22 March 2007
Eternity on Georgia Ave
Eternity is an easy concept if you ignore it. It is harder when you have to come to grips with it.
The Post Office apparently noticed that it is inconvenient when they increase the cost of sending a first class letter by a few cents, since we all have to rush out and purchase those penny stamps to make up the difference.
When the rates go up this Spring, the Post Office is supposed to issue a new, eternal stamp that will be good for all time, or at least as long as the Republic. There is some controversy about whether people will speculate in the futures market on letters.
I only send a few bills a year anymore, and a couple dozen Holiday cards, so I am not going to panic. There are only a few dollars at stake. I intend to deal with the new stamps the same way I deal with the rest of eternity. I'll ignore it.
That is pretty much how the Government dealt with the dead of the Civil War. They were all over. Everyone agreed that they were actually The Honored Dead, at least in the oratorical flourish, but in a war of motion, or headlong flight, they also became inconvenient.
The troops had to deal with them as they could, and the KIAs were often buried where they fell. When peace returned, they were almost always disinterred from shallow graves, by then anonymous, when the civilians came back to marvel at what the elephant had wrought in its passing.
Congress can recognize a problem when it is whacked over the head sharply. It authorized President Lincoln the authority to purchase cemetery grounds in July of 1862, a year into the fighting.
Twenty-seven places of burial 27 burial bore the designation of National Cemetery by the end of 1864, and eventually reached 73 during the 1870s, when a post-war burial reburial program was completed.
The problem was compounded because there were two types of cemeteries established. The Honored Dead and their companions in eternity, the Dishonored enemy, were often buried where the armies happened to come together with such awful friction.
Haste was a requirement. The war brought on major innovations in the embalming industry, which permitted bodies to be shipped home by rail, and the prototype of the "dog tag," invented by Union troops who knew they were going to die in repeated assaults on the impregnable Confederate positions at Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg.
The grounds of Arlington House near my lodgings in Big Pink were confiscated early on to accommodate the honored dead, but the acute need overwhelmed any rational plan to deal with the numbers.
Gettysburg's Soldier Cemetery where Mr. Lincoln gave his short address remarks occupies a central role in the way we think of all the nation's dead, but the cemetery was a creation of the local residents, who noticed the wind and rain opening the shallow graves, and paid workers to clear the field for more than a year after the battle. The Union casualties, many unknown, were re-buried with a little dignity in centric rings around a flagpole.
Some of the Confederates left behind by Lee's retreating army were not collected for nearly a decade, and some still turn up in the construction projects that encroach on the fields around the Emittsburg Pike.
Suffice it to say that the dead were a continuing problem.
Which is how I found myself swerving off Georgia Avenue the other day to visit the honored dead. You would miss the Battleground National Cemetery if you did not know it was there. It is a little bitty thing, just larger than a regular house lot. The City has spilled over the forts a half mile to the south, and marches north now in a parade of liquor stores, discount pharmacies and assorted mom-and-pop businesses.
Once it was the country road out of town in green fields on the way to Rockville, Maryland . Now it is a down-at-the heels retail strip that fronts homes of quiet desperation.
The battle in front of Fort Stevens has considerable significance in the history of America's honored dead. While not a large engagement, it was breathtaking in its audacity. On July 11, 1864, Early's Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia stood in battle order facing the northern defenses of Washington .
Hysterical rumors swept through the city, claiming that Lee himself was not far behind with the veteran Corps commanded by grim James Longstreet and A.P. Hill.
The local press and military commanders were consumed by fear that U.S. Grant had gone a bridge too far across the James River in his haste to crush the Rebel army and seize Richmond .
It was a calculated risk on Grant's part, but the gambit offered Lee the only way out of the Union's death grip. It was a brilliant stroke that inflamed the popular imagination. Every man in the capital capable of bearing arms was pressed into service. Amputees from the hospitals hobbled on crutches to the ramparts of the forts. Civilian clerks of the Quartermaster General's Office was good for a battalion of a hodge-podge composite regiment commandeered by the Quartermaster General himself, Brigadier General Montgomery Meigs.
If you are going to die, but seek to make a small mark on eternity, it is useful to be commanded by the Quartermaster General, since his trade is in organization and the movement of inanimate things.
Meigs wrote in his annual Report that:
"The bodies of the loyal officers and men who fell at the sortie [were] buried in a piece of ground selected for the purpose in the midst of the battlefield and is sight of Fort Stevens. It is hoped that Congress may see fit to cause a monument to he erected to the memory of these patriots who fell in defense of the Capital itself."
The Battleground National Cemetery was the answer. There are 41honored dead in two concentric rings around a tall flagpole sandwiched between an ominous -looking apartment building and an alley. There is a small brick house for the groundkeeper, and a bedraggled portico constructed in the classic Greek manner from which addresses might be given in praise for the ultimate sacrifice.
The entrance to the Cemetery is flanked by two 6-pounder, smoothbore guns of Civil War vintage. All forty-one of the dead are honored by having their names on their stones. All are identified, which is the key point to this little tale. They are laid in neat concentric circles which originally contained the earthly remains of forty soldiers, mostly of Frank Wheaton's Second Brigade, but including men of the four volunteer regiments that fought at Fort Stevens:
o 25th New York Volunteer Cavalry
o 122nd New York Volunteer Infantry
o 150th Ohio National Guard, Company K
o 98th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry
Each has a commemorative pillar, which peep over the low brick wall toward the busy avenue.
I kept half an eye in that direction to see what the homeless men might be doing to my car.
The 41st stone in the outer circle belongs to a veteran of the battle who wished to join his comrades when he passed into forever at the age of 92.
The cemetery is an important turning point in the way we think of our veterans and our dead. It was the very prototype of how we behave on Memorial Day, and why we have been looking for the missing of SE Asia for decades.
There is a counterpoint to this proud little postage stamp of a national memorial, just a couple miles north on Georgia Avenue. It is on the right side of the street, on the grounds of the current Grace Episcopal Church. It is the modest plinth that marks the mass grave of the 17 Confederates who were left on the field when the assault on the capital failed. They have been moved twice since they fell to accommodate increased commuter traffic on the avenue.
They have no names now, though my understanding is that they did once.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com