Union Club members take especial pride in their club’s early history, because it is bound up, most honorably, with the history of the United States.
In late 1862 and early 1863, developments in the Civil War were not favoring the preservation of the Union. In Boston, sympathizers with the secessionist states, including some leading men, so-called “Copperheads,” would have been content to see off those states. But there were other leading men who were stalwart in support of the Union, and some of them felt that they should have a club of their own specifically to support the United States. After some preliminary discussions and planning, the Union Club of Boston formally came into existence on April 8, 1863, at a meeting to which the club’s first president, Edward Everett, delivered an oration (the manuscript of which is still in the club’s possession). This can be read as an early draft of the speech that he gave seven months later at Gettysburg, before President Lincoln’s far better known address.
Unlike some Union Clubs and Union League Clubs that were founded around the same time in other cities (and the name “Union” for a club does not necessarily reference the Civil War), the Union Club of Boston was strictly non-partisan, although, naturally, many of its founding members were Republicans. The only explicit qualification for membership was that one give “unqualified loyalty to the Constitution and Union of the United States and …of the Federal government in efforts for the suppression of the Rebellion.” Article 3 of the club’s original constitution stipulated that “the Club shall never be called upon nor permitted to act, in its official capacity as a Club, upon any political question or subject.” This was intended to welcome pro-Union Democrats. Although at this point in the Civil War, being for the Union did not necessarily imply being an abolitionist, the club did immediately gain a reputation as a hotbed of abolitionism.
Six months after its founding, the club moved into its present clubhouse, and by the end of its first year, it had 503 members, some of them in uniform and fighting for the Union cause.
Several of the club’s rooms are now named for members who distinguished themselves as officers in the Union army. Among those founding and early members were some of the most distinguished Bostonians in science, letters, business, law, and government.
Besides Everett (who may have had the greatest résumé in American history: first American with a Ph.D., professor of Greek at Harvard, president of Harvard, congressman, ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, governor of Massachusetts, U.S. senator from Massachusetts, U.S. secretary of state, and vice presidential candidate—of the Constitutional Union Party), famous members in the club’s first half-century included Louis Agassiz, Louis D. Brandeis, General Benjamin Butler, Richard Henry Dana Jr., General Charles Devens Jr., Ralph Waldo Emerson, Asa Gray, Edward Everett Hale, Henry Lee Higginson, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Cabot Lodge, Francis Parkman, William Barton Rogers (founding president of MIT), Charles Sumner, and Amos Tuck. Calvin Coolidge was a member, too.
With the end of the war, the Union Club adopted a more traditional role, so that twenty years later, a guidebook to Boston could say that “it has become a purely social club” featuring “excellent table d’hôte dinners.” It has continued to be a social club into the twenty-first century, and, consonant with its founding principles, it remains non-partisan and welcoming to all who would share its good fellowship. And, in a minor way, it made a historical mark again later in the twentieth century, when it became the first of Boston’s traditional men’s clubs to admit women to full membership; the decision to do so was voluntary and uncontentious.