Civil War Burials in Lincoln County

This is the introduction to a forthcoming book by Matt Hayes and myself that will present data surveying Civil War soldiers buried in Lincoln County. However, it was written solely by myself and no one else has a right to reproduce it. I hold the copyright.

Civil War Burials in Lincoln County, Oklahoma

The real war will never get in the books.--Walt Whitman

For Civil War commemorations, 1915 was the big year, marking fifty years since the end of the conflict. This was true across the nation, and it was true in Lincoln County. The Prague Record outdid its competitor newspapers in Carney, Stroud, and Chandler (which boasted three) with a special Memorial Edition for May 27th that featured a spread of photos, stories, and poems that took up the entirety of page one. The largest photo, top and center, showed four veterans, two in gray flanked by two in blue and sitting together as comrades. It carried the headlines: Memorial Day 1915 / 50 Years of Peace Between North & South. Embracing the larger photo like bookends were, to the left, a drawing of a battle scene and, to the right, another of a pubescent angel releasing a dove of peace. 

Prague Record, Memorial Edition, 27 May 1915

In the upper left of the page, pride of place is given to a poem called “Grandfather Vet Speaks” which appears below an American Press Association photo of a white-bearded soldier walking hand in hand with his small grandson. Set in large type, the poem is two columns wide. The headline is misleading, for in fact it is spoken by the grandson, who recalls his granddad’s words.

My granddad fought in ‘61,

The year that saw the war begun.

He kept it up till ‘65

To keep our dear old land alive.

He says to me, “Should danger come,

With whistling fife and roll of drum,

Don’t stop to argue ‘bout the right,”

But answer duty’s call and fight.”

The poem marks that love of sentiment so characteristic of the era. It was a time when most literate people could write sentimental verse, and seemingly most of them did, with the majority being women. Like the kitchen, sentiment was regarded as the preserve of women. It had a pedagogical purpose as well, the point being that the importance of the War was not about being right but answering duty’s call.

The rest of the double column is devoted to “Lee’s Retreat from Gettysburg” by Mrs. Roger A. Pryor. She notes the self-evident fact that during the war more attention was paid to the wounded than to the dead then stops for an odd aside explaining to her readers that the day the nation is celebrating is not Decoration Day but Memorial Day: “Of late years many persons have referred to Memorial day as ”Decoration day.” Odd, I say, because her chronology is backwards. Decoration Day was the earlier term, especially in the South.

The point is worth considering since it has proved a topic for discussion and debate over the years. Recently the New York Times gave this account:

The custom of strewing flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers has innumerable founders, going back perhaps beyond the horizon of recorded history, perhaps as far as war itself. But there is the ancient practice and there is Memorial Day, the specific holiday, arising from an order for the annual decoration of graves that was delivered in 1868 by Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a group made up of Union veterans of the Civil War. According to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, roughly two dozen places claim to be the primary source of the holiday, an assertion found on plaques, on Web sites and in the dogged avowals of local historians across the country.

The preferred name for the holiday gradually changed from "Decoration Day" to "Memorial Day," which was first used in 1882. Memorial Day did not become the more common name until after World War II, and was not declared the official name by Federal law until 1967. In 1968 Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which moved four holidays, including Memorial Day, from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create convenient three-day weekends. The change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May.

The third column of the Prague Record is called “First Memorial Day” and subtitled “It Was Observed in May, 1865, in Charleston, S.C.” but this is a claim that has already been dealt with above.  The next column is devoted briefly to “Bits of Sentiment for Memorial Day,” including the reminder that “The nation’s holy of holies is about the resting place of her soldier dead.” The rest of the column is filled with “Just for Memories,” where we read of a custom now largely forgotten: “All the flags on public buildings will be lowered to half mast, bells will toll each thirty seconds during this time, and those who honor the memories of the men who died that the Union might be saved will, as in the past, stand uncovered.”  This directive came from the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic and of course ignores the Confederate side.

