This Gettysburg Battlefield monument was dedicated on July 3, 1938, commemorating the 1913 Gettysburg reunion for the 50th anniversary of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg.
Discussions for some sort of monument to commemorate North/South peace was proposed as early as 1887. President William McKinley had a conversation in 1900 about it with Col. Andrew Cowan, a Union artillery commander at Pickett’s Charge who later made millions in leather goods. Nothing tangible resulted from their talk.
In 1913 the centerpiece of the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg was a reunion of soldiers, both Union and Confederate: 53,407 veterans (about 8,750 Confederate) attended. President Woodrow Wilson’s July 4 reunion address summarized the spirit: “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—except that we shall not forget the splendid valor.”
A commission started planning this reunion in 1909. Their proposal initially included a “Peace Jubilee” which would include placement of the cornerstone for a “Great Peace Memorial.” Because the peace memorial funding was not approved as part of the Congressional appropriation for the event, the Peace Jubilee plans were dropped from the reunion schedule.
All was not lost, as at the reunion the Gettysburg Peace Memorial Association was formed after a rousing speech by Col. Cowen. In 1914 a “Peace Memorial Bill” was proposed in the US House of Representatives for a $250,000 peace monument at “The Angle,” part of the Pickett’s Charge terrain. They compared the planned memorial with Christ the Redeemer of the Andes and the Lincoln Memorial. The bill was not passed.
In 1936 Virginia became the first state to contribute to the building of a Gettysburg peace monument. Pennsylvania soon followed, and New York, Indiana, Tennessee, Illinois, and Wisconsin soon chipped in. On December 10, 1937, Lee Lawrie was announced as the sculptor; his most famous commission is probably his most well-known work, the bronze Atlas (installed 1937) at Rockefeller Center. The architect was Paul Philippe Cret. The $60,000 monument was ultimately completed northwest of Gettysburg on Oak Hill. Groundbreaking was on February 14, and the last foot of piping for the flame’s gas supply was placed on May 31.
Attendance for the memorial’s dedication at the 75th anniversary Gettysburg reunion on July 3,1938 was 250,000, including 1,800 Civil War veterans; 100,000 more attempted to attend but were foiled by congested roads. As President Franklin Roosevelt’s nine-minute speech ended at sunset, the Peace Memorial, covered by a 50-foot flag, was unveiled by Union veteran George N. Lockwood and Confederate veteran A. G. Harris (both age 91.) Two regular army soldiers lit the flame. Roosevelt remarked, “All of them we honor, not asking under which flag they fought then – thankful that they stand together under one flag now.”
Roosevelt also said, in part:
Lincoln was commander-in-chief in this old battle; he wanted above all things to be commander-in-chief of the new peace. He understood that battle there must be; that when a challenge to constituted government is thrown down, the people must in self-defense take it up; that the fight must be fought through to a decision so clear that it is accepted as being beyond recall.
But Lincoln also understood that after such a decision, a democracy should seek peace through a new unity. For a democracy can keep alive only if the settlement of old difficulties clears the ground and transfers energies to face new responsibilities. Never can it have as much ability and purpose as it needs in that striving; the end of battle does not end the infinity of those needs.
That is why Lincoln—commander of a people as well as of an army—asked that his battle end “with malice toward none, with charity for all.”
The memorial has “The Flame of Eternal Peace” and relief sculptures of two women and an American eagle. There is a small plaque mounted on a stone nearby which says: Eternal Light Peace Memorial. Dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the observance of the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1938. This text is on the tower:
An enduring light to guide us in unity and fellowship
-Lincoln
With firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.
The natural gas flame is in a one-ton bronze urn atop a 47-foot tower on a stone pedestrian terrace with views from the terraced hill summit over about 400 square miles. The flame is visible from 20 mi away. The gas-lit eternal flame burned until 1979 when it was replaced by electricity because of the energy crisis, but it was restored in 1988 during a 125th anniversary commemoration. (According to LBJ aide Jack Valenti, the monument was Jacqueline Kennedy’s inspiration for the eternal flame on President Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. The Kennedy family visited Gettysburg on March 31, 1963, on a day trip from Camp David, and stopped at the Peace Monument.)
This is a US Army archival video of the 1938 ceremonies, including the unveiling of the eternal flame:
In 1988 Carl Sagan, at the invitation of the National Park Service, gave a speech at this memorial, on the 5-th anniversary of its dedication, the 125th anniversary of the battle. In it he said:
The souls that perished here would find the carnage of which we are now capable unspeakable. Today, the United States and the Soviet Union have booby-trapped our planet with almost sixty thousand nuclear weapons. Sixty thousand nuclear weapons! Even a small fraction of the strategic arsenals could without question annihilate the two contending superpowers, probably destroy the global civilization, and possibly render the human species extinct. No nation, no man should have such power. We distribute these instruments of apocalypse all over our fragile world, and justify it on the grounds that it has made us safe. We have made a fool’s bargain.
The 51,000 casualties here at Gettysburg represented one-third of the Confederate army and one-quarter of the Union army. All those who died, with one or two exceptions, were soldiers. The best-known exception was a civilian in her own house who thought to bake a loaf of bread and, through two closed doors, was shot to death; her name was Jennie Wade. But in the global thermonuclear war, almost all the casualties will be civilians, men, women, and children, including vast numbers of citizens of nations that had no part in the quarrel that led to the war, nations far removed from the northern mid-latitude “target zone.” There will be billions of Jennie Wades. Everyone on earth is now at risk. . . .
