confederate soldiers were always considered traitors...this is NOT a new idea.
The end of combat in spring 1865 offered an opportunity to attend to the dead...
Many of the missing soldiers of the Union Army lay in graves scattered across the South, often unmarked and unrecorded. In the fall of 1865, U.S. Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered an assessment of the condition and location of graves to ensure their protection, an increasingly urgent issue in face of growing bitterness and defiance in the defeated South. Units of northern soldiers searched across the battle fronts of the war for slain Yankees, inaugurating what became over the next six years a massive federally supported reburial program. Ultimately, 303,536 Union soldiers were reinterred in 74 new national cemeteries, and Congress officially established the national cemetery system. Careful attention to the content of graves and to the documentation that poured in from families and former comrades permitted the identification of 54 percent of the reburied soldiers. Some thirty thousand of the reinterred were black soldiers. Just as they were segregated into the U.S. Colored Troops in life, so in death they were buried in areas designated “colored” on the drawings that mapped the new national cemeteries.
This federal effort included only Union soldiers. Outraged at the official neglect of their dead, white southern civilians, largely women, mobilized private means to accomplish what federal resources would not. In Petersburg, Virginia, for example, the Ladies Memorial Association oversaw the reinterment of 30,000 dead Confederates in the city’s Blanford Cemetery. What was to become the cult of the Lost Cause in the latter decades of the century found an origin in the rituals of Confederate reburials.
The federal reburial program represented an extraordinary departure for the United States Government, an indication of the very different sort of nation that had emerged from civil war. The program’s extensiveness, its cost, and its location in the Federal Government would have been unimaginable before the war created its legions of dead, a constituency of the slain and their mourners, who would change the very definition of the nation and its obligations. The memory of the Civil War dead would remain a force in American politics and American life well into the 20th century and beyond.
Death and Dying--Civil War Era National Cemeteries Discover Our Shared Heritage Travel Itinerary
The end of combat in spring 1865 offered an opportunity to attend to the dead...
Many of the missing soldiers of the Union Army lay in graves scattered across the South, often unmarked and unrecorded. In the fall of 1865, U.S. Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered an assessment of the condition and location of graves to ensure their protection, an increasingly urgent issue in face of growing bitterness and defiance in the defeated South. Units of northern soldiers searched across the battle fronts of the war for slain Yankees, inaugurating what became over the next six years a massive federally supported reburial program. Ultimately, 303,536 Union soldiers were reinterred in 74 new national cemeteries, and Congress officially established the national cemetery system. Careful attention to the content of graves and to the documentation that poured in from families and former comrades permitted the identification of 54 percent of the reburied soldiers. Some thirty thousand of the reinterred were black soldiers. Just as they were segregated into the U.S. Colored Troops in life, so in death they were buried in areas designated “colored” on the drawings that mapped the new national cemeteries.
This federal effort included only Union soldiers. Outraged at the official neglect of their dead, white southern civilians, largely women, mobilized private means to accomplish what federal resources would not. In Petersburg, Virginia, for example, the Ladies Memorial Association oversaw the reinterment of 30,000 dead Confederates in the city’s Blanford Cemetery. What was to become the cult of the Lost Cause in the latter decades of the century found an origin in the rituals of Confederate reburials.
The federal reburial program represented an extraordinary departure for the United States Government, an indication of the very different sort of nation that had emerged from civil war. The program’s extensiveness, its cost, and its location in the Federal Government would have been unimaginable before the war created its legions of dead, a constituency of the slain and their mourners, who would change the very definition of the nation and its obligations. The memory of the Civil War dead would remain a force in American politics and American life well into the 20th century and beyond.
Death and Dying--Civil War Era National Cemeteries Discover Our Shared Heritage Travel Itinerary
fyi. Removing the con flag from the state house in Floriduh was pretty meaningless as our state flag is really just a fancied up rebel flag.
^ still fighting the civil war...
South Carolina leaders call for removal of Confederate flag; Republicans reject white supremacist donations
"It's time to move the flag from the capitol grounds," South Carolina's Republican governor Nikki Haley said of the flag, which was a symbol of the pro-slavery South during the Civil War.
"This is a moment in which we can say that the flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state."
Charleston shooting South Carolina leaders call for removal of Confederate flag Republicans reject white supremacist donations - ABC News Australian Broadcasting Corporation
--
June 20, 2015
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said in a statement that "My position on how to address the Confederate flag is clear. In Florida we acted, moving the flag from the state grounds to a museum where it belonged."
In 2001, Bush ordered the removal of the Confederate flag from the Florida State Capitol, where it had flown since 1978.
But Bush's statement didn't explicitly call on South Carolina to do the same: "This is obviously a very sensitive time in South Carolina and our prayers are with the families, the AME church community and the entire state. Following a period of mourning there will rightly be a discussion among leaders in the state about how South Carolina should move forward, and I'm confident they will do the right thing."
Mitt Romney s opposition to Confederate flag puts GOP s current presidential candidates on the spot - The Washington Post
Yes, they do get some credit but it is a damn shame that nine people had to die before they decided we shouldn't be honoring traitors and racists.
