War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion
War, Memory,
and the
1913 Gettysburg Reunion
Thomas R. Flagel
THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Kent, Ohio
For the families of veterans
2019 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever,
without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short
quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2018052574
ISBN 978-1-60635-371-4
Manufactured in the United States of America
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Flagel, Thomas R., 1966- author.
Title: War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion / Thomas R. Flagel.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2019] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018052574 | ISBN 9781606353714 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Gettysburg Reunion, 1913.
Classification: LCC E475.57 .F53 2019 | DDC 973.7/349--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052574
23 22 21 20 195 4 3 2 1
Contents
It takes a village to produce a monograph, and this work is no exception. Primary credit for this endeavor goes to my family and friends, who provided boundless motivation and support despite my continual absence. Great thanks also to Ken Allers Jr., for spending countless hours teaching me the phenomenon of Gettysburg. The work is based on a talk supported by Cindy Small and the Gettysburg Foundation, with research made possible with the help and expertise of the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville, the Library of Congress staff and the National Archives, the John C. Hodges Library Special Collections staff at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Mike Sherbon and the Pennsylvania State Archives in Harrisburg, John Heiser and Tom Greaney of the Gettysburg National Military Park Library, the Adams County Historical Society in Gettysburg, the Wisconsin Historical Society at Madison, the Manuscript Division at the New York Historical Society Library, and many others. I am also eternally grateful to my many colleagues and students at Columbia State Community College who supported this work, especially Hoyt Gardner, Dr. Barry Gidcomb, Greg Mewbourn, and everyone at the Williamson County Campus.
Thanks to veterans John Sylva, James Beins, Charles W. Caldwell, Bill Radcliffe, and Ralph Walker for their insights concerning military tenure and memory. Critical to the editing process were Theresa Elworth, Will Underwood, Hazel Blumberg-McKee, Mary Young, and the staff at Kent State University Press; Michael Bryant of the US Department of Education; and novelist Ann Rushton.
Gratitude also goes to Jacki Sylva, Tim Pierce, Mike Skinner, Dr. Carol Codori, Barb Ross, Read Ridley, Drs. Rob and Laura Yost, Karl Green, and my publicist Barb Flagel for their support. Finally, innumerable thanks go to the many who have done their best to formally train me, including my professors at Loras College, Kansas State, Creighton, and Middle Tennessee State University, and for this project particularly Dr. Robert Hunt, Dr. Martha Norkunas, Dr. Mary Hoffschwelle, and Dr. Rebecca Conard.
June 16, 1913
Comrade:
Your name is on the list to go to Gettysburg. The trip will be by Providence Line boat, leaving Sunday evening, June 29. In order that there may be time to make complete arrangements you are requested to be at the boat, Fox Point Wharf, Providence, by 6 P.M. that day. An envelope will then be given you containing:
An individual round trip ticket, which you must sign; good until July 15.
A badge, which you are requested to wear at all times.
An identification tag, which you must fill in and carry in your pocket.
A pass, which you must show to gain admission to the camp. You should also carry your Discharge or a Certificate of Service from the State in which you enlisted, or Pension Certificate.
A bag tag. You are reminded that only hand baggage can be taken, each to handle his own.
When it became clear that the Jubilee Reunion of the Battle of Gettysburg was going to take place, after years of promising yet contentious planning, Rhode Islands commission chairman Elisha Hunt Rhodes and his officers sent the above circular to four hundred fortunate individuals within their jurisdiction. Months before, the committee members worried that few of their fellow residents would volunteer to go. Fearing a lack
Surprised by the outpouring, Rhodes and his associates felt compelled to send a second message, trying to dissuade the surplus from attending. Do you understand, read the notice, you are to sleep in tents, and live on U.S. rations, cooked but issued as when you were in the Army. That you will be in these tents and live on these rations for at least four days, with no chance to hire a room or go to a hotel if you are sick. The commission gave each man one day to answer, and even then, over four hundred still said yes.
The respondents would become part of the largest Union and Confederate reunion ever held. Over fifty-five thousand official attendees plus thousands more under their own volition descended upon a town of four thousand during the scorching summer of 1913, with the promise of little more than a cot and two blankets, military fare, and the presence of countless adversaries from a horrific war. Just to reach this site, some would travel nearly the length of the continent. Most of the men were revisiting a period in their personal history that involved acute physical and emotional trauma (the word trauma itself being the ancient Greek word for wound). All attendees lived in a country in which the average lifespan for a male at the time was fifty-one years, and their average age was seventy-two. The scenario raises a number of questions, not the least of which was, why did they go?
This is an exploration of that event and those individuals.
Contrary to popular belief, the prime motives for veterans to attend did not include national reconciliation, nor did the Great Reunion produce a general sense of a reunified country. The reconciliation premise, advanced by several major speeches at the anniversary as well as David Blights influential Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) and Stuart McConnells Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic (1992), lived in rhetoric more than in fact. More recent scholarship effectively dismantles this Reconciliation of 1913 mythos, finding instead that sectionalism and lingering hostilities largely prevailed among veterans and civilians. Chief among these explorations
While largely agreeing that sectionalism remained in place, War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion differs from the preceding works by positing that, when veterans returned to a place of war memory, they almost invariably interpreted the site in personal rather than sectional or national terms. The phenomenon of shared experience often transcended a persons national, regional, and even regimental affiliations. Locations and events that may have become iconic in the collective civilian psyche, such as Little Round Top or Picketts Charge, remained almost irrelevant to veterans who fought in other places. Time and again, veterans sought out others who endured the same specific circumstances they had, and the more precise the episode, the more intense the bonding that often followed. For the individual veteran in situ, national themes and narratives were at most tertiary considerations.
