Blue and Gray at 75th Anniversary of Great Battle (1938)

This public-domain Universal newsreel, released on 4 July 1938, covers the 75th-anniversary reunion of the Battle of Gettysburg. Its title card reads “F.D.R. dedicates peace monument to Blue and Gray,” and the original release sheet describes President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicating the Eternal Light Peace Memorial before 150,000 people, with 1,800 Civil War veterans of both sides in attendance.

The clip runs about a minute and a half and is largely silent, without narration, apart from a brief passage of Roosevelt’s speech. It shows great crowds spread across the fields, close-ups of white-bearded veterans – some with medals pinned to their coats – saluting and greeting one another, a column of modern Army armoured vehicles on parade, Roosevelt speaking from a flag-draped stand, and the tall memorial, draped in an enormous flag, surrounded by spectators.

The 1938 reunion was the last of its kind. The youngest veterans of the battle were by then in their nineties, and the memorial – dedicated on 3 July, the anniversary of Pickett’s Charge, and topped by a gas flame – was meant to stand for peace between North and South. Other accounts put the crowd far higher than the newsreel’s 150,000, at around a quarter of a million.

For anyone interested in Gettysburg’s ghost lore, this is the living memory the legends grew out of. Many of the battlefield’s stories involve soldiers glimpsed long after the fighting; here are the actual survivors, filmed 75 years on, on the same ground.