For three hot summers, Rufus Weaver toiled to retrieve Confederate soldiers’ remains from crude Gettysburg battlefield graves. His efforts to get paid for his hard work proved to be nearly as difficult.
In 1889, Weaver wrote to his friend, Ada Egerton: “Over 16 years have now passed away and today over twelve thousand dollars (including interest) is due me without a line from any of those interested in the debt—debt which you have often truly said is one of ‘Sacred honor.’” Weaver certainly had a right to be aggrieved, for $12,000 in 1889 is the equivalent of more than $350,000 today.
How did this happen? How could an obligation of this size have been created? Weaver was not some Wall Street financier or speculator in land or railroad stocks. He was a physician and a lecturer in human anatomy at a medical school in Philadelphia. Who could possibly owe him a sum of that size?
The original obligation was created in the decade following the end of the Civil War, when Southern women sought to provide proper resting places for their fallen husbands, sons, and fathers. At the end of the war, tens of thousands of soldiers’ graves dotted battlefields from Pennsylvania to Louisiana. Soldiers were generally buried where they fell, and any farmer’s field was likely to contain a grave.
The area around Gettysburg, Pa., was no exception. It is estimated that approximately 7,800 men were killed during the three days of that battle. Nearly all were buried hastily. Some graves were marked, other graves were simply trenches holding dozens of bodies, unmarked except for signs indicating the number of bodies therein. During the nine months following the fight, the bodies of 3,354 Union soldiers were exhumed and reburied in Soldiers’ National Cemetery, dedicated in November 1863. The bodies of Confederate soldiers were left where they lay.
As the U.S. Army advanced over old battlefields during the final year of the war, it discovered that many men had been buried improperly. In some cases, skeletons wearing tattered Union uniforms lay in plain sight. Acting under the authority of an 1862 act of Congress, the War Department began to rebury the Union dead into what became known as “national” cemeteries.
There the graves of soldiers who fought to preserve the Union were protected, cared for, and decorated on the new holiday known as Memorial Day. Once again, Confederate dead were not welcome in those cemeteries. This rankled many Southerners, so the ladies of the South took it upon themselves to care for the fallen as they had cared for the wounded soldiers who had fought for “the Cause.”
A Ladies Memorial Association was established in almost every major city in the South, its purpose being to care for the graves of Confederate dead. In some cases, that was merely a matter of decorating the graves in existing cemeteries, but in places like Winchester, Va., where a great
