Taxpayer Funds Used to Maintain Confederate Graves and Memorials

[The Straight Story]

When President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address only 19 weeks after that pivotal battle, the graves of the dead were still unmarked, but local officials had already separated them so that Union soldiers—but not the rebels who had killed them—would receive headstones on hallowed ground. Nevertheless, today the federal government spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to maintain the graves of those who died trying to destroy the United States by carving a separate nation out of it.

Specifically, the Department of Veterans Affairs, through the National Cemetery Administration, has spent more than $2 million since 2002 to provide more than 18,000 headstones honoring Confederate soldiers, often at the request of local pro-Confederate groups in the South. Although the federal government started providing headstones for veterans under legislation passed shortly after the Civil War, this honor was reserved for those who served in the U.S. military, not for those who fought against it.

That started to change in the early years of the 20th century, shortly after white supremacists across the South had succeeded, after decades of effort, in completely disfranchising blacks and establishing the Jim Crow system of racial oppression. Under the rubric of “national reconciliation,” explains historian William Keylor, “there’s this new mode of American nationalism and patriotism and there’s this emphasis on reunion and reconciliation, and that’s good news for the whites in the South, but bad news for blacks in the South.”

Part of this whites-only reconciliation was a statute passed in 1906 providing headstones for Confederate prisoners of war “who died in Federal prisons and military hospitals in the North and who were buried near their places of confinement,” but which was expanded to include all rebel dead in 1929.

http://www.allgov.com/news/where-is-the-money-going/taxpayer-funds-used-to-maintain-confederate-graves-and-memorials-130721?news=850618

[lapfog_1]

1. For God's sake, lets let them win the war already

and then that wall they keep harping about... lets build a really good one...

and invite all Teapublicans to go to the south and all Dems and liberals in the south to move to the "sane states of America"...

and no, they can't keep any US federal government assets... especially military.

But they can keep all of their guns and bibles.

[southernyankeebelle]

2. It's time to leave the civil war behind and let the dead on both sides rest in peace. We

can honor both sides by maintaining all federal grave sites. I think Lincoln would want us to unite.

[loli phabay]

4. this, as a taxpayer i have no problem with paying to upkeep these pieces of history.

[southernyankeebelle]

5. neither do I. We should maintain all federal gravesites.

[redgreenandblue]

3. If you start injecting the morality of the conflict into commemorating soldiers...

...then we can do away with tax payer funded memorials for Vietnam and Iraq war veterans as well.

Can't have it both ways. Either the broader context of the conflict matters, or it doesn't.

[XemaSab]

6. Even though they were wrong, they're Americans

I'd rather spend two million on keeping American cemeteries maintained than on killing even more people, Americans or foreigners.

According to the internet, that's not even enough for 10 minutes in Afghanistan.

(Besides, I think it would piss them off to be thought of as Americans. That alone is worth the price of admission. )

[Eleanors38]

7. Sounds like a fight ready to be picked.

[coldmountain]

8. The Confederates were traitors fighting for slavery and should not be honored by taxpayers

Time to forget about the losers