7/16/2006

HISTORY on the march

I see that HISTORY is on the march and that history had better get the hell out of the way. The report (with my emphasis):
VERONA, Miss. - The body of a Confederate soldier discovered on property slated for development has been laid to rest in a cemetery. [...] Funeral patrons got the full view of how fallen soldiers were laid to rest during the Civil War with more than 100 re-enactors participating in the burial. [...] Dressed in wool costumes that were worn by Confederate soldiers, the re-enactors marched through the cemetery with Grist's coffin, which was pulled by a mule-drawn hearse.
Meanwhile, this just in from the costume department at the Army War College:
Early in the Civil War, hasty and mass burials occurred without benefit of identification and documentation, because the large number of casualties were both unanticipated and unmanageable. As late in the war as 1863, specific reference to mass graves appears in the report of Samuel Weaver, who was responsible for relocating Union dead from battlefield gravesites to the newly established National Cemetery after the Jul 1863 Battle of Gettysburg.