A National Cemetery System

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 confronted the urgent, unplanned need to bury fallen Union troops, helping drive the creation of a national cemetery system. On September 11, 1861, the War Department ordered commanding officers to keep accurate and permanent records of deceased soldiers, and it required the U.S. Army Quartermaster General to mark each grave with a headboard; a few months later, the department required burial in graves marked with numbered headboards and entered 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 the service of the country, and fourteen national cemeteries were established by 1862. After the war, in October 1865, Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Megis directed officers to survey lands in the Civil War theater to locate Union dead and prepare for their reinterment in new national cemeteries, with sites chosen near camps, hospitals, battlefields, and railroad hubs where troops had been concentrated. By 1872, seventy-four national cemeteries and several soldiers' lots contained 305,492 remains, about 45 percent of them unknown; most cemeteries were less than ten acres, and their layouts varied. The Act to Establish and to Protect National Cemeteries of February 22, 1867 funded permanent walls or fences, grave markers, and lodges for cemetery superintendents. 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 those whose names were known, while six-inch-square blocks marked unknowns. By 1873, military post cemeteries on the Western frontier had joined the national cemetery system, and the National Cemeteries Act of 1973 transferred eighty-two Army cemeteries, including twelve of the original fourteen, to what is now the National Cemetery Association. The war's human toll also shaped remembrance: two percent of the U.S. population died, memorials to war service were erected in national cemeteries, Decoration Day began in 1868 as a popular patriotic spring observance, monument construction peaked in the 1890s, and by 1920 more than 120 monuments stood in the national cemeteries.

Leesburg, Virginia · United States