A guest blogger at Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory, Michael Schaffner has written a brilliant post that examines the evidence for the Angel of Marye's Heights legend, one of the most celebrated examples of charity to fallen foes in American history. Go there now and read it.
The national need for reconciliation and to make sense of all the loss and slaughter of the American Civil War helped to propagate stories like that of Sgt. Kirkland. Whether or not it actually happened that way is less important than what the story represents (and to whom). The idea the the better angels of our nature were present on our internecine battlefields helped "to bind up the nation's wounds" and perhaps as well to redeem the humanity of former combatants.
It has become a pervasive theme in the memory of this great national trauma as a war of brother against brother. We still need it to be true, even now as we enter the sesquicentennial of that war, which is why revealing Kirkland as history records him, rather than as a core myth and symbol of "sublime compassion", is likely to provoke strong reactions.
There are many similar anecdotes from this conflict in addition to the Kirkland story, particularly those involving the fraternity of Masons. A quick internet search reveals numerous stories from the Civil War when the obligation to come to the aid of a brother Mason in distress apparently trumped even opposing sides on the battlefield.
This theme is very much part of the folklore of the Civil War, and its memory has meaning to more than modern Masons. It is possible that masons in the Civil War in mid 19th century America did believe and behave this way; that even if they were at war with each other there was peace in their lodges. This is certainly how they wished to remember themselves in the decades that followed.
Freemasonry, however, was not universally accepted in America, nor across all regions of the divided country. It may also be that postwar professions of christian charity and humanity toward captured or fallen foes helped reintegrate the secret society of Masons into the mainstream of reconciliation.
Are such claims of the ties among warring Masons limited to the U.S. Civil War? During the American Revolution, the association of many of the principle founders and members of the Society of the Cincinnati with freemasonry is well known (and well hyped). There were numerous military lodges among royalist as well as patriot battalions, and at least in the case of the British 17th Regiment of foot, the bonds of Freemasonry prompted a patriot general to return their captured Masonic regalia.
But did patriotic Masons in the American Revolution give aid and comfort to wounded or captured brother loyalists, or British masons to their American brethren who fell into their hands? And if so, can this be distinguished from the conventions of the treatment to which gentlemen and officers were entitled, especially in a war in which the status of rebel combatants was far from settled and the ties with the mother country had loosened? There may be such examples, but they will take some serious scholarship to unearth, and they are not part of our founding myth. They were not, in fact, needed as part of a process of reintegration of loyalists into the new republic, as perhaps they were as part of the process of reconciliation following the Civil War.