The Debate over Honoring the Confederate Dead
By STEVEN V. CRONIN
American Cemetery & Cremation
Sometimes, the dead can’t rest in peace.
That was the lesson Robin Simonton learned when vandals snuck into Historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina, late in 2015 and defaced nine monuments, mostly in an area of the cemetery where Confederate soldiers and their supporters are buried.
The vandals splashed monuments with red paint and spray-painted graffiti – such as “KKK” – causing more than $20,000 worth of damage.
“They showed up in the night and vandalized,” said Simonton, director of the 102-acre cemetery. “There was no precursor for this; we were stunned.”
And while shocking, the incident was just one of several of around the country recently that demonstrate how the debate over symbols commemorating the Confederacy is spilling into cemeteries.
In August, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it was banning Confederate flags from flying on flagpoles in cemeteries it administers.
For the past two years, a group of congressmen have sponsored a measure in the House of Representatives to ban federal funds from being used to fly the Confederate battle flag at cemeteries operated by the VA. The measures, however, have never received final legislative approval.
In Union Springs, Alabama, an activist made news in 2015 when he removed Confederate flags from graves at a local cemetery. The same thing happened in April 2016 at Bryan City Cemetery in Texas, when someone stole 160 Confederate flags placed there by the local branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
And even far north in Gray, Maine – where a long-ago wartime error resulted in a single Confederate soldier being buried in the town cemetery – someone tore out one of the Confederate flags placed there every Memorial Day.
“I’m upset. I don’t care what flag it is,” said Chris Stickley, superintendent of the cemetery. “It’s the desecration of someone’s grave.”
Until recently, cemeteries had largely escaped the debate about the display of the Confederate flag and Confederate monuments.
In many cases, fallen Confederate soldiers and veterans are buried in private cemeteries, so there is not the question of government sanctioning display of what some say is a symbol of racism and oppression and others say is a celebration of southern heritage. There also seemed to be a consensus to leave the long dead out of any modern political fight.
Calls and emails to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Black Lives Matter group – all of which have spoken out against display of the Confederate flag – were not returned. Myron Penn, the attorney who removed the flags in Union Springs, did not return a call to his office.
In a statement released following the House vote on his measure, California Congressman Jared Huffman said the Confederate battle flag – the familiar red and blue stars and bars flag now most-often associated with the Confederacy — has no place in “our sacred national cemeteries.”
“Symbols like the Confederate battle flag have meaning. They are not just symbols of pride, they represent slavery, war, lynchings, and tragedy,” the statement said.
Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, who co-sponsored the measure, said the battle flag “is a symbol of treason,” and flying it at national cemeteries is disrespectful to those who fought and died to preserve the Union.
“These brave Americans gave their lives opposing everything the Confederate battle flag represented,” Ellison said in a statement. “We should ensure that the flag that their enemies carried so proudly does not fly above their graves.”
Many of those who permit display of Confederate flags at their cemeteries also do not want to discuss the subject. A call to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, the final resting place of 28 Confederate generals as well as Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, was not returned. At Magnolia Cemetery, in Charleston, South Carolina, where 3,000 Confederate soldiers are interred, Superintendent Beverly Donald made it clear she didn’t want to talk on the subject
“I’m not interested in replying,” Donald said, and then hung up her telephone.
Michael Landree, executive director of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, is one person willing to speak out in favor of displaying the flag at cemeteries. He says modern moves to ban the practice are going against an agreement arrived at more than 100 years ago.
“It was accepted by the North and the South; After Reconstruction, the North said they would honor the sacrifices and valor of the southern soldiers as long as the South recognized the legitimacy of the federal government and the United States,” said Landree. “This was the agreement up until about 15 years ago.”
Landree, who served 28 years in the Marines and is a retired colonel, said banning the flag from cemeteries shows disrespect to men who fought and died for a cause they believed in and goes against the American principle of tolerance.
“The basic premise of freedom in America is that we don’t always agree on everything but we respect the opinions of others, we make allowances for those we disagree with, “ he said.
Landree also rejected arguments that allowing the battle flag on Confederate graves is akin to sanctioning the display of swastika flags on the graves of German soldiers killed during World War II.
“It’s a bad analogy, since the Confederate States did not invade anyone,” he said.
Whoever vandalized the graves at Oakwood targeted specific monuments.
“The CSA fought for the right to enslave” was painted on the marble obelisk marking the grave of Gen. George B. Anderson, who was killed at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862.
