Sounds Related To The American Civil War

Robert P. Scott, Confederate veteran speaks at 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg

Home recording sample

Performed by Robert P. Scott

June 30, 1938

The full version of this file is available on CD0100. This CD contains more than 34 hours of historical audio.

"I was fifteen years old going on sixteen. . . . " (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, June 30, 1938)

In late June 1938, the last living veterans of the Battle of Gettysburg came to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the historic battle. The battle, fought over the first three days of July 1863, was the largest military engagement ever waged in the Western Hemisphere and the turning point in the American Civil War. With victory at Gettysburg, Union forces repulsed the Confederacy's last invasion of the North at the total cost of 51,000 Americans killed, wounded, or missing in action. Among those who survived Gettysburg was seventeen-year-old Confederate soldier Robert P. Scott, who despite his youth had already been fighting two years for the Southern cause. Three-quarters of a century later, Scott, then ninety-two years old, returned to Gettysburg to attend the ceremonies surrounding the battle's seventy-fifth anniversary. On June 30, 1938, he recounted his Civil War experiences, including details of a battle fought near his home in Missouri in which he was shot off his horse.