The following story takes place after the Civil War, and on a Confederate battlefield. It is one of those touching stories about loss and healing after America’s most brutal war.
Marked End of Bitterness
For a long time there was a rigid rule against erecting any but Federal monument in Federal battlefield cemeteries and Confederate monuments in Confederate cemeteries. But as time passed and the bitterness healed, slabs here placed here and there denoting that a one-time enemy slept among the others. When Memorial day came, the flowers were placed ungrudgingly on the alien’s mound.
In one of the southern cemeteries where a northern soldier rests, there was for a long time a practice of decorating every Confederate grave with a tiny Confederate flag – the Stars and Bars. As the survivors and the widows and orphans of the Confederate dead came spring after spring to strew their flowers and plant their flags they halted at the Yankee soldier’s grave for a second with bitter thoughts. Finally, as time passed and their grief lessened, they placed flowers on their foeman’s grave also.
In 1872, as a young widow of one of the dead Confederates went with her little daughter to decorate the graves, the girl noticed that no Confederate flag had been placed on the northern soldier’s mound. So she placed one there. The chairman of the Memorial committee, passing by, removed it.
The little girl burst into tears and it was hard to explain things so as to satisfy her. Her elders began to think over the incident.
The next month, when the widow again went to the cemetery, she brought with her a small Stars and Stripes, which she had procured only after considerable difficulty.
This she silently handed her little daughter, who placed it lovingly on the Yankee soldier’s grave.
Source: The Blackfoot optimist. (Blackfoot, Idaho), 27 May 1915.
