now occupies a similar position
on the Staff of General Stephen D. Lee. One of his prime ob-
jects in advocating and promoting the organization of the United
Confederate Veterans was in that way to promote the purchase
of the Chickamauga battlefield by the United States government.
The movement was started January, 1889. The last session of
the Georgia legislature had granted a charter to thirty or forty
gentlemen who had been prominent officers in the Confederate
armies in the Civil War, many of them being at the time mem-
bers of the upper and lower houses of the national Congress.
The purpose of the Association was to have Congress appropriate
a sum of money sufficient to purchase the ground on which the
battle of Chickamauga was fought and to make it a grand park.
Many influential Northern men who served in the federal army
became interested, as it was intended, by means of Northern and
Southern monuments and other marks, to locate the several po-
sitions of the armies, so that the men of the Union and Con-
federate forces might meet often in fraternal reunions, and by

relating their experiences "bridge over the bloody chasm.*' This
dream of Capt. Shipp has been more than realized, as there

is now a great national military park not only at Chickamauga

but also at Shiloh and Vicksburg, and the annual gatherings
of Union and Confederate soldiers have been attended with a
feeling so fraternal that so far as they are concerned the war is

over.

Capt. Shipp purposely selected New Orleans as the place

in which to inaugurate the movement for the organization of

the United Confederate Veterans, which with the Grand Army

of the Eepublic was to have a general supervision over the parks,
recognizing that city as the geographical centre of Confederate