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When I read this question I was a little confused because I didn’t know if it was asking what the culture of the Union Army (the GAR) or the United States, which is what the “Union” was at the time.The culture of the nation was diverse and grandiose. At the time of the Civil War the entire world was at the beginning of the most momentous sociological and technological changes in history. The USA was in the middle of all of this while fighting the Civil War. One of the biggest things going on during the war that most people don’t realize is that while Lincoln was fighting the Civil War he was also shepherding the largest construction project in the world, the construction of the Trans-Continental Railroad from Chicago to San Francisco. When the project started, San Francisco was a tiny town the locals called “Yerba Buena” until gold was discovered at Sutter’s sawmill in 1848 and the course of the city was changed. Within a few year, the city had swelled to over 500,000, with immigrants from everywhere seeking gold, and the harbor was filled with ships abandoned by their crews who deserted to look for gold. The idea of the railroad magnified the impact of growth and importance of the city, and the US planted the American flag to claim California for America in 1846 after it declared independence from Mexico. Nitroglycerin, for example, had only been recently invented in Italy by an Italian scientist, Antonio Scorbrero, and it changed the world. It was first used in America in the construction of the Hoosac Tunnel in western Massachusetts and its efficacy was so dramatic that it was immediately brought to San Francisco where a clumsy worker dropped the box and blew up the entire harbor. Nevertheless, there could have been no railroad without it.In the East, Boston, New York and Philadelphia were competing for primacy in various areas; no one could compete with NYC which was blessed by a deep harbor and the Erie Canal. Steam power was just coming up to speed and again, the railroad was a major driver of culture, so much so that by the Civil War the roads were being neglected in favor of rail travel. The transcontinental railroad was controlled and even somewhat financed by the Ames family of Boston, who were selling metal shovels so quickly that by the end of the Civil War, 8 out of every 10 shovels sold in the entire world was an Ames shovel. In Boston the biggest engineering project in the world was being undertaken, the filling in of the Back Bay to make mansions for the rich who were moving out because of the influx of Irish immigrants who were transforming the city. Many ordnance were passed to discriminate against the hated Irish such as laws against the building of Catholic churches in the entire Back Bay and rules against Irish taking jobs in civil service; the first Irishman on the Boston Police had been hired and fired three times because he was Irish.Meanwhile, in Boston, the anti-slavery groups established their headquarters. Boston was considered progressive; the first Black church in America, on Joy Street, was instituted (still there); the first integrated church in America (the Baptist Temple on Tremont Street) was implemented (still there); William Lloyd Garrison, the most outspoken anti-slavery publisher in America said his famous words decrying slavery, “I will not equivocate. I will will not excuse. I will not back down a single inch. And I will be heard.”. Moses Kimball, the richest Black man in America, who made a fortune on publishing was a major force. Boston was then, as now, the technological center of the United States with all kinds of schools such as Harvard, and soon to be MIT (Harvard tried to take over MIT at one point). Edison, Bell, Morse, and other inventors all had coffee at a coffee shop/bookstore that sill exists and discuss the state of technology and their ideas. It was also the forefront of the woman’s movement, with the first school for women, Simmons, which became a college and the first industry for women made by the department store magnate, Simmons who gave women independence by employing them as seamstresses at a time when women weren’t allowed to work outside the house.Meanwhile, all over the world there was a major religious shift, also felt in the US. As “science” rose up, religion was challenged as never before. Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” had rocked the world. There was so much change taking place that the existence of God began to be doubted. An Anglican minister’s wife was said to have said “Let us pray [Darwin’s theory] is not true but if it is, that it not become widely known.” In addition, the Catholic Church, the most powerful religious organization in the world, held the First Vatican Council, where it was determined for the first time that abortion was wrong; previously, the Church turned a blind eye to abortion before the viability of the fetus, it was a minor sin. Now the catechism decreed that all abortion was wrong. It took over 50 years for this philosophy to become cemented; the Church was still advertising abortifacients in 1900. At the same time, major changes in medicine were occuring; the development of ether and chloroform; the Church tried to banish painkillers for women, as the pain was supposed to be the result of “original sin” but later, when Queen Victoria took chloroform for her birthing of children, painkillers were accepted despite the