“You can observe a lot just by watching,” Yogi Berra once said, and it still makes sense, even while just watching Graves.
In this iconoclastic season, when police stand by as hatefully ill-educated, black-clad doofuses tear down statues of our heroes (that are, to the sensitive soul, first and foremost, beautiful works of art), reminders of why Americans are the tolerant folk we are still abound in any major US city and lots of smaller ones.
In one 1800s-era Pittsburgh cemetery, city folk jog while others stop and ponder 150-year-old tombstones for a young family, the four children’s graves separated by a few years each. Small deer herds freely graze, and a flock of Canadian geese live here year-round.
Among hundreds of acres are fields half-paved with sunken, barely legible gravestones, and stone monuments including small Greek temples/burial vaults, architectural statements of the Steel City’s early industrialist elite’s financial might. Some are in disrepair, eroded by the elements, forgotten by families long gone, no longer connected to, or perhaps not even aware of this resting place of their ancestors, or what it all meant, back when.
The tombstones and monuments tell tales of financial might and obscurity, of filial love and loss. They speak of honoring a spouse, or a child or parents, or for young men who put their lives at stake, for love and honor.
In a quiet valley deep in the cemetery, a tall stone monument stands sentinel over a burial ground with a couple hundred graves of soldiers, most of whom died in the Civil War.
A bronze plaque on the monument reads: “Erected to the memory of the gallant men who gave their lives in defense of their country’s honor. By the Allegheny County Ladies Memorial Association. 1876.”
That ladies group was like many others across northern and southern US states after the Civil War, who worked to honor the sacrifices of Americans who died in battle. They helped their countrymen remember the sacrifices that others made for them.
What might seem ironic, at least for the modern day “woke” person viewing this graveyard, is that among the many Union soldiers’ graves are a handful of Confederates’ graves that are almost indistinguishable from the rest, unless you know their gravestones are shaped a bit differently than the Union gravestones.
Far north of the Mason-Dixon Line, in the unlikely resting place of one Pittsburgh graveyard, four Sons of Dixie found their rest. From Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi, they remain, and always were, Americans. That’s why they are here at rest with other Americans.
In fact, given the state of soldiers' remains when they were finally buried in places such as this lot, there could be other Confederates in there, marked as "Unknown US Soldier".
In 1862, a dozen national cemeteries and also many soldiers’ lots were created for burial of the 600,000+ Civil War dead. Some estimates put it at more than 800,000 dead, but they just don’t know and never will know. Many Americans have never been taught the ugly truth and so don’t know or realize that the US had a war, on its home soil, in which the dead were too many to count.
A true understanding of the sacrifices of the Civil War should dispel any fair-minded person’s belief in the neomarxist myth of White Guilt. The moral debt of slavery was repaid in blood in full and then some, long ago.
The average Union soldier was just 25 and you had to be 18 to sign up, but 16-year-olds could enlist with parental permission and many did. My great-great grandfather, Frederick Hawes, fibbed about his age to sign up for the Union Army at the start of the war, saying he was over 18, though he was not quite 16 at the time; he served nearly four years. It boggles my mind to consider just exactly how deaf that young man became in four years of war as part of an artillery group. But, he was like many other teens his age—there were about 200,000 16-year-olds who served in the Civil War. The average soldier on both sides of the war was a white, native-born, protestant believer.
By the end of the Civil War, there were about 30 national cemeteries and seven soldiers’ lots in private cemeteries. Despite the effort, the grisly task of burial was too great, and at war’s end many soldiers still were in shallow graves in farm fields, their remains becoming exposed. Many thousands, or perhaps even tens of thousands of the fallen, were never recovered. The most recently discovered remains of a soldier at Gettysburg were found in 1996.
Many of these soldiers that were lucky enough to be exhumed and properly buried were dug up long after the war or even years later, so identification was impossible for some of them. Because of this, many Confederate soldiers are buried as unknown US soldiers in Union cemeteries and likely, vice versa.
The mindset of the era was you remember the fallen, who by their dedication proved they were honorable and so, deserved to be honored.
These days, with many folk being too brutish to understand courage or honor, such greatness is hated by those who could never achieve it.
Still, it’s our duty to remember our ancestors’ great deeds, because they illustrate America’s greatness.
Author's note: This piece originally was written in Fall 2020.
