Cemeteries, Military

Cemeteries, Military. Few provisions were made prior to the Civil War for the maintenance of permanent cemeteries for Americans who died in military service. After battle, the dead were buried in hastily dug graves on the site or at nearby civilian cemeteries. In peacetime, commanders at many forts and outposts, such as Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in the 1840s, established burial grounds for soldiers who died. In the aftermath of the Mexican War, the United States established a cemetery in Mexico City for U.S. soldiers killed during the capture of that city.

During the Civil War, the U.S. government established a permanent national cemetery system in 1862 for uniformed personnel. Most of these army‐maintained cemeteries were located near a military hospital or major battlefield, although the battle dead were still frequently buried in scores of smaller, scattered plots, and the dead of losing sides were often interred in mass graves. After 1865, the Quartermaster Corps removed the bodies of Union soldiers from many of these smaller burial sites and placed them in large, more centralized cemeteries with standard markers for officers and enlisted men. It was at the dedication of the national military cemetery at Gettysburg (later Gettysburg National Military Park), only weeks after the battle, that President Abraham Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg Address defining the nature of American democracy.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the national military cemetery system for the Union dead served as an important site of both individual and collective mourning, especially on Memorial Day—a national day of mourning for the Union dead designated by the Grand Army of the Republic in 1868 and by Congress in 1887. In these national military cemeteries, state governments, veterans' groups, and other organizations erected memorials commemorating particular units, states, or other entities. By the late nineteenth century, Civil War cemeteries at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Shiloh served as the nucleus of a system of national military parks. In 1872, Congress extended the right of burial in national military cemeteries to all Union veterans of the Civil War. To foster sectional reconciliation, the federal government in 1912 allowed burial rights to Confederate veterans in Arlington National Cemetery (originally established in 1864).

There still remained, however, strong local and regional patterns of mourning that militated against having all the war dead buried in national cemeteries. Families retained the right to reclaim bodies. The bodies of service members who had died in most subsequent foreign wars were returned by the federal government to the United States. During the Spanish‐American War and the Philippine War, the army created the Quartermaster Burial Corps to disinter those who died overseas and to return their bodies to the United States.

In contrast, World War I brought significant support among internationalists to create permanent U.S. military cemeteries overseas to symbolize the American commitment to Europe. This proposal aroused considerable opposition from families who wanted the fallen buried in home‐town cemeteries and from isolationists who feared that the European cemeteries would commit America to defend those countries in the future. In response to such disagreements, Congress and the War Department affirmed the right of each family to decide where a soldier would be buried. In 1923, Congress created the American Battle Monuments Commission to build and maintain permanent cemeteries abroad to cover U.S. participation in World War I. After World War II, this authority would be extended to cemeteries in battle grounds in Europe, North Africa, and Asia.

No overseas cemeteries were established for either the Korean War or the Vietnam War. Initially, Americans killed in the Korean War were buried in overseas cemeteries in Korea, but even before the war ended, Washington decided to bring all the bodies back to the United States. This practice differed from that of almost all other major nations, such as Great Britain, which buried soldiers on or near the battlefield. During the Vietnam War, the bodies of the American dead were flown immediately to the United States for burial in either national or private cemeteries.

In the twentieth century, Veterans' groups like the American Legion were active in ensuring that veterans and their spouses were accorded the option of burial in the national military cemeteries, especially Arlington National Cemetery. Since many of the cemeteries were established near the sites of Civil War battlefields or hospitals, they were widely dispersed. With some success—often over the opposition of funeral directors, private cemetery managers, and the national government—veterans' organizations pressured Congress to create smaller military cemeteries nearer to major population centers. The army finally agreed. Only a limited number of new cemeteries were added in the immediate post–World War II period, generally after sufficient pressure was placed on Congress by veterans' groups and local leadership. In 1962, during John F. Kennedy's administration, the army officially abandoned any plans for a new system of military cemeteries for 16 million veterans and their eligible dependents.

The army had held full control over the national cemeteries until 1933, when eleven Civil War battlefields near national military parks were transferred to the control of the National Park Service. Veterans' groups opposed to the policy of nonexpansion lobbied Congress to transfer jurisdiction of the national cemetery system away from the army and place it with the more sympathetic Veterans Administration (VA). In 1973, the VA gained control of most national cemeteries—except for Arlington.

National cemeteries have served as important sites for commemoration and public ritual, especially during Memorial and Veterans Days. American presidents have visited overseas national cemeteries to underscore U.S. commitments abroad. In the twentieth century, Arlington National Cemetery evolved into a powerful site of national collective memory with the creation of the Tomb of the Unknowns, the Memorial Amphitheater, and the burial of a number of prominent civilian leaders, most notably John F. and Robert Kennedy.
[See also Battlefields, Encampments, and Forts as Public Sites; Memorials, War.]

Bibliography

James M. Mayo , War Memorials As Political Landscape, 1988.
David Charles Sloane , The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History, 1991.
Dean W. Holt , American National Cemeteries, 1992.
Garry Wills , Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1992.
G. Kurt Piehler , Remembering War the American Way, 1995.

G. Kurt Piehler