![\"Confederate](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/Confederate-dead-051515.jpg\")
\n(Those who died during the Battle of Raymond were buried on a hillside in the Raymond Cemetery. The hillside later became the Raymond Confederate Cemetery. Randal McGavock was buried here the day after the battle of Raymond, but later removed. The plot is mowed neatly and well maintained. Photo Socotra).<\/p>\n
I felt triumphant that our search had been successful, and what had been family myth was now filled in memory and digital record with a sense of space, and place. The air was moist and gentle on our skin and we turned back on the black-top and drove slowly down to Highway 18 for the right turn north back to Raymond. I took a sheaf of notes out of my back-pack and glanced quickly down Uncle Patrick\u2019s account of the aftermath of the battle, recapping the events that happened after the battle.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, Patrick goes back to get Colonel McGavock\u2019s body, which was just where he left it, near the edge of bluff near the sign we found. He got two members of H Company to volunteer to go with him and carry the body. Gregg\u2019s Confederates were beating feet north to escape the Yankees.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ladies of Raymond had made lemonade and a light lunch for them,\u201d said my friend, negotiating off the big bypass road and back onto the human scale of Port Gibson Street. \u201cThey could not stop to tarry, and you can say that the Yankees ate their lunch.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cUncle Patrick and his comrades were making a slow go of it with the body. They were overcome by the vanguard of the Yankee advance, and Patrick had to threaten his friends at gunpoint to keep them from running. Seeing that capture was inevitable, he let them go. The Union troops gave him the raspberry, but he said he was beyond caring. Eventually the commander of the rear guard, a Captain of Infantry named McGuire, took pity on his fellow Irishman and had the Colonel\u2019s corpse put in a wagon to be hauled to town.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSounds a little like the movie Weekend at Bernies,\u201d smiled my friend, swerving off the road onto the grass near the historical marker at the Raymond Cemetery. We dismounted and walked over to read what was on it.
\n![\"confederate](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/confederate-cemetery-marker-051515.jpg\")
\n\u201cA hundred and forty Confederates,\u201d I said. \u201cWhere did the Union dead go?\u201d<\/p>\n
My friend smiled, a little sadly. \u201dLook at the terrain, going up slope toward the wrought iron fence around the Confederate graves.\u201d I did, and the lowering sun showed a pattern of shadows revealing oblong dimples under the verdant greensward.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were all here, too. There was no provision for a Graves Registration Service in either of the Armies. After the fight, combat troops were detailed to bury the dead before they putrefied. There was no embalming for most of them. There wasn\u2019t any specific provision for it, unless a Suttler following the Army was there to provide the service at private cost. The threat to public health was the biggest deal in what we know now as the first modern mass war.\u201d
\n![\"City_Point-051515\"](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/City_Point-051515.jpg\")
\n(This is what the cemetery at Raymond would have looked like in the days immediately after the battle. This image is of the graveyard at the City Point Hospital near Richmond, VA. Collection of the New York Historical Society, nhnycw\/ad ad35012).<\/p>\n
\u201cNo wonder most of the casualties were from infection or disease. But if the Union dead where here, where did they go?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cProbably to the National Cemetery in Vicksburg. That is a story in itself. The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865 is estimated to be north of 600,000.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWait, that is more than all the other wars in American history until Vietnam!\u201d<\/p>\n
My pal nodded. \u201cYep, and they were buried where they fell. That lead to a bold plan devised by Army Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs to find, disinter and re-bury the Union dead in a new system of national cemeteries.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew he directed the first burials at Arlington, partly out of revenge for the death of his son in combat. But I had no idea he was behind an entire campaign to dig up all Union Corpses and bury them together.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAside from the War itself, that was the first big government social program. As Reconstruction was rolled out, resentment was growing across the South. Union cemeteries in the southern towns were becoming an emotional issue. General Meigs dispatched teams to all the major battle sites in a six-year massive Federal program to locate, disinter and rebury the Union dead. Ultimately, well over 300,000 bodies were reinterred in 74 new national cemeteries. They tried their best to identify them, eventually naming more than half. Clara Barton ran her own agency to locate and identify the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat boggles the mind, no kidding. Clara\u2019s vision for the Red Cross came out of her experience in Fairfax County and the search for the missing after the war. I saw that her Missing Soldiers Office in DC has become a museum. I will put that on my District Bucket List. Was that only for the Union Dead?