An estimated 700,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War between April 1861 and April 1865, and as the death toll rose, the U.S. government struggled with the urgent but unplanned need to bury fallen Union troops, helping propel the creation of a national cemetery system. On September 11, 1861, the War Department directed commanding officers to keep accurate and permanent records of deceased soldiers and required the U.S. Army Quartermaster General to mark each grave with a headboard, then soon mandated interment in graves marked with numbered headboards and recorded in a register. Authority to create military burial grounds came in an Omnibus Act of July 17, 1862, which directed the president to purchase land for national cemeteries for soldiers who died in service, and fourteen national cemeteries were established by 1862. After the war, in October 1865, Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs ordered officers to survey the Civil War theater for Union dead and plan their reinterment in new national cemeteries, with sites chosen where troops had been concentrated, including camps, hospitals, battlefields, and railroad hubs. By 1872, seventy-four national cemeteries and several soldiers' lots contained 305,492 remains, about 45 percent of them unknown. Congress funded permanent walls or fences, grave markers, and lodges for cemetery superintendents in the Act to Establish and to Protect National Cemeteries of February 22, 1867. At first, only soldiers and sailors who died during the Civil War were buried in national cemeteries, but in 1873 eligibility expanded to all honorably discharged Union veterans, and Congress appropriated $1 million to mark the graves. Upright marble headstones honored individuals whose names were known, while six-inch-square markers identified unknowns, and by 1873 military post cemeteries on the Western frontier had joined the national cemetery system. The National Cemeteries Act of 1973 transferred eighty-two Army cemeteries, including twelve of the original fourteen, to what is now the National Cemetery Administration. The nation also reflected on the war's human toll, with 2 percent of the U.S. population dead, as memorials were built in national cemeteries, Decoration Day began in 1868 as a popular patriotic spring event, monument construction peaked in the 1890s, and by 1920 more than 120 monuments stood in the national cemeteries.

Photo: Jason Voigt

Quincy, Illinois · USA