Existing comment:
Fields of Stone:
"Of all the cemeteries I have visited this seemed to me the saddest, the loneliest. Few ever pass the cemetery by that road through the swamps and fewer still pause to enter the gate and look upon the graves of the heroic dead. Such is the irony of war."
-- A 1920s visitor to Glendale National Cemetery
Before the Civil War, Americans treated death with great respect. Battles like Glendale and Malvern Hill changed that. The armies, without the time or the resources to provide the usual care, handled battlefield dead with callous disregard -- at least by pre-war standards. Hot summer weather mandated speedy burials for friend and foe alike. Days after the battles were fought and dead were imperfectly buried, many of them as "unknown soldiers," and most of them in mass graves.
When the Confederate army camped on these battlefields briefly in June 1864, its soldiers found that the elements had exposed many of the graves. "On every side of us lie the bleaching bones of those who fell," noted a South Carolina soldier. "A dentist might make a valuable collection of teeth: I have seen on beautiful set."
In May 1866, the United States government sent working parties to build cemeteries and to collect the Union dead from these two battlefields. Eventually they buried about 1,200 Union soldiers at the Glendale National Cemetery, of which only 242 are identified. Most are in a mass grave in the center of the cemetery. The Confederate dead never were collected systematically. They remain unmarked; the battlefields are their ceremony.
The earliest known view of the Glendale National Cemetery reveals its primitive appearances. The Nelson House, used as a headquarters during the battle on June 30, can be seen in the distance. |