19131776 Club
53,000 Union and Confederate veterans converge on Gettysburg, fifty years on
Wilson walks through a row of Boy Scouts to address the men in a tent pitched on the same ground where fifty thousand fell; most, it seems, have made their peace.
Fifty years after the bloodiest battle on American soil, the men who had fought it were mostly in their seventies — and they came back. From June 29 to July 4, 1913, 53,407 Union and Confederate veterans converged on Gettysburg for the largest Civil War reunion ever held, with veterans from 46 of the 48 states making the trip. A Great Tent measuring 200 by 450 feet, fitted with thirteen thousand chairs, rose on the same ground where roughly fifty thousand men had fallen as casualties in 1863. President Woodrow Wilson arrived on July 4 and walked through two rows of Boy Scouts into that tent to address men who had once tried to kill each other — and found, by most accounts, that they no longer wanted to…
