Free Those Who Have Borne the Battle by James Wright Page A

ceremonial act of bringing bodies “home” from places like Gettysburg was an important assertion of pride and an act of repatriation. Similar in many ways to the themes in the North, those honoring the Confederate war dead reminded all white Southerners of their dominant heritage and their values. And Southern cemeteries, like Northern ones, “contained ordered row after row of humble identical markers, hundreds of thousands of men, known and unknown, who represented not so much the sorrow or particularity of a lost loved one as the enormous and all but unfathomable cost of the war.” 41
    At least down to the First World War, the South resisted Memorial Day as a Northern and largely Republican celebration and as a symbol of Southern alienation. As the South increasingly emphasized the “lost cause” as a means of mourning and of affirming the justice of their action, the North tolerated and finally even joined in some of this sentiment. By the 1880s Union and Confederate veterans began joining together to remember together and to salute the courage of their comrades and of their former foes. On Memorial Day 1884 in Keene, New Hampshire, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. expressed his respect for the Confederates he fought: “The soldiers of the war need no explanations; they can join in commemorating a soldier’s death with feelings not different in kind, whether he fell toward them or by their side.” So, on Memorial Day, “Every year—in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life—there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.” 42
    Of course, the freed slaves had no place in the “lost cause” narrative. Black veterans who had sacrificed and fought for the Union and for the freedom of all Americans had no place in the Northern narrative and therefore no role in the celebrations. Virginian Richard Henry Lee argued in 1893 that the war was not about slavery but about “liberty” for his region: “As a Confederate soldier and as a citizen of Virginia I deny the charge, and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels; we did not
fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes.” 43 These indignant lapses in memory and convenient accounts of history were essential components in the “lost cause” narrative.
    In these generalized, even abstracted accounts, where many of the dead remained anonymous, service itself was synonymous with sacrifice, and battle death was by definition heroic. By the 1870s towns in the North began to erect monuments to remember and to salute. Parks and town squares were marked by memorials that listed the names of those from the community who had served—and recognized those who had died in the war. 44
    In the midst of heroic narratives and allegorical imagery, of the democratization and anonymity of service and sacrifice, there remained millions of surviving veterans. Their needs were quite different. In 1862 Congress approved legislation that provided medical support, pensions, and survivors’ coverage for all members of the Union armed forces, whether volunteer or regular, state or national. Wounded veterans would receive pensions, as would the widows or orphans of those who died as a result of their military service. Of course, these payments did not extend to Confederate veterans. In fact, in 1861 the War Department had ordered the Pension Bureau to cease payments to all veterans or eligible survivors of veterans of the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War who resided in the South.
    On March 4, 1865, President Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address, just a little more than a month before his assassination. It was a remarkably eloquent speech, even for this remarkably eloquent man, praying then for a quick resolution of the