A Confederate veteran buried in Union soil with an American flag flying above his grave? I recently arrived early at
an Ohio sister Presbyterian Church for a meeting. Since I was the first one
there and the building was still locked, I walked across the country road in
front of the sanctuary to a cemetery on the other side from where I had parked.
While I had been to this church before, I had never taken the time to stroll
through the nearby graveyard. I was surprised and perplexed by what I saw.
Under a bright sun set in a
nearly cloudless sky on a warm August Sunday afternoon, I meandered among the
tombstones and freshly mowed grass. As I slowly walked around, I was drawn by
small American flags waving in the slight breeze – the ensigns inviting me to
more closely examine the markers they were attached to. One Stars and Strips marked
the grave of a Revolutionary War Veteran. Another identified the final resting
place of a Veteran of the World War. I assumed the marker had been placed there
before there had been a Second World War. Another signified a Veteran of Viet
Nam. Several were attached to markers
denoting Union Soldiers.
As I examined a Union
Soldier’s grave, one John Cole, whose tombstone had held up very well in spite
of its years of being exposed to the elements, I noticed that he died in
Martinsburg, Virginia on February 18, 1863 at the age of 20 years, 10 months,
and 11 days. I quickly did the math and determined that if John had lived just
four months and two more days before he died he would have died in Martinsburg,
West Virginia rather than Martinsburg, Virginia, on Union soil rather than
Confederate soil.
Another of those American
flags waving in the breeze indicated a Confederate Veteran, but the tombstone
was so deteriorated that I could not read a single word of its inscription, if
it ever had one. Then, in light of the recent controversy over statues of
confederate generals and politicians being removed from public spaces, I
thought how ironic it was that the remains of this Confederate Veteran
(presumably from Ohio, which seemed odd) was lying in a grave marked with the
flag of a country and a government he had fought against. I shared my quandary
with a friend who speculated that some well-meaning veteran’s organization
quickly moved through the burial ground and placed United States flags on the
graves bearing a veteran’s marker without noticing that this particular veteran
was a veteran of the Confederate States of America, not the United States of
America.
At the southern end of North
Carolina’s Outer Banks on the island of Ocracoke is a small “British Cemetery” where the bodies of several British Sailors, veterans of World War II, are
interred, their bodies having washed up on Ocracoke after their ship had been
sunk while defending the American coast. The United States eventually deeded
that land to the British and a Union Jack now continually flies over the tombs
of those British Soldiers, tombs in British, not American soil. Admittedly, the
British were at that time, and have been ever since, our allies. Those sailors
of a foreign nation died defending American (and therefore British) interests
in a struggle against Nazism. If the bodies that had washed up on the beech
been of German Sailors and had been buried there, I doubt the land would have
been deeded to Germany or that a Nazi flag, or even a German flag would now be
flying overhead.
What of this Confederate
Veteran whose body lies buried in an Ohio Cemetery, Ohio having always been a
“free state” of these United States of America? How might a Confederate Soldier
feel, if a corpse were able to feel, not only being buried on foreign soil but
lying underneath the flag of a nation and a government he fought against?
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