The letters KKK were painted on the grave marker for Lt. Randolph Abbott Shotwell, who survived the war and was later jailed for his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan.
“White Supremacist” was painted on a monument to Charles Aycock, North Carolina’s governor from 1901 to 1905 who worked to suppress the black vote.
“Not Heroes” was painted on a bronze plaque and marker dedicated to the crew of the Confederate submarine CSS H.L. Hunley. The wreck of the Hunley, which was lost in February 1864 after sinking the warship U.S.S Housatonic, was discovered and raised in 2000. Its crew was buried at Magnolia Cemetery four years later, in an elaborate ceremony that included an honor guard of Confederate re-enactors.
The targeting of specific graves at Oakwood showed the vandalism was not a spontaneous attack.
“These folks had done their research,” Simonton said.
Oakwood Cemetery was founded 147 years ago as a resting place for Confederate soldiers. There are 1,400 soldiers buried in the Confederate cemetery, including many originally buried on the battlefield at Gettysburg and in Arlington National Cemetery but later disinterred and moved to North Carolina.
The cemetery displays the Confederate national flag from a flagpole but does allow the placement of Confederate battle flags on graves.
The cemetery does not shy away from its past and conducts educational tours and discussions that touch on the flag issue.
“We are not afraid to have difficult conversations,” Simonton said. “We talk about race during tours.”
But Simonton said that discussion needs to be civil and respectful.
“I feel that a cemetery is as sacred as a church. In the course of normal human discourse, we should be having these discussions about race in America. But, if you have to bring a can of spray paint into a cemetery to discuss that, you are in the wrong spot,” she said.
Apparently, a lot of people on both sides of the issue agree with her. Simonton said she was touched by the outpouring of support the cemetery received following the vandalism.
The cemetery raised $26,000 to remove the paint and has completed much of the work. The obelisk of the Anderson monument is made of limestone, and the graffiti, along with red paint splattered on the marker, has been absorbed by the stone and is proving difficult to clean, Simonton said. Officials there are now trying to determine their next move to prevent further incidents. Simonton knows of Confederate monuments on public property that are repeatedly vandalized. She hopes that is not the case at her cemetery.
“It would be pretty daunting to feel that this might happen again,” she said. “In many ways, we hope whoever perpetrated this has seen the huge outpouring of community support and realized this is not how the conversation should be held. If they thought people would support them, they were clearly wrong.”
The public support or outcry wasn’t as strong at Gray Cemetery, where Stilkey is still angry about what he considers a cowardly act of desecration by “a punk or some activist-type of person.”
“I was surprised, but I wasn’t surprised. People’s attitudes are so poor, they think they have the right to do whatever they want to do,” he said.
The story of Gray Cemetery’s Confederate soldier is actually a tale of a town doing what it felt was right, even in the midst of a brutal and devastating conflict.
The residents of the small Maine town proportionally saw more of their sons go off to fight the war than any other town in the state, according to the town of Gray website.
More than 178 of them are now buried in the small village cemetery. One of the spots was intended for Lt. Charles H. Colley, who fell in 1862 during the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Colley’s family arranged to have his body returned home for burial. However, when the casket was opened, they found a soldier dressed in a gray Confederate uniform.
Rather than return the body to the South, the town buried the man in its cemetery, erecting a headstone that simply read “Stranger.”
Since the 1950s, the grave has been marked by Confederate battle flags – a gesture suggested by a Georgia resident who’d heard the story of the small town’s compassion.
The flag is usually placed on the grave for Memorial Day, when all the Civil War graves are decorated with flags, and usually remains on display through Veterans Day.
Stilkey said the gesture shows the town doesn’t “care who you are. You are an American.”
“Who knows what he believed. We don’t know if he supported slavery,” Stilkey said. “We know he served in the war. We honor our Civil War men up here,” he said.
For more than 50 years there had not been a problem about the flag display. But in the summer of 2015 – amid the debate about Confederate symbols following the murder of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina – someone removed the flag from the grave and threw it on the ground.
“It blew my mind,” said Stilkey, who had never heard any complaints about displaying the flag at the cemetery. “Up here, we don’t really think about it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say, ‘We won the war.’”
Like Simonton, Stilkey isn’t sure what can be done to protect the grave from further vandalism, short of 24-hour surveillance.
He, however, doesn’t think the incident will discourage volunteers from placing the Confederate flag on the unknown soldier’s grave on future Memorial Days.
“If you are spending your afternoon putting out flags in a cemetery, you do it because it makes you feel good and you are doing something special,” he said.
For her part, Simonton hopes the vandalism at Oakwood proves an isolated event.
She says displaying Confederate flags and symbols in a private cemetery isn’t the same as displaying the flag at public buildings or statues in public parks.
“If you are talking about taxpayers’ dollars on a square, it’s more open for discussion on whether they should be there or not. When you are talking about someone’s headstone on private property, then I think we are dealing with a whole other set of problems,” she said.
The cemetery was founded by the Wake County Ladies’ Memorial Association, one of the groups that worked after the war to locate fallen Confederate soldiers and rebury them in the South.
If there is a place where Confederate flags and symbols should still be displayed, it is a cemetery, Simonton said.
“If the Confederate flag is going to fly, this is the proper place,” she said. “These boys gave their lives for it.”
“We welcome productive conversations, but these graves should be off limits. Not one person buried in this cemetery did not make a mistake,” she said. “I think it’s wrong to judge the past on today’s morays and social norms.”
SIDEBAR
Rules Limit Display of the Flag at Federal Cemeteries
The debate over displaying Confederate symbols on public property has broadened to include national cemeteries.
In August 2015, President Obama banned flying Confederate flags from flagpoles in national cemeteries. Small flags will still be allowed to be displayed on individual graves.
“In particular, we will amend our policy to make clear that Confederate flags will not be displayed from any permanently fixed flagpole in a national cemetery at any time,” the Washington Times quoted Ronald E. Walters, under secretary for memorial affairs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, on the move.
Federal legislators began trying to ban the Confederate flag in federal cemeteries following the murder of nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a gunman who had posed for pictures in front of the Confederate battle flag.
While twice passed by the House, the Senate did not take up the measures.
The National Park Service administers 14 national cemeteries, according to spokeswoman Kathy Kupper. The park service knows of 47 Confederates buried in those cemeteries, she said.
There are, however, other cemeteries containing Confederate dead within the boundaries of national parks, such as at Appomattox Court House, that the park service has no control over, Kupper said.
There are several reasons for the low number of Confederate dead at park-service administered cemeteries.
In some cases, such as at Gettysburg National Cemetery, the approximate 3,500 Confederate soldiers who died during the battle were banned from burial there from the start.
“The soldiers’ National Cemetery was set aside to be the final resting place for those who gave their last full measure to preserve the Union,” according to an article on the Park Service website. “There was to be no room for those trying to destroy it.”
After the war, Southern groups worked to recover soldier remains from hastily dug graves on the battlefield, as well as other battle sites, and interred them at cemeteries in the South.
There are 482 soldiers buried in the Confederate section of Arlington National Cemetery, according to the Washington Post. The section, which features a monument honoring the Confederate dead, was created in 1900 to allow authorities to consolidate the resting area of Confederates who were buried in the cemetery, as well as other national cemeteries in the Washington, D.C. area. Bringing the Confederate dead together was intended to ease lingering tensions from the war and allow Confederate mourners to decorate the graves, a practice sometimes forbidden when the graves were among those of northern soldiers, the newspaper said.
Current rules allow for Confederate flags at cemeteries administered by the parks service, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of the Army, but strictly limit when and how they are displayed, according to papers prepared by government analysts in the wake of the Charleston killings.
The Park Service allows for display of the flag on Memorial Day and Confederate Memorial Day. In both cases, sponsoring groups must provide and place the flags, and the groups must remove them as soon as possible. The Confederate flag must be accompanied by an American flag on Memorial Day. Confederate flags can’t be flown on Park Service cemetery flagpoles. The Park Service has also asked those operating its concession stands not to sell items that solely depict the Confederate flag. Parks can only display the flag on flagpoles when they provide historical context.
The Department of Veterans Affairs allows placing small flags at individual Confederate gravesites on Memorial Day and on Confederate Memorial Day in states that mark the day. The department no longer allows flying the Confederate flag on flagpoles in cemeteries that contain the mass graves of Confederate soldiers. In the past, regulations allowed for display of Conferate flags, but stipulated they were to be on their own flagpole and must be subordinate to the United States flag. Groups must submit a request to display the flags and must provide and remove the flags.
The Army policy allows the display of small Confederate and United States flags on Confederate graves on Memorial Day or Confederate Memorial Day. Private groups must purchase the flags and remove them on the first workday following Memorial Day or Confederate Memorial Day.
Groups placing the flags have to absolve the federal government of any responsibility for their loss or damage.