The last article, in the spirit of reconciliation, tells the story of the Vermont legislature having recently commended Mrs. Bettie Van Metre of Berryville VA for her care of Lieutenant Bedell of Westfield VT. Wounded at the battle of Opequo VA he was left behind by his regiment. He was picked up unconscious  and carried to the home of a family whose southern sympathies were so strong that he was left in an attic room for three days without proper care until Mrs. Van Metre, then twenty years old, heard of his condition and insisted on acting as a nurse. She watched over him in spite of the criticism of her friends and neighbors until he was able to be moved back to his home.

Finally, a pair of lines at the bottom right of the page announces special services on Sunday at the Prague Presbyterian Church.

On the whole, the rhetoric of the front page of the Prague Record emphasizes peace and reconciliation. As such, it still bids us to reflect. A civil war inspires hatred on both sides, and with 620,000 dead at the end of the war, half of them still lying or buried haphazardly in the fields where they’d fallen, there was plenty of ammunition for mutual recrimination. The first job was to count and identify the dead, then to send the bodies back to their homes and families, so that the work of grieving could be gone through. Then there would be time to erect memorials. The work of identifying the corpses required a bureaucratic organization that hadn’t yet been born, and the labor was nightmarish and long. In some cases the soldier might have pinned a paper with his name and hometown inside his jacket. In others he might have carried a Bible in which he had written his name. In still others, comrades took care of each other through mutual promises exchanged before battle. (The use of metal ID tags called dog tags was not introduced until World War I.)

In the final accounting, nearly half of the dead Civil War soldiers were never identified. The federal government had instituted an elaborate program of locating and burying the Union dead in newly created national cemeteries all over the South, where of course all the major battles with the exception of Gettysburg and some in the west were fought, and by 1870 some 300,000 Northern soldiers had been reinterred in seventy-three national cemeteries, with 58 percent identified.

In the North the interment of soldiers was pushed by a bureaucratic bulldozer of increasing power which freely visited Southern battlefields to reclaim its own, but in the South the bulldozer ignored the slain Confederate soldier, a rebel and thus an outlaw. For some years there was “warfare over the disposition of the dead.” In the South, the dead Yankee was left to rot where he lay, or his place of burial was plowed under and ignored. In the North, this happened too, but necessarily only around Gettysburg, the scene of the only major battle fought on Northern soil. Let one instance stand for many. When the national cemetery was established in Marietta, Georgia, a local Unionist suggested burying Northern and Southern soldiers together, but women of the area were horrified and insisted that the Confederate dead “be protected from a promiscuous mingling with the remains of their enemies.”

Retrieval and recognition of the Confederate dead took much longer due to inadequate resources. Even in the face of great obstacles, local memorial associations were forming in the South as early as 1866, organized and staffed largely by women. New cemeteries were created near battlefields, and existing ones were expanded enormously. By the 1890s hardly a town in the South lacked a monument, the omnipresent Confederate soldier on a pedestal in front of every county courthouse being only the most familiar example. Often these monuments were raised by memorial groups like the United Confederate Veterans or the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who spearheaded the fund raising. Many more towns dedicated monuments between 1885 and 1900 than had in the first twenty years after the war.

This process of institutionalizing remembrance was usually locally inspired, with the result that different dates were recognized in different parts of the South. The deep South tended to honor April 26th, the day General Johnston surrendered Atlanta to General Sherman, while towns in North and South Carolina adopted May 10th, the anniversary of the death of Stonewall Jackson. Virginia towns chose days ranging from May 10th to mid-June. By 1916 some regularity had entered the system with ten Southern states officially observing Memorial Day on June 3rd, the birthday of Jefferson Davis.  

Though there was no north-south agreement about the memorial date, a more important reconciliation was coming about, one that put aside the divisive political rancors of states’ rights and slavery to emphasize a common courage and dedication on the part of the soldiers who had fought on both sides. This has to be seen in contrast with the continuing hostility of the years 1865, 1866, and 1867, when southerners refused burial to northern soldiers who died on southern soil, and northerners replied in kind. It is the new spirit of reconciliation that lies behind the Prague paper’s image of Federal and Confederate soldiers sitting down together.  

