22 Confederate Soldiers Reburied in Moving Tribute

In the shadow of Ft. Sumter, where it all started, the Civil War finally came to an end Friday for 22 Confederate soldiers whose remains were reburied in a grand and stirring ceremony that organizers called the largest Confederate funeral since 1871.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been a dramatic day: Hundreds of men dressed in gray Confederate flannel, marching smartly from the city’s waterfront to its historic cemetery, a solemn escort for a cortege of flag-draped coffins pulled by horse-drawn caissons. Even in a place that considers itself the cradle of the Confederacy--the “Holy City,” as some Southerners call it--the event promised to be extraordinary.

But with South Carolina under political siege these days as the last state still flying the Confederate flag, and with tension building over a flag-related boycott called by the NAACP, Friday’s funeral threatened to become not just a Civil War reenactment, but a riot. Police feared that many groups, from the Ku Klux Klan to local African Americans, would use the occasion to provoke a nasty confrontation.

Instead, the day was oddly quiet, and often touching, and many of the 3,000 people on hand--including a few African Americans, among them the city’s black police chief, dressed as a Union soldier--were moved to tears. Instead of slavery and states’ rights, the dominant themes of the day were honor, sacrifice and the eternal dominion of the dead over the living.

Much of the day belonged to Randy Burbage, president of the Confederate Heritage Trust, which first discovered the soldiers’ remains. “It’s hard to describe,” Burbage said, shortly after his own regiment of Civil War reenactors, rifles over their shoulders, entered the oak-filled Magnolia Cemetery on the banks of the Cooper River. “Looking back at that column of men, those coffins, and the response from the community. . . .”

He stopped, as he did so often during the day, to collect himself.

“And Wednesday night,” he continued, “when we transferred the remains into the wooden coffins, all built by the descendants of Confederate veterans. . . .”

Again he stopped, this time reaching into the pocket of his Richmond gray officer’s frock for a white linen handkerchief to dry his eyes.

It was 1993 when Burbage and other descendants of Confederate veterans found, through interviews with officials and searches of musty records, that 39 soldiers, mostly sailors in the Confederate Navy, were lying beneath the football stadium at The Citadel. A clerical error in 1948 apparently caused the stadium and its parking lot to be set atop a forgotten Confederate graveyard.

With the military school’s grudging permission, Burbage and fellow volunteers organized an archeological dig. For days they sifted the soft dirt, until they found 13 soldiers, whom they promptly reburied in a more modest ceremony. Then, last summer, they organized a second dig, and hit the mother lode: 22 soldiers, plus a 3-year-old child, possibly a soldier’s son.

“Gosh, that was an emotional moment,” Burbage said. ‘We all got down in the hole, and we held hands, and we sang, ‘Dixie.’ You could feel something. It was like they knew we’d come to get them.”

Little is known about the 35 soldiers. Judging from the buttons on their worm-eaten uniforms, they fought in units from Georgia, North Carolina and Florida, and died around 1864, during the siege of Charleston. One had a .36-caliber bullet in his gut.

Jonathan Leader, the deputy state archeologist who examined the remains and served as a pallbearer Friday, said the bones showed signs of hard, bleak lives--compressed spines, torn muscles, bad teeth. “They very much defined the common lot of the common man in the Civil War--on either side,” he said.

Like most at the funeral, Leader refused to combine the flag controversy and the Confederate funeral. “I have a strong belief that the living have a responsibility to the dead,” he said. “It’s not an issue of Union and Confederacy. It’s an issue of right and wrong. Anyone buried needs to be dealt with on a level of concern and respect. Period.”

For one day, at least, even the most vocal opponents of South Carolina’s official use of Confederate imagery agreed.

“If the people want to recognize their folks, and do the reburial, it’s fine,” said James Gallman, president of the South Carolina chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. “My concern is the flag is not to be flown on top of the state capitol that represents everyone. That flag that they may bury their dead in represents those that are buried, but a flag on top of the state capitol says, ‘This represents all of the people.’ ”

The truce won’t last long. The NAACP renewed its threat this week to boycott South Carolina, beginning Jan. 1, until the state removes the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse dome. And Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges only complicated matters when he offered to fight for a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday if the boycott was halted. (At least 80 groups have canceled their conventions in South Carolina since the boycott.)

C. Lynn Bailey, pastor at St. Johannes Evangelical Lutheran Church, where the bodies lay in state the night before the funeral, told the assembled mourners that the soldiers were more than men. They were symbols of valor and Southern pride.

“We don’t know what they looked like, we don’t know where they came from,” he said. “We don’t know who they left behind, or whose hearts were broken became they didn’t come marching home.”

What is known, he said, is that all 22 led lives of “immortal quality.” They were “young men who were willing to stand up and fight for that which they believed, even when the odds were stacked against them. . . . They challenge each of us to live with the same conviction, the same dedication, the same faith as did they.”

A Confederate funeral, Bailey said, makes for an especially somber event in a city such as Charleston, where the war is still real: When Bailey’s church was renovated not long ago, he told the crowd, an unexploded Union shell was found lodged in the roof.

Brian Madaris, a 39-year-old paramedic from Dekalb County, Ga., was the only descendant of the dead soldiers, to attend. His great-great-great uncles, Franklin and Jefferson, represented a cornerstone of his identity. He’d come to know their stories as well as his own--except he didn’t know where they were buried. When he learned that they were buried together, and that they’d been found, and that they were being reburied with full Confederate honors, he was overcome with pride.

There he sat in the front row, video camera in hand, tears in his eyes, as 22 pairs of pallbearers lowered the 1’x1’x2’ wooden boxes into the ground. When he stood to receive one of the Tennessee battle flags that had draped his uncles’ coffins, Burbage embraced him, and Madaris suddenly collapsed on a chair and sobbed.

He admitted that the force of his own emotion caught him off guard.

“You research these people and study them and it’s like you know them,” he said of his ancestors. “But this is like stepping back in time. This is something that should be happening 135 years ago--and I’m actually attending.”

Following the burial, the crowd stood and sang “Dixie.” A bugler then blew Taps. Finally, the soldiers dispersed, cavalrymen giving their horses an extra kick as they galloped from the cemetery, so their banