…Then Bring Them Home

It is said that in 1869 some Southern women entered Arlington to lay flowers on Confederate graves and were turned away by bayonet. They came on the day that Union graves were being so honored. Hearing of this story, James R. Randall (Maryland, my Maryland) wrote a poem. This is the last stanza that describes the scene after a storm blew the Union decorations to the Confederate graves.

And when the morn came, young and fair,

Brimful of blushes ripe and red,

Knee-deep in sky-sent roses there,

Nature began her earliest prayer

Above Triumphant Southern dead.

So, in the dark and in the sun,

Our cause survives the tyrant’s tread

And sleeps to wake at Arlington!

In 1900 and 1901 there are several stories in Southern papers indicating that the women of the South were not all in favor of burying their sons, brothers, and fathers at Arlington. This was at the time when Congress provided funds to have Confederates, buried in and around Washington DC, reinterred at Arlington.

“Mrs. W. J. Behan, president of the Ladies’ Confederate Memorial Association, addressed a letter to the army of the Tennessee Association, in which she said that although numerous requests had been sent to the War Department asking permission to bring to New Orleans the remains of Confederate soldiers buried in and around Washington the Secretary of War had instructed the quartermaster-general to bury the South’s dead in a national cemetery”

“…it is now proposed that the Daughters of the Confederacy in North Carolina claim their dead and bring the remains of the bodies of all North Carolinians to their native State, to rest in the Confederate plot in Raleigh in the shadow of our own beautiful monument.”

Seems these women were right at the turn of the 20th century. The United States Government cannot be trusted to properly honor Southern dead if they will destroy a memorial to them. The South should bring her heroes home.