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Show UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY there would have been two nations where there is now but one.”2 In November 1863, President Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to dedicate a national cemetery, and his Gettysburg Address began the slow healing process for the nation. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg approached in July 1913, many Americans saw it as an opportunity to host the largest gathering for veterans of the Civil War and as an opportunity to finish what Lincoln had started fifty years earlier. That grand fiftieth anniversary reunion—and Utah’s participation in it—involved far more than assembling elderly veterans. First, political wrangling at the state level frustrated the efforts of local organizers to get Utahns to the event. Second, in Utah, as elsewhere in the nation, the reunion illuminated both the lingering tensions between Union and Confederate factions and the hopes that such animosity could finally be laid to rest. As John Widdoes, a nonagenarian veteran from American Fork, remarked as he left for a later celebration, “I’m going to shake hands with a Reb, something I’ve never done before.”3 Plans to celebrate the semicentennial of the battle of Gettysburg publicly began on January 5, 1909, during Governor Edwin S. Stuart’s biennial message to the Pennsylvania general assembly, when he observed that the nation was “approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the most decisive battle of the war for the suppression of the Rebellion, fought on Pennsylvania soil, at Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863. . . . Many of the men [who fought] are still living . . . and it would be entirely in keeping with the patriotic spirit of the people of the [Pennsylvania] Commonwealth to properly recognize and fittingly observe this anniversary.” Stuart further suggested that “other States, both north and south, whose sons fought at Gettysburg, will surely co-operate in making the occasion one that will stand foremost in the martial history of the world.” Accordingly, on May 13, 1909, Pennsylvania’s general assembly created the Gettysburg fiftieth reunion commission and authorized $5,000 for preliminary expenses.4 The newly created commission reached out to every state—including former Confederate states. They invited “the congress of the United States and her Sister States and Commonwealths to accept this invitation . . . to share in this important anniversary and to help make it an event worthy of its historical significance, and an occasion creditable and impressive to our great and re-united nation.”5 The commemoration was envisioned as “the greatest and most elaborate event of its kind ever [to] be held,” and the commission’s goal was “to have present on the battlefield all of the 2 “On to Gettysburg!” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, June 28, 1913. “Five Utah Veterans Leave for Gettysburg,” Times-Independent (Moab, UT), June 30, 1938, punctuation added. 4 Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg: Report of the Pennsylvania Commission (Harrisburg, PA: Wm. Stanley Ray State Printer, 1914), 3–4. 5 “Veterans to Meet on Battlefield,” Carbon County News (Price, UT), June 12, 1913. 3 268 |
