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Show LIBRARY OF CONGRESS “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here”: Utah Veterans and the Gettysburg Reunion of 1913 By KENNETH L. ALFORD AND KEN NELSON “This is the old soldiers’ show—they paid the price of admission fifty years ago.” —New York Times, June 29, 1913 G ettysburg was the defining battle of the American Civil War. When the Union and Confederate armies collided in southern Pennsylvania during the first three days of July 1863, the nation’s future hung in the balance. Both forces fought heroically. By the time the Confederate army retreated, around fifty thousand men were killed, wounded, or missing across the Gettysburg battlefields—the largest number of battle casualties during the entire Civil War. With the Union victory that ended Lee’s second and final invasion of the North, Gettysburg became “one of the decisive battles of the world.”1 As the Salt Lake Herald noted in June These GAR men represent some 1913: “Had the Union army wavered and of the 44,713 Union veterans who broke under the charge of Pickett’s men, attended the four-day reunion. Kenneth L. Alford is an associate professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University. He served as an active duty U.S. Army officer for nearly thirty years, retiring as a colonel. His most recent book is Civil War Saints. Ken Nelson is a collection manager with Family Search. He has worked as a reference consultant in the Family History Library and is a member of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. 1 “Veterans to Meet on Battlefield,” Carbon County News (Price, UT), June 12, 1913. 267 |
