The World Will Never See the Like

The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913

By: John L. Hopkins

Narrated by: Joe Pavia

The largest gathering of Union and Confederate veterans ever held was front-page news throughout the country. “[It] will be talked about and written about as long as the American people boast of the dauntless courage of Gettysburg,” declared a woman who accompanied her father to the reunion. But as the years passed, the memorable event was all but forgotten. John Hopkins’s The World Will Never See the Like: The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913 goes a long way toward making sure the world will remember.

The 1913 Gettysburg reunion is a story of 53,000 old comrades and former foes reunited, and of the tension, even half a century later, between competing narratives of reconciliation and remembrance. For seven days the old soldiers lived under canvas in stifling heat on a 280-acre encampment run by the U.S. Army. They swapped stories, debated still-simmering controversies about the battle, and fed tall tales to gullible reporters. On July 3, the aging survivors of Pickett’s Division and the Philadelphia Brigade shook hands across the wall on Cemetery Ridge in the reunion’s climactic photo op.

Some of the battle’s leading personalities attended, including Union III Corps commander Dan Sickles, who at 92 was still eager to explain to anyone who would listen the indispensable role he claimed to have played in the Union victory. Also present was Helen Dortch Longstreet, the widow of Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, who devoted her life and considerable energies to defending the reputation of her general. Both wrote articles from the reunion that were syndicated in newspapers across the country. There was even a cameo appearance by a young and as-yet unknown cavalry officer named George S. Patton Jr.

Hopkins fills his marvelous account with detail from the letters, diaries, and published accounts of Union and Confederate veterans, the extensive archival records of the reunion’s organizers, and the daily stories filed by the scores of reporters who covered it. The World Will Never See the Like offers the first full story of this extraordinary event’s genesis and planning, the obstacles overcome on the way to making it a reality, its place in the larger narrative of sectional reunion and reconciliation, and the individual stories of the veterans who attended. Every reader interested in Gettysburg will find this a welcome addition to their library.

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Fascinating look at a little known event in American history.

I first fell in love with history when my parents took me to Gettysburg just before I entered kindergarten. I had only seen a brief reference to the 1913 reunion at the end of Ken Burns’s amazing Civil War documentary. This book is thoroughly researched and really gives you a sense of the great reunion from many different perspectives. It was fascinating to see the amount of camaraderie among former soldiers who five decades earlier had fought against one another. It also shed light on how pervasive the myth of “the noble lost cause“ had entered theAmerican psyche by then, and the book touches on how African-Americans, while able to participate, still were not viewed as equals by either the north or the south.

The narrator does a good job and engages the listener by doing different voices for various individuals. My only complaint was that the book devotes I think three chapters to what went into planning the reunion. That dragged a little bit and probably could’ve been dealt with in one chapter. The book really takes off when it gets to the point of the actual reunion itself. I found myself thinking that I could’ve just read a brief summary of the planning and started with chapter 4. Any Civil War buff would enjoy this book. It gives you a sense of sort of the doorway between the twilight of the Civil War era and the beginnings of the America we know today.

Wonderful story about a highly unknown event in American History

I was deeply moved several times during the course of this book. The writer brought up many logistical challenges to hosting the event that most people would not have expected. That along with the fact that at the time, train and boat were the primary mode of transportation in America. I was awestruck by the fortitude of the old veterans on both sides during the arduous, hot week of July when they conducted this reunion. As a veteran myself, I was proud of the class and dignity with which both sides behaved some 50 years after this tumultuous battle which so defined US History. The stories within are heartwarming and deeply moving.

This book should be required reading for everyone under 40 years of age in this country, perhaps they then would not be so easily triggered or inclined to hold a “ tribunal” whenever a slight offense overcomes them.