Reconciliation at Gettysburg: the monuments that honour both sides

Most countries build war memorials to the side that won. Walk the battlefield at Gettysburg and you will find monuments that honour both armies at once — Union and Confederate names cut into the same stone, the two flags crossed. That is not an accident of taste. It is the mark of an idea, reconciliation, that shaped how Americans remembered the Civil War for a century, and of who it left out.

"Under blue and gray – Gettysburg." Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-13841.

A monument to both sides

The Gregg Cavalry Shaft, Gettysburg National Military Park. NPS

The Gregg Cavalry Shaft was put up in 1884 to mark the field where, on July 3, 1863, Union cavalry under Brig. Gen. D. McM. Gregg fought Confederate cavalry under Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart. Northerners built it, but its four faces list both sides:

It also bears the U.S. and Confederate flags, crossed.

What reconciliation meant

Every Civil War monument, like any book or film, has a point of view. Some celebrate the freeing of four million enslaved people. Some mourn a lost "Southern way of life." And some celebrate a divided country made whole again. That last theme took hold in the 1880s and stayed popular well into the 1900s, in monuments, magazines, plays and national parks. Its message was that soldiers on both sides had been brave and honourable, and that North and South should forgive each other.

President William Howard Taft put it plainly to Confederate veterans in 1909: "All who were in the bloody four years contest are proud of the courage and fortitude shown by both sides … What any Americans did then we all cherish as a common heritage."

Veterans met at "blue-gray reunions," named for the colours of the two armies' uniforms. The biggest came at Gettysburg in 1913, for the battle's fiftieth anniversary, and drew national attention. A South Carolina paper reported that Confederate cavalrymen had pledged under the Stars and Stripes to "forget," and their Union counterparts had sworn by the Confederate flag "that the fight was over for all time."

Boy Scouts who helped at the 1913 reunion. A few years later young men of their generation would be drafted to fight in World War I. "Boy Scouts – Gettysburg," Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-13868.

Who it left out

Reconciliation was a story about white Americans. The 1913 reunion was an all-white event; the only Black people present were there to work.

Many African Americans objected that it put the two sides on the same footing. The editor of the Washington Bee, a Black newspaper, pointed out that the Gettysburg reunion honoured both "those who fought for the preservation of Union and the extinction of human slavery" and "those who fought to destroy the Union and perpetuate slavery" — a false equivalence that excused the Confederacy's cause.

It also erased what Black Americans had done in the campaign itself. On the march to Gettysburg, Confederate soldiers tried to seize free Black people and carry them into slavery, and Black residents fought back. After the battle African Americans cared for the wounded, buried the dead and helped rebuild.

Not every white veteran was ready to forgive, either. Some at the reunions were still angry at the men they had fought; some had no interest in reconciliation; many carried traumatic memories. The comfort of forgiving and forgetting was not shared by everyone, and it came at a cost. Monuments like the Gregg Cavalry Shaft still stand, and Americans still argue about whether this is the right way to remember the war.

Four ways to remember

Historians sort Civil War commemoration into four broad themes. Any monument can be read against them:

Try it on four real monuments: the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in New London, Connecticut (1896); the South Carolina Women of the Confederacy Monument at the State House in Columbia (1912); the Spirit of Freedom sculpture at the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1998); and the Peachtree Creek memorial once at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta (1944, since removed). Look at the design, the inscription, the symbols, who is honoured, and whether the war appears as victory, defeat or something else.

Questions to take away

• Why was Gettysburg such a natural stage for reconciliation?
• What did the country gain by remembering the war this way, and what did it lose?
• Could a monument celebrate a reunited nation without leaving out slavery and the African Americans who fought against it?
• Is there a Civil War memorial in your town? What does it want you to think?

Sources

Written from "(H)our History Lesson: Reconciliation at Gettysburg," by Talia Brenner, edited by Katie McCarthy, National Park Service, part of the series Conversations about Legacies of Slavery; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson cites Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion (2001), for the Taft speech; the Lancaster News (South Carolina), July 1, 1913; the Washington Bee, June 24, 1913; Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Did Black Men Fight at Gettysburg?" (2014); and Brian Matthew Jordan (2011) on the 1913 reunion.