Soon after witnessing the great events of July 3, a reporter
guessed that in time Gettysburg would fascinate both North and South
alike. Even though he realized that "our better feelings are antagonistic
to war," he knew that battle would "stir us as thunderbolts." The great
charge could not fail to inspire poets who "stirred out fancy" about the
martial bearing of soldiers marching into battle or those who "recite in
melody attuned to sympathy, the history of the wounded drummer boy or
the dying volunteer." And these were only two ways in which the nation
might preserve popular "heroic and melancholy" wartime memories. ¹

This correspondent understood that the past served peoples and na-
tions in many ways. Indeed, as historian Michael Kammen has argued,
societies "reconstruct their pasts rather than faithfully record them," and
"they do so with the needs of contemporary culture clearly in mind." ²
Even before the war ended, Northerners and Southerners had begun to
look back at the events of July 3 with just such selectivity of purpose.

Pickett's Charge found a place in two of the conflict's first and most en-
during memories. First, a cataclysm on the scale of the Civil War seemed
to demand a point of demarcation, a specific moment when no doubt re-
mained about its ultimate end. By 1870, that clump of trees on Cemetery
Ridge where Northern defenders stopped Southern attackers and seemed

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