Memorial Day Through the Years: Remembering the Fallen

Once Lost, Now Found, Never Forgotten.”

So reads the card tucked into flowers that appear each year on grave #540 in the Fredericksburg National Cemetery. Sergeant Jerome Peirce of the 36th Massachusetts Infantry was killed at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House on May 12, 1864, leaving behind a wife, Albinia, and a daughter, Lucy. He was buried in a temporary grave before his remains were moved to the national cemetery. In 1919, Albinia sent $100 to cemetery Superintendent Andrew Birdsall, also a Civil War veteran, asking him to use the interest earned on the fund to decorate Peirce’s grave each year. Birdsall, and later his descendants, have quietly and faithfully fulfilled the request at Memorial Day every year since.

As the card on Peirce’s grave suggests, he was fortunate among his fallen comrades to have a marked gravesite. In a battle’s aftermath, the dead were often buried in hasty, shallow graves, if buried at all. Only soldiers whose bodies had some form of identification or whose fellow soldiers recognized or recovered their bodies rested in marked graves on the battlefield. After the war, the federal government scrambled to bury the Union dead, first in small cemeteries and later in organized, concentrated “national cemeteries.” White Southern women formed associations to organize and re-inter Confederate soldiers. The task of identifying the dead became more difficult with the passage of time and in some cases, exposure to the elements. Countless grim markers in National and Confederate cemeteries alike told the same story: Unknown.

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