Peace Jubilee

In July, 1911, at Manassas, Virginia, the Manassas National Jubilee of Peace brought together Union and Confederate veterans fifty years after the first major battle of the Civil War in the first ceremony on the same ground where veterans of both sides came together in peace and reconciliation. The idea for the week-long celebration of national healing and reunion, held July 16-22, came from a letter to the Washington Post by D. H. Russell, a South Carolina Confederate veteran, who proposed that the fiftieth anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas be one of peace and reconciliation. George Carr Round, a Union veteran and community leader who had settled in Manassas after the war, read the letter and acted on it. The festivities culminated on July 21, the battle’s anniversary, when Union and Confederate veterans formed opposing lines on Henry House Hill, advanced on a signal, and clasped hands in friendship and reconciliation where they had once fought in mortal combat. After a picnic on the battlefield, the crowd returned to the Prince William County Courthouse to hear President William Howard Taft speak. Later reunions of Civil War veterans took place on other major battlefields, but Manassas was both the site of the war’s first major engagement and the first reunion of these former adversaries.

Virginia · United States