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course. The South was vanquished. Identifying and memorializing the Rebels was a local or State matter, and there was no money for that. Outraged at the official neglect of their dead, white southern civilians, mostly women, mobilized to accomplish what federal resources would not. That is where the cult of the Lost Cause began in the sense of violation. The ladies of Columbus, Mississippi began to decorate the Southern graves in 1866.\u201d<\/p>\n
We unlatched the wrought iron gate and walked slowly down the rows of Confederate graves. They are marked with distinctive stones that come to a gentle point, unlike the Union markers that are gently rounded. It is said they were carved that way so that Yankees wouldn\u2019t sit on them.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the whole Memorial Day holiday flowed from that, right? But even that is controversial. Some people claim it was freedmen in Charleston who began decorating the graves of Union prisoners in 1865 to commemorate what the fight was really about.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cControversial indeed. In fact, like the social changes brought by World War II, there is one America before 1861, and completely different one after 1865. So, your Uncle Patrick brought the Colonel\u2019s body back to Raymond, and then what happened?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPatrick was a prisoner, again. By nightfall he had been taken to a hotel in Raymond that was being used as a prison by the Union forces. The Colonel\u2019s body spent the night on the porch. The next morning, Captain McGuire stopped at the Hotel to deliver a two-day parole. Free to move around, Patrick found a carpenter and paid him $20 to build a plain wooden coffin. He then hired a wagon, and a procession of prisoners under guard gave an escort of honor, and the burial was right here. He got the grave marked so the Colonel\u2019s relatives could find it easily. Then he went back to being a POW.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe escaped later, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is his story, and he stuck to it the rest of his life. His daring escape from a prison boat and the trip back down the river to re-join his family is quite an epic. Ultimately, he rejoined the fight as a headquarters scout and railway saboteur in the Georgia campaign of that crazy Texan John Bell Hood.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGood story,\u201d said my friend.<\/p>\n
\u201cMight even been true. Patrick named his daughter Louisa McGavock Griffin after the Colonel.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happened to the Colonel\u2019s body after Raymond?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy understanding is that McGavock\u2019s sister Ann and her husband, Judge Henry Dickenson, traveled to Raymond and made arrangements for the body to be brought to their home in Columbus, MS. After the war, the remains were moved one final time to Mt. Olivet Cemetery. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1866, Patrick\u2019s Colonel finally came to his final destination and was interred in a formal Masonic ceremony. They say most of Nashville\u2019s Irish population was there to honor their former Mayor. Far as I know, he has remained there since.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe moved more in death than a lot of people do in life. Care for a drink?\u201d<\/p>\n
I did indeed. We walked back down the hill and mounted up to drive the back roads back into the future, and presently we found ourselves in the bright lights of Clinton.<\/p>\n
We stopped at an Applebees near the Holiday Inn Express. It was Mother\u2019s Day, and the crowd was brisk and very diverse. We sat at the counter in the middle of the restaurant and the server brought us some menus.<\/p>\n
\u201cSweet tea?\u201d she asked pleasantly. \u201cSunday, no liquor.\u201d<\/p>\n
She must have assumed we were ignorant Yankees, but was courteous about it. It is the way of things down South.<\/p>\n
![\"graves-051515\"](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/graves-051515.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra<\/p>\n
www.vicsocotra.com<\/p>\n
Twitter: @jayare303<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Those who died during the Battle of Raymond were buried on a hillside in the Raymond Cemetery. The hillside later became the Raymond Confederate Cemetery. Randal McGavock was buried here the day after the battle of Raymond, but later removed. The plot is mowed neatly and well maintained. Photo Socotra). I felt triumphant that our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10483"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10494,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10483\/revisions\/10494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}