disapproval of the Church; this was a seismic shift at the time, because people were openly challenging the supremacy of the Church. But the result of this and the backlash against Darwin was a major religious revival throughout the US. Philps Brooks, was a famous preacher and firebrand who went around the country preaching, probably the “Billy Graham” of his day. He was the man who penned the words “Of the people, by the people, for the people,” that Lincoln later used in his “Gettysburg Address”; the two were friends. People traveled great distances to take part in great religious festivals.In Philadelphia the city was exploding with industry. Philadelphia was possibly the most civically advanced area of the US, and Baltimore and Philadelphia worked hard to implement great civic works such as “street paving” and commuter trolleys and iron works. By the time of the Civil War 80 percent of all the steel made in the US was consumed for rails, and steel came from Pennsylvania. In addition, a large supply of soft coal was found, which altered the entire fabric of the nation because it was good for heat - and trains. At the time, there was a great outcry from the nation because the wood-burning trains were consuming all the forests in America and the country was ranging further and further afield for wood, to Canada and Maine. Coal changed this equation, though it was much dirtier than wood. In New York, for example, there were “firewood wars” every winter where the cold and desperate rioted over firewood prices and availability. Ships and barges from Maine and the South would anchor outside the city and demand exorbitant prices for their firewood cargoes; the street sellers would short the cord and raise the price. People broke up furniture and stair banisters and newel posts when they were cold and the government had to step in try to control the price, quality and standardization of a cord of wood. There were even “firewood inspectors” who measured and weighed cords and challenged prices; these were largely ineffective.There were major social changes going on, with women demanding more independence; more racial suspicion with the Whites looking down on the free Blacks; the Blacks looking down on the new-comer Irish immigrants who would take the awful jobs that were fit only for Blacks; Chinese immigrants escaping the horror of building the transcontinental railroad came to New York and started the only businesses they were allowed, the backbreaking laundry business. They were harassed but laundry was such an awful chore that they were tolerated; in those days, most people only did laundry twice a year, called the “Great Wash”. Chinese launderers used gasoline as the first dry cleaning agent and laundromats often exploded.Upstate New York was the destination for tens of thousands of immigrants who sought work, and New York State was becoming the world capital for brick making. Haverstraw, a town no one remembers now, was making bricks by the million and shipping them to New York to feed the insatiable demand for construction; over 40 million bricks would eventually be sold into New York alone and brick masons were among the highest paid blue collar workers in the city and never out of work. In the winter, the brick makers cut ice on the Hudson River and sold it to New York; in the winter there were firewood riots but in the summer there were ice riots. The New York Times quipped that the Ice King made sure ice was equally distributed: “The rich get theirs in the summer and the poor get theirs in the winter.” The ice industry, started by Fredric Tudor in Boston, became one of America’s biggest businesses employing over 100,000 people and storing millions of tons of ice every winter for the huge markets of NYC, Boston and Philadelphia and exporting it as far away as India. Speaking of India, the entire shipping industry was changing with the invention of the Clipper Ship by Wm McKay in Boston; these ships were incredibly fast and used a much smaller crew; they opened up China to America and the influence of the Chinese culture, art, ceramics and tapestries had a major impact on American culture at the time, especially among the wealthy. The Nichols House in Boston is a museum on Beacon Hill at one of the most prestigious locations. It was the home of a rich merchant and today still shows the impact of Chinese culture because it is adorned with all manner of Chinese art, vases, and so forth, as it was then.Meanwhile, the recent invention of the “telegraph” was sweeping the nation and causing a cultural shift which had never been seen before - rapid national news overnight. The newspapers, which had waited as long as three months to print a story, were now printing on events in almost-real time and people were unsettled. Rapid information was being thrown at them constantly and it was like a punch, over and over and people were having a difficult time knowing what to do with the information. The smart ones became incredibly rich financiers later, like Cornelius Vanderbilt, a self-made billionaire steam boat captain who, for a time, owned every railroad in America and JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, perhaps the richest man in history, who at his height had the equivalent of almost a trillion dollars today, and Andrew Carnegie and Jay Gould who manipulated the financial system for their benefit. Without a central bank the US went through massive boom and bust business cycles