Albeit the beginning of this movement belongs to the 1870s, it had an early harbinger when, so the story goes, two women decorating graves decided to decorate the graves of the Union as well as the Confederate dead, thinking that each grave whether Union or Confederate contained someone’s father, brother or son. A lawyer in Ithaca, NewYork read about this gesture of reconciliation and wrote a poem called “The Blue and the Gray,”which The Atlantic Monthly published in 1867. As we would say nowadays, the poem went viral. Its last stanza reads: 

No more shall the war cry sever,

    Or the winding rivers be red;

They banish our anger forever

    When they laurel the graves of our dead!

        Under the sod and the dew,

            Waiting the judgment-day,

        Love and tears for the Blue,

            Tears and love for the Gray.

It is everywhere quoted in the ensuing decades as the grounds for reconciliation. It was argued that what Decoration Day commemorates is not political positions but qualities common to both sides--courage, loyalty, and a spirit of self-sacrifice. President Woodrow Wilson's July 4 address for the 50th Gettysburg reunion summarized the spirit: "We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—except that we shall not forget the splendid valor."

(The only soldier buried in Lincoln County whom we know to have attended a Gettysburg reunion is James Riley (1844-1939), whose great-great grandson Melvin Chatman writes of a later gathering: 

From June 29 to July 6, 1938, the U.S. government and the State of Pennsylvania sponsored the [75th Gettysburg] reunion. Each Civil War veteran was authorized a chaperon at government expense. . . . James Riley, at the age of 94, was one of 1,850 ex-soldiers (all 90 years and older) from both sides who attended the event. Grandpa Riley was the only black veteran among the group of 63 representing Oklahoma. According to Francis Ellis, Grandpa’s grandchild who accompanied him, they did not see more than four or five other black veterans at the reunion.  Using a 99-cent camera purchased specially for the event, Francis took pictures at the reunion. . . . There is another significant event related to the Grandpa Riley’s participation in the Gettysburg Reunion. We believe he was the first “colored” Oklahoman to ride in a Pullman Sleeping Car. Both the Pullman ticket and photos taken by the 99-cent camera can be seen on Mel Chatman’s website “Chandler: The Ellis Family Story” listed below in the Sources.) 

It is this whole background of cultural conflict that makes the Civil War burials in Lincoln County important markers of something more than faded history. The murderous antagonisms fostered by the war didn’t simply disappear with Appomattox or the publication of “The Blue and the Gray,” and the lingering clouds darkened the nation’s memorial practices for decades. Though the end of the Civil War marked the birth of a new nation, free of slavery and bound by a centralized bureaucratized federalism, the old symbolic colors are still with us even today. Presidential-election results in recent decades are illustrated with maps showing the states in red and blue. The blue is the old blue of the union states of the solid northeast with the addition of three more on the west coast plus Hawaii, while the red, a color that suggests the red stripe that marked the gray of the uniforms of Confederate officers, has spread across the rest of the country like a great tide and even includes states that made massive contributions to the Union side like Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio. 

A great internal migration has taken place, as though the Scotch-Irish of the Appalachians had experienced a population explosion and a diaspora. But the explosion has not been ethnic; it is not defined by DNA but by cultural attitudes and identifications centered on a bitter opposition to federalism and multiculturalism. This is the sense in which can best be understood the fact that out of the Civil War came the Solid South. The Confederacy rose from the ashes of defeat to become a “City of the Soul” that took on a mystique that now recalls the grassroots of the Republican Party with its deep resentment against federalism. As noted by one of the twentieth-century South’s finest writers, “In the moment of death the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.”

But Memorial Day, a day dedicated to the remembrance of the Civil War dead, has always been a multiracial, multiethnic commemoration, and as such it was America’s first. It celebrates “the Independence Day of the Second American Republic.” To realize this we have only to survey the grave markers of Lincoln County. (Any other county north or west of the Mason-Dixon line would probably serve as well.) About ten percent of the Lincoln County Civil War soldiers are African-American, a figure that corresponds closely to national demographics. The dead include men born in Canada, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. Of those born in the United States, a handful come from the deep south (Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia,) and a large number from the divided or border states like Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. 

Lincoln County saw little intersectional rivalry or racial conflict, partly because the veterans came late, starting with the land opening of 1891, and partly because, as Hannibal Johnson says in his The Sawners of Chandler, the county seat was “an oasis of racial understanding.” No Civil War battles were fought in Lincoln County, nor were any race riots. Still, the county was not paradise. Though there had been de facto integration of schools in the pre-statehood period, statehood in 1907 brought with it Jim Crow with its mandatory segregation. Most graveyards were segregated from the start and remain so to this day. Some even have met the appalling fate of Dudley Cemetery west of Carney, once part of a dominantly black community. Many of the grave markers were bulldozed into a gulley by an oil company that had leased the land for drilling. The stones remain there to this day, as no community effort has ever been made to restore them. Carney maintains a FaceBook page called Carney Oklahoma History Buffs, but being a buff evidently doesn’t extend to restoring a graveyard. No doubt for reasons of racial blindness: the buffs are white and the dwellers at Dudley were black. 

The grave markers in the county come in three basic forms, standard issue from the War Department, common mortuary stones, and field stones that are illegible or have disappeared. Our attention will be directed to the first, for it is they which continue the public tradition of commemoration we have been discussing. The second group, the common mortuary stones, belong to men whose families were either ignorant of or unconcerned with procuring a standard stone from the War Department, and the field stones belong to the poor. These latter are the people Abraham Lincoln identified with when he told an early campaign biographer to ignore his beginnings because--as he said, quoting Thomas Gray’s famous “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”--they were merely “the short and simple annals of the poor.”  

Beginning in 1873, the US Department of Veterans Affairs furnished uniform government-issued headstones for unmarked graves of deceased eligible veterans. At first, this applied only to burials of honorably discharged Union (not Confederate) veterans in national military cemeteries. (Strictly speaking, Oklahoma boasts only three national cemeteries: Fort Gibson  with 23,922 burials, Fort Sill with 6,823 burials, and Citizens’ Cemetery, a.k.a. Cherokee National Cemetery with 3,514 burials, but in addition to these should be noted the Oklahoma Veterans Cemetery, a.k.a. Union Soldiers Cemetery with 222 burials.)   One historian states that “Despite the accusations of jobbery, bribery, and favoritism in 1876, the headstone program in fact was a success. More than 300,000 stones had been produced and set in just three years, and the work had been done for $200,000 less than the Congressional appropriation of $1,000,000. By the 1890s a contract for 10,000 stones was being tendered every two years . . . and the cost had dipped to $1.28 by 1900.”

In 1879, Congress extended the benefit to veterans interred in private (i.e., non-national) cemeteries. The Secretary of War was to record the veteran’s name and place of burial. Finally, in 1906, Congress authorized the furnishing of headstones for unmarked graves of Confederate soldiers. The headstone program continued for the Spanish-American war and for all later wars. The chronology just recited, however, creates a problem for the Civil War researcher. Only two databases exist for finding Civil War headstones. First there is “Headstones Provided for Deceased Union Civil War Veterans 1861-1904,” and then there is “Headstone Applications for Military Veterans 1925-1963,” but between 1905 and 1924 there is nothing except the National Archives, where the records do in fact exist on microfilm and can be printed, though the process is slow and costly. Why the 1905-1924 records are not online is a question for which no answer seems to exist. If we think of the average soldier as having been born about 1840, the first archive gives us the records for men up to the age of 65, while the second one catches men past 85, but of course few men lived so long. The absence of records for men aged 65 to 85 is a huge omission and hard to understand.

Yes, you may say, but the stones are there and surely they suffice without the supplement of paper records. Would this were true. In fact, the information included on a government stone is inadequate, especially for the first period. Between 1861 and 1905 the stone offered only the man’s name and the name of the unit he served with. This may have been fine for the family who buried him, they were satisfied to see his name carved in stone, but a hundred years later many of these stones are orphans. Without birth and death years, we can’t identify the person. Take the case of George Cooper, whose memorial stands in Parkland Cemetery and tells us he fought with Company I of the 6th Iowa Cavalry.

The first step in identifying him is to look for members of his immediate family in the same and nearby cemeteries, but this is unreliable because their given names are unknown and Cooper is a very common surname. Then we try the census for Lincoln County in the likely decades--not 1890 because it doesn’t exist, but 1900 and 1910, even 1920. He might be there but if we don’t know his place and date of birth or the names of his family members, we aren’t going to be able to pinpoint him among the many men named George Cooper. (In fact, there was no George Cooper around Parkland in the three censuses mentioned above, leading us to suppose he may not have lived there during a census year.) Then we try the historical-newspaper archive for Oklahoma, though it’s limited to about 1897-1920. The same problem as before: we don’t know enough about the man to be certain that a given reference to George Cooper would be the same man. 

GEO. COOPER / CO I / 6 IA CAV

A clue would be if his obituary mentioned military service, but for poor people often there is no obit. All we know about George Cooper is that since he’s buried in Parkland he probably lived around there. At last, we try the military records but caution must be exercised. The fact that George fought with an Iowa unit doesn’t mean he came from Iowa. And now instead of a half dozen men named George Cooper in the military or on the Lincoln County census, we’re going to be looking at hundreds. But say we get lucky and find a George Cooper in Company I of the 6th Iowa Cavalry. What does that tell us? Usually, nothing at all. It just repeats the information already on the stone. The stone itself could be a clue. Someone had to apply for it and a bureaucracy keeps records. If we don’t find it, what does that mean? Probably that he died in the interregnum 1905-1924, though we can’t be certain. What we really need is for him to have a pension record and a wife who outlived him so that her name might be mentioned as the recipient and his date of death be shown. That’s the El Dorado we’re looking for--the pension record. Equally good is an application for a grave marker from the period after 1924, which gives the date of death and the name of the person placing the order.  

We found very little in print to aid our search. After our research was done, we discovered Dale Talkington’s The Long Blue Line, giving data on Union soldiers buried in Oklahoma. But Talkington’s research pre-dates the internet, and, as the author admits in his preface, he merely shows the tip of the iceberg. He has about sixty entries for Lincoln County, while we have about four hundred, of which 90 percent are Union. 

Our primary sources for the records that follow are Find-a-Grave.com and the 1910 census, and each entry indicates the source, whether one or both. Our secondary sources are the older database at okcemeteries.net and the databases for vital statistics available at Ancestry.com, which includes military records. We began this survey with the 1910 census, which at column 33 indicates military service either by CA or UA. Many of these men, of course, did not die in Lincoln County, or their graves are unknown. Therefore, for the reader of these pages, the data from Find-a-Grave is the more important, with the 1910 census providing supplementary hints that can be pursued. 

Sources

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Chatman, Melvin. “Chandler: The Ellis Family Story.” http://www.ellisfamilystory.com/chapter01.html. Accessed November 2018.

Elliott, Bruce S. “Memorializing the Civil War Dead: Modernity and Corruption under the Grant Administration. Markers XXVI, Association for Gravestone Studies, 2011, pp. 15-55. Online at http://www.gravestonestudies.org.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: 2008.

Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South. Oxford University Press, 1987. 

Johnson, Hannibal. The Sawners of Chandler: A Pioneering Power Couple in Pre-Civil Rights Oklahoma. Fort Worth TX: Eakin Press, 2018.

Pounds, Wayne. “African-American Civil War Soldiers Buried in Lincoln County.” http://genealogytrails.com/oka/lincoln/africanamericancivilwarsoldiers.html

Robertson, Campbell. “Birthplace of Memorial Day? That Depends Where You’re From.” New York Times, 26 May 2012.

Talkington, N. Dale. The Long Blue Line: Civil War Union Soldiers and Sailors Buried in Oklahoma. https://books.google.co.jp/books? id=2wi0g7Dm6nQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed October 2018.

Warren, Robert Penn. The Legacy of the Civil War. Bison Books. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

Web, Jim. Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. New York: Broadway Books, 2004.

Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days & Collect. 1883; New York: Dover Publications, 1995.