Union and Confederate veterans shake hands during the 50th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg, 113 years ago in July of 1913.
Fifty years after the Battle of Gettysburg, thousands of aging Civil War veterans returned to the Pennsylvania battlefield where they had once fought as young soldiers. The 1913 Gettysburg Reunion commemorated the battle’s semicentennial and became one of the largest gatherings of Civil War veterans ever held. Men who had once faced one another across stone walls, ridges, and open fields reunited as survivors of the conflict that had transformed the United States.
Veterans were housed in a sprawling temporary camp near the battlefield, and many were now in their seventies or eighties. They revisited landmarks such as Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top, and the site of Pickett’s Charge, where some of the war’s fiercest fighting had taken place in July 1863.
One of the reunion’s defining moments came during a ceremonial reenactment of Pickett’s Charge, when surviving Confederate veterans crossed the field and were greeted by Union veterans with handshakes instead of gunfire. More than 50,000 veterans attended the event, and the widely photographed gestures of reconciliation became enduring symbols of national reunion, even as many of the war’s underlying issues and legacies remained unresolved.