with the government at the point of collapse many, many times. One of the ways the US financed the Civil War was through tobacco taxes; the government knew even then that tobacco was addictive and unhealthy but they took advantage of that fact by taxing it heavily.Education was changing as well. America was beginning to demand standardized education of students across the land; until about the Civil War, education was a haphazard, local affair; students rarely went beyond the sixth grade, learning just enough to run the farm or store. But then, school districts emerged with Superintendents and trained instructors and a “curriculum”. Eventually this would grow into a major industry but it was rudimentary at the time and there was often a backlash against educational authority in practice, most people wanted their children to go to school and even beyond, but colleges were the purview of the rich. America had so much opportunity to seize that education was a way for average people, people like Goodyear, the inventor of vulcanized rubber, but still just a Blacksmith, could make good.In Connecticut, Samuel Colt was changing the world through this construction of the Colt Repeating Revolver. Colt was on the verge of bankruptcy before the Civil War but his pistol had been so effective in the Mexican Wars that a group of Army Officers begged the government to purchase them in huge numbers for the Army. The result was a revolution in precision machining that propelled Connecticut to the richest state in America, a position it still holds today, and a revolution in the development of firearms.At the same time, the death toll of American soldiers in the Civil War was having a massive negative effect on morale; it even changed the entire death system of America to what we use today: embalming and viewing the body in a funeral home. Up til the Civil War the dead were viewed on a couch in the living room for a few hours before they were quickly buried; now, bodies of soldiers were pickled or preserved and put on trains and sent north to their families for viewing in “funeral homes” near the train station before they were buried. Embalming and funeral services skyrocketed as a business.One thing that cannot be culturally overlooked at the time was the impact of the Cartmen all over the country, but primarily in NYC. The Cartmen had been incorporated when the city was New Amsterdam and they were considered the lowest of the low, but they were also considered critical to the success of any city. These were the men who owned a horse and cart and delivered goods from the docks all over the cities. They were spit on and treated like dirt but the city couldn’t exist without then - and as a perk they enjoyed a power that many people didn’t have. They had a vote in the legislature and so wielded enormous power. In many cities, moving day was scheduled by law as on May 1, with a “little moving day” scheduled in October after Michelmas, a religious holiday. At any given time, on May 1, 1/3 of almost every city was moving from one apartment to another and everyone had the need of a Cartman. They worked seven days a week for very little money and were strictly regulated. Eventually, they became the Teamster’s Union in 1901, whose logo still shows a horse. The Cartmen contributed to the change of culture all over the country and as the war took men and material and grew rapidly, labor demanded more money and management took a dim view of that, going as far as killing strikers and hiring replacements. Carnegie was among the worst of this lot, indiscriminately firing and killing workers who sought greater wages, better working conditions and fewer working hours.America was still largely an agricultural nation with most people working on farms or in the farming industry. In NYC, the biggest city in America at the time of the Civil War, with over 1 million people, the number one profession on the census was still “Agricultural” such as farmer, gardener or in the farming support industry; there were farms in NYC, the last one finally gave up in 1940, 80 years after the war. But the nation was deep into farming because it needed food and farming was very inefficient so many people had to work in it to supply a growing nation. People grew their own food but in cities that was hardly possible so trains and boats and wagons all wended their way to the cities to sell their produce. The first cattle drive in America was from Texas to New York City; eventually Armour would become the leading cattle slaughterhouse in the world, centered in Chicago. Cattle were driven through the streets of New York by cowboys up until the 1920s, stopping traffic and making a mess and causing damage.In sum, the culture of the US at the time of the Civil War was in upheaval on many fronts from rapid technological change, political corruption, religious doubts and change; women’s sufferage; ethnic and racial suspicion and animosity, immigration and the influx of new education and information. The fifty years between 1850 and 1900 were the most dramatic and in-flux times in the history of mankind and the difference in culture at 1850 and 1900 were revolutionary. Before 1850 most people lived a rural lifestyle and thought that way; by 1900 the country had changed into a manufacturing and military powerhouse with all that meant. There was no turning back.This post is already too long to discuss the culture of the Union Army; perhaps in another post.