I had occasion to visit a country cemetery about the same time the really silly parts of the Confederate flag conversation was going on. It is the kind of place where, standing in the center, you can see the cemetery was carved out of otherwise unused land. You don’t hear anything except the breeze and, occasionally, some far distance heavy machinery. You can’t even see the country road off which you turned onto the gravel path to get there. It is a pretty and peaceful place and in a part of the world where you still refer to people by a plural version of their family name.
The cemetery sits most of the way up a rolling part of a tiny, tiny foothill in the southern Appalachians, in a part of the region that, during the Civil War, was as confusing and complicated as any other. Most of the people that lived in this part of the world then weren’t even secessionists. Historically, you would find, that many of them saw the entire conflict as a war of the men that lived in other parts of the South. In this part of the world, then, things could get particularly personal and bitter. Supporters of both sides had violent conscription efforts terrifying families.
In fact, on one side of my family the young men tried to stay out of the war, but were eventually enlisted to the Union’s cause when their soldiers came through. On the other side of my family there are at least some documented Confederates and these people all lived within 30 or so miles of one another. This sort of thing was not uncommon in that area.
Anyway, the cemetery would have been a great opportunity to write another navel-gazing essay about the way of things. Near one entrance to the cemetery was the marker of this man, who I am not related to:
Someone placed a Confederate flag there.
To the left was an entire line of James Fleming’s family buried right alongside. A few generations and not many more plots away you read that some of his descendants served in later wars. And beside their markers someone had placed American flags.
Livingstone’s 8th Cavalry, by the way, was organized late in the war, reporting to duty in the summer of 1864 and fought in Alabama and Florida before surrendering at Gainesville the next year.
The TL:DR aspect of the essay would be that, for some people, this is complicated. That got lost in the heated rhetoric in the long-overdue move to take those flags from government land, which is probably fine. And it seems dismissed entirely in the even deeper rhetoric of that imagery in general, and that seems simultaneously good and a shame. For some people it is complicated.
Nearby here is another old cavalry man:
The 4th Alabama cavalry was formed in 1863 and fought in east Tennessee, Mississippi and all over north and central Alabama. They were essentially a hyperactive home guard before many of them were captured at Selma in the spring of 1865.
And I just put this one here because I like the name:
Ollice was a farmer before World War II. He had some grammar school under his belt. He was enlisted at Fort McClellan, in Anniston, a week before Pearl Harbor. That’s all I can find about him online.
Next time I’m in that area I’ll have to ask around. There are still plenty of McNatts in that area.
