#68 George
This past week I was on vacation and made visits to 4 Civil War battlefields in Tennessee. For me it was a way to get a better understanding of the war. Each battlefield has it's own story, it's own history and it's own outcome. But something they had in common was unimaginable death and suffering. The picture above is from the Military Cemetery at Stones River Battlefield in Murfreesboro TN. There are more than 6100 Union Soldiers buried there. Of those 2562 are unknown. The soldiers who could be identified have the name, state and sometimes rank and company listed. But, most of the unknown have a simple cube shaped marker with a number inscribed on top for location purposes. Also, there are a few with just the first name like my friend George. I call him "just plain George". I was walking through the cemetery reading the names and where they were from when I came across George. The thing about it is that you can tell the unknowns very easily, the maker is just a cube. But for George and a few others they are still unknown. My heart sank as I thought about the families of these men. George was someones son, brother, cousin, friend and maybe even a husband and dad. The family would have know that he died in the war and possibly where he died. They could have gone to Stones River and looked through the burial list and found a listing the says "George ----- First Interred at Shelbyville, #A68". It would have taken a little work but they could have found him.
But here is something I didn't know until I visited these battlegrounds. The Confederate soldiers are not buried in the Military Cemeteries. They were the enemy and most were buried in mass graves. No headstones, no ceremony, no proper burial. At Shiloh National Battlefield as well as most others, due to health reasons, all the dead where buried in shallow graves on the battlefield. The Union soldiers were later moved to cemeteries while the Confederates where not. There is as many as 11or 12 of these mass graves at Shiloh. However only 5 have been identified and are now marked. This makes me sad too. These men had families just like the Union soldiers however their families never had the chance to find and visit their graves.
I say all this because of the political correctness clement we live in. There are some people out there who want the names of high schools and other public buildings changed because these buildings are named for people in our history who owned slaves. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson just to name a couple. Or they want statues of Confederate officers removed from public squares. I think before we make snap judgments about our history, based on our feelings, we need to look at the human loss and suffering of these men and their families.
There were 620,000 men killed, 476,000 wounded and 400,000 capture or missing during the Civil War. That's over 1.5 million lives shattered.
What would happen today if we looked past our own feelings about life and looked at the suffering of others?
What would happen today if we tried to unite our country instead of dividing it over things that happened over 150 years ago?
What would happen if we put aside our own agenda and looked for the good in each other today instead blaming our past for the bad?
What would happen today.....
