Reviewed by: War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion by Thomas R. Flagel Albert Dorsey Jr. War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion. By Thomas R. Flagel. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 170. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-60635-371-4.) Historian Thomas R. Flagel’s archival research for War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion began with his preparation for a lecture he gave at the sesquicentennial commemoration at the hallowed Gettysburg National Military Park. His cogent argument is that when Civil War veterans, both Union and Confederate, returned to the places of “war memory, they almost invariably interpreted the site in personal rather than sectional or national terms” (p. xi). His work here is a departure from conventional scholarship, which argues that the Grand Reunion, the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, was motivated by national reconciliation of northern and southern sectionalism. Flagel places front and center the experiences of four veterans (Heman Allen of Vermont; William Fickas, a Union artillery gunner; Virginian Moses Waldron, a survivor of Pickett’s Charge; and North Carolinian H. H. Hodges, who joined the Confederate army after his regiment fought at Gettysburg) to demonstrate how the vast majority of participants came back to deal with their own physical and emotional trauma. There were over 55,000 official attendees at the reunion; thousands more came unofficially. Flagel smartly demonstrates that there were two reunions—one for the politicians and their nationalistic agendas and one for the veterans. Dignitaries made grandiose speeches praising martyrdom, death, sacrifice, and salvation for country. Gettysburg, Flagel suggests, was America’s Golgotha. The furtive juxtaposition of Christ’s sacrifice for the salvation of humankind against the gore and death of men, northern and southern alike, for the greater good and global domination of the American nation-state was a constant theme throughout the weeklong commemoration. While the average lifespan for a white man in the early twentieth century was just over fifty years, the average age of the Civil War veterans in attendance was seventy-two. The author shows that most veterans at the reunion were more concerned not with the burden of reconciliation but with living long enough to persevere through the ceremony. Aged and mostly feeble, many of those men had sustained battlefield injuries, including missing limbs. Many suffered emotional damage. Planning the historic event took years, and debate was sometimes contentious. Should former Confederates be allowed wear their uniforms or bear [End Page 199] the Confederate flag? Should the federal government pay their fare to and from the event? For the chosen few, state and local governments and veteran’s organizations, especially the Grand Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans, granted train fare and small stipends, respectively. There were few African American veterans at the Grand Reunion. Many former Confederates wore their uniforms and proudly flew their battle flags. Comparatively, few Yankees wore theirs. Many contemporary military officers and politicians were slated to attend, including former president William Howard Taft and President Woodrow Wilson, who gave a short and uninspiring speech on July 3 but then immediately left. The politicians and high-ranking military officers had ulterior motivations. Under the Great Tent, they gave impassioned speeches about sacrifice because they were concerned with nation-state building, writes the author. As they did, most of the veterans were traversing the old battleground, reliving their summer of 1863 experiences; “it was more a litany of small search parties” (p. 50). They looked for grave markers and surviving comrades; they were happy when they found them, disappointed when they did not. They asked questions of each other and told stories; sometimes they wept silently and other times uncontrollably. “One survivor was seen weeping next to a [grave] marker, saying to passersby, ‘he’s under there,’” writes Flagel (p. 48). The media, military, and moguls conflated the butchering of men, who were staunchly opposed to each other, with hallowed nationalism. Flagel’s important monograph provides a nuanced existential examination of what fifty years after the battle meant to the veterans in attendance: survival. Albert Dorsey Jr. University of California, Riverside Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jan 1, 2023
Vladimir Nosov + 8
