Posted on 04/14/2008 8:29:57 PM PDT by BenLurkin
LANCASTER [California] - The sharp scent of gunpowder hung in the air with the smoke from a booming cannon shot as a lone trumpeter played the solemn notes of "Taps."
This ceremony of remembrance played out twice Saturday afternoon at Lancaster Cemetery...
The Civil War mourning ceremony, organized by Friends of the Lancaster Cemetery, honored all five veterans of that war - four Union soldiers and one Confederate - who are buried in the cemetery, but specifically two for whom new grave markers were dedicated.
James Madison West was born in Ohio in 1843, and died in Lancaster on Oct. 11, 1934, at the age of 91. He enlisted in the Union Army at age 19, and served in the 115th Illinois Infantry Regiment until he was discharged for medical reasons in Tennessee in July 1863.
Morgan Price was born around 1831 in Mississippi and died at Del Sur on the west side of the Valley in 1919, at the age of 88.
Price enlisted in the Confederate States Army in 1861, serving in the 10th Texas Regiment of the Texas Infantry. He was captured in Arkansas in 1863 and was a prisoner until the end of the war.
Although the other three Civil War veterans in the cemetery had military headstones, neither of these men's graves were so marked. The cemetery organization received markers from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the upright, white stone markers were dedicated Saturday.
A joint color guard, consisting of members representing groups of descendants of those on both sides of the conflict, opened the ceremony wearing the blue and gray woolen uniforms of their ancestors.
They were joined in the audience and at the podium by women wearing the somber black mourning dresses of the mid-19th century.
(Excerpt) Read more at avpress.com ...
Thanks for the post Ben. With three great-grandfathers in the conflict (both North & South), I love reading articles like this, and Lancaster is only 200 miles south of me.
We call Lancaster “Sandblaster.”
“You may forgive us but we won’t be forgiven. There is a rancor in our hearts which you little dream of. We hate you, sir.” (Said by a surrendering Rebel officer to Joshua Lawrence Chamberlin at Appomattox.)
In the 143+ years since Appomattox, their rancor and hate has long faded from memory. These brave men, so passionately committed to their different causes, now sleep together as brothers in the soil of this Great Nation which was formed out of that tragic conflict. R.I.P.
Actually it had faded within 25 years. The veterans of the Civil War met for reenactments at Gettysburg in 1888, 25 years after the battle, and again in (I believe) 1923. There is actually movie footage showing the old codgers rushing or doddering into battle again. What the movie doesn't show is that before and after this reenactment the veterans of both North and South were amiably coexisting in the town of Gettysburg--drinking together, playing cards, and (in some hardy cases) whoring.
To a great extent it was we women who kept a lot of the bitterness alive. My own kin who actually fought in the War had abandoned their hatreds within 25 years after the War ended, as my father abandoned his hatred of the Japanese shortly after World War II ended.
That was a beautiful and poetic statement you made, BTW, and I don't mean to minimize its grace with my observation.
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