In 1938 old men clothed in faded blue and gray, bearing canes and ear trumpets shuffled out of trains and automobiles arriving from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. For the most part these gents were in their early 90’s, and came eager to reminisce, find old comrades, and attend formal observances.

Organizers had planned three full days of tours, speakers, and brass bands playing marches and songs like Dixie and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The event planned to conclude with a military flyover and an evening of fireworks.

The Battle of Gettysburg’s 75th commemoration had begun.

There had been an earlier event, in 1913, but this time visitors understood this congregation of veterans would be the last. Attendees who hadn’t fallen on that Pennsylvania battlefield in 1863, would soon join their brothers-in-arms buried in towns and cities across the re-unified nation. 

The stories these old warriors shared would soon pass from eye witness accounts into America’s collective memory.  

No longer wielding rifles, many maneuvered familiar grounds pushed about by family members and others. Old men held tight ear trumpets to catch the orations of the many visiting dignitaries. The men listened as President Franklin Roosevelt delivered remarks dedicating the Eternal Light Memorial, located near the “Bloody Angle.” Battlefield tours transported veterans, and well-wishers from Cemetery Hill, to Seminary Ridge, Little Round Top, the Devils Den, and finally the exposed fields of Picketts Charge.

There, at the stone fence, these old men shook hands in reconciliation as cameras flashed and movie cameras fluttered.

However the event was incomplete. Those Americans left uninvited included scores of African Americans for whom the Civil War had been contested. Those emancipated by a deeply principled president, and had harbored hope for new lives of freedom, were conspicuous by their absence. This occasion had been a whites only affair. From the smoke and thunder of battle a new enslavement had emerged of sharecropping and perpetual debt; enslavement in every aspect, but iron chains.

Though once promised Forty Acres and a Mule by victorious Union commanders no acreage ever materialized. Relegated to tenant farming, black Americans struggled in the same conditions endured before Fort Sumpter and Bull Run. Stuck in a never-ending cycle of poverty, sharecroppers yielded insufficient harvests that were debited into the next season, and then the next, in an endless cycle of debt slavery.

As a result any black faces on that battlefield were most likely pushing wheelchairs, or cooking and serving the white crowds in attendance. The 1896 Supreme Court ruling, Plessy V Ferguson, legalized segregation by insisting any negative correlation attached to feelings of inferiority lived only in the minds of Blacks. Separate water fountains, parks, transportation, and schools worked just fine for the elderly veterans from the North and South.

The moral force of the Civil War had died as thoroughly as the nearly 7 million who had perished upon the scattered battlefields of that bloody conflict. Those veterans who reunited in 1938 Pennsylvania found white identity and brotherhood far outweighed any new birth of freedom envisioned by President Lincoln 75 years earlier.

The current occupant of the White House has made it his mission to once again assert white supremacy in an effort to rewrite American history. His feelings of superiority had been injured by our first black President and now he seeks revenge. Of course this foolish attempt will fail, as is his custom in all things, because the majority of Americans understand the essential truth of human equality, and unlike those 1938 attendees we will never forget.

Gail Chumbley is the author of the two-part memoir “River of January,” and “River of January: Figure Eight,” co-writer of the screenplay, “Dancing On Air” based on those books. She has penned three stage plays on history topics, “Clay” on the life of Senator Henry Clay, “Wolf By The Ears” examining the beginnings of American slavery, and “Peer Review” where 47 is confronted by specters of four past presidents.