This is truly good news. A son of the South comes home to his final rest. Now if we can just keep the PC crowd from defiling the event with their lies and historical delusions.
Posted on 10/06/2002 8:34:43 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
BOSTON, Sept. 30 (UPI) -- At long last, Confederate Navy Lt. Edward J. Johnston will be making his final voyage, home to a hero's welcome.
Johnston is believed to be the last Confederate prisoner of war buried in New England.
But thanks to the efforts of veterans groups and Civil War re-enactors in the North and South, his remains are to be moved from Massachusetts to Florida for reburial this month with full Confederate military honors, 139 years after his death.
This will be Johnston's fifth -- and final -- grave. This one, however, is special. It will be with his wife and children at Fernandina Beach, Fla.
"There's an empty grave at his wife's feet waiting for him," said Bob Hall, a Massachusetts veteran who was instrumental in taking up the cause to return Johnston home. "He'll be buried there."
Some 500 people, including officials, Civil War re-enactors and dozens of descendants, plan to take part in ceremonies when Johnston's body is exhumed Oct. 12 at Fort Devens, Mass.
Then, on Oct. 26, his remains will be reburied with his wife, Virginia, at Fernandina Beach, also known as Amelia Island, separating Florida from Georgia on the Atlantic coast.
Some 1,500 people -- including 25 to 50 of Johnston's 200 living descendants -- are expected at the Florida ceremonies, according to Dana Chapman, a founding member of the Georgia Civil War Commission who is coordinating the events.
"They are coming from all over the country," she said, adding it will be a "hero's homecoming."
"The biggest comment that everybody makes is he needs to be home, he needs to be where his family and friends are," Chapman told United Press International.
She said Johnston's family had been trying for 70 years to have the body returned, but never could afford the expense.
Chapman had a few words of criticism for the federal government for failing to take the necessary steps earlier to reunite Johnston with his family.
"The federal government moved these remains four times," she said. "This was absolutely appalling in itself, but what appalled me more about the federal government was they knew when they moved him the fourth time where his family was. Why did they not move him to Fernandina instead of to Fort Devens?"
Chapman, however, had high praise for the "wonderful example" of cooperation among veterans groups in Massachusetts, Georgia and Florida.
Georgia became involved because it was initially believed Johnston came from that state, but it was later determined his home was in Florida.
Hall, an official with the Olde Colony Civil War Round Table and retired special assistant to the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Veterans Services, said there had been talk about moving Johnston yet once more to a new veterans cemetery in Agawam, Mass.
Hall said when he went to see his boss, Tom Kelley, Kelley said, "Why don't we try to get the guy back home?"
"Being an American from the South," Hall said, "he belongs back home."
Using the Internet, Hall was able to locate some of Johnston's living relatives and, as Chapman put it, the effort "just purely snowballed."
"If it had not been for the Internet, this wouldn't have happened," Hall said. "There's no way I could have found 54 relatives or anything else."
One of those descendants, Johnston's great great grandson, Ben Korbly, 57, of Philadelphia, called the "final move" project "a very gracious and honoring thing."
Hall told Johnston's story to United Press International.
Born in 1827 in Dublin, Ireland, to Scottish parents, Johnston sailed to Florida with his parents when he was 3. At 14 he came back to the sea, becoming an engineer. After returning to Ireland for several years, he sailed back to Florida and in 1853 met and married his wife. According to some records, they had five children, many of whom are buried with their spouses in the Fernandina family plot.
When the American Civil War broke out between the Northern and Southern states in 1861, Johnston, being a sailor, joined the Confederate Navy and was made a lieutenant.
He was aboard the ironclad blockade-runner CSS Atlanta when it was captured by the USS Weehawken off Savannah, Ga., on June 17, 1863.
Johnston and other ship's officers were imprisoned at Fort Warren on George's Island in Boston Harbor.
On Oct. 13, 1863, he died at the fort, most likely due to a combination of pneumonia, dysentery and diarrhea. He was about 39.
Union guards and other prisoners collected $75 to buy a 1,500-pound granite stone marker for his grave.
When the fort closed, Johnston's body was reburied first on nearby Governor's Island and then Deer Island, and it and the stone marker were moved in 1939 to their current site at the Fort Devens Army cemetery in Ayer, Mass.
"The stone has followed him at all four graves to this point," Hall said. Despite being "very old, cracked," the granite slab is to make the final journey to Florida with Johnston.
Johnston's return is "historically significant because it'll never happen again," Hall said. "There's no possibility of any more Confederate prisoners of war still being buried in New England. He's the only one. It'll be the last time we will be sending a prisoner of war home.
"What happened when the war ended, those who were buried here in New England, as far as I know, the ones who died were from Fort Warren, the only prisoner camp in New England." Hall said. "They were all Navy, and they were all officers. So after the war their families were wealthy enough and could afford to pay to have their bodies sent back home. In the case of Lieutenant Johnston, when his shipmates were released in 1865 and went back home, nobody went back to Fernandina to tell his wife, so his family never knew where he had died, where he was buried."
It wasn't until about 1917 when a granddaughter started a search for him that she eventually found that he at that time was buried at Governor's Island. But the family was unable then or later during the depression years to raise enough money to return the remains to Florida.
That problem was overcome earlier this year when a member of the Georgia Sons of Confederate Veterans, George Hagan Jr., called Chapman after learning of the effort.
"'The bill is paid to move him home,'" Chapman said Hagan told her. When informed it would cost $10,000 or more, she said he responded, "'I am picking up the tab.'"
Following the ceremonies at Fort Devens, Johnston's remains will be carried by a funeral home van with the gravestone in another vehicle in a procession for the three-day drive to Florida.
As the procession passes through each state along the Interstate 95 route down the East Coast, state troopers will be in escort.
Chapman said Confederate and Federal re-enactors have asked for schedules so that they can stand by the roadside along the route to "fire their weapons in salute as the cortege passes by."
She said the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy, re-enactors both North and South, and other officials are going all out to welcome Johnston home.
"It's a big deal, a very big deal," she said, "and I am delighted that it has turned into the big deal that it has."
After arrival, the body will be at the Oxley-Heard Funeral Home in Fernandina Beach until the morning of Oct. 26, when the casket will be placed aboard the CSS Belle, a replica of a Confederate Navy vessel.
The Belle will sail about 5 miles up St. Mary's River to a docking point near the Bosque Bella Cemetery on Amelia Island. That will be Johnston's final voyage.
Draping the casket will be a replica Chapman made of the flag from the CSS Atlanta, and the Bonnie Blue flag from the casket of his granddaughter, a former president of the Florida United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Hall and Chapman will take part in both ceremonies, along with many others who have made the event possible.
Hall, an enlisted man in the Navy during World War II, has been made an honorary captain in the Confederate Navy and a special uniform was made for him to wear for the two events.
Feeling she has been "adopted" by "Edward," Chapman said the "bring him home" effort "has been one of the most pleasurable jobs that I have done in a great number of years."
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(For more information, see Web sites civilwarnews.com/news; hometown.aol.com/gordonkwok/occwrt.; scv.org)
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
Thank you for your service. We are forever indebted.
We owe to our guys to bring them home.
This is truly good news. A son of the South comes home to his final rest. Now if we can just keep the PC crowd from defiling the event with their lies and historical delusions.
for dixie,sw
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