The painting also hinted at tantalizing possibilities. If the war had a single decisive moment -- its outcome in the balance -- then it might have ended differently. It was the sentiment best captured by William Faulkner a half century later, as he painted the by-then familiar scene:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet...and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time ...

Perhaps the greatest appeal of the painting was that it captured both Northern heroism and Southern valor in a single vivid picture. By 1883, when the first cyclorama opened, the North had largely retreated from its efforts to reconstruct the South, leaving that revolution unfinished. Reconciliation was the order of the day. The cover of the Boston Program showed a Union soldier clasping hands with a Confederate. Such appeals were not only good politics; they were good business. In New York, the lecturer took pains to praise the heroism of both sides. "No ex-Confederate could listen, except with a full heart, to the panegyric heaped upon Pickett's men at the cyclorama of 'Gettysburg,'" the Blue and Gray observed in 1893. The cyclorama offered an image that both sides could regard with pride. And, by fixing the war firmly in the past, it offered the public a chance to celebrate how far it had come.

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After mouldering in its mausoleum for a decade, the Boston cyclorama received a new lease on life. In 1910, the department-store mogul Albert Hahne dispatched an agent to procure the massive painting. He used large sections cut from the canvas to adorn the soaring atrium of his new flagship store in Newark, New Jersey. From there, the painting traveled to New York, Baltimore, and Washington, arriving in Gettysburg in May 1913. It was installed in a crude, temporary building, where it would remain for the next 47 years. The convex canvas was flattened against the wall behind it, and many of the remnants of the tattered blue sky were shorn off. Gone was the elaborate diorama that had blurred the line between foreground and painting. But even in its straitened state, the picture retained some of its old power.

It was installed in time for the 50th anniversary of the battle. That reunion, trumpeted as the Peace Jubilee, brought more than 50,000 veterans of the war together on the field of battle. Union men mingled with old Confederates. They listened to President Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner in the White House since the Civil War, as he praised the fruits of reconciliation:

How wholesome and healing the peace has been! 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, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other's eyes.

The cyclorama provided the perfect complement to the occasion. The landmarks had changed over the decades, and memories had faded. Staring at the painting, though, veterans moved effortlessly back through time. The cyclorama, despite its mistakes and flaws, now offered a vision of Gettysburg with which not even the actual battlefield could compete. Inside the cyclorama, "men of both sides gathered, finding it easier to locate their positions in the vivid reproductions of the scenes than on the wide-spreading landscape." Two such veterans found themselves standing side by side. They shook hands. They recalled their units, and realized that they had fought each other nearby, 50 years earlier.

They stood there silently for a moment, the heart of each too full for speech. Then the Confederate rallied. "We're all comrades now," he said.

It was the great theme of the Peace Jubilee, and the cyclorama became its physical embodiment. Visitors came from around the country to remember the courage of those who fought, and the horror of the fight itself. "More and more," the cyclorama's lecturer told his audiences, "the country is coming to feel the plain truth of the fact that the valor of both sides in the Civil War is the equal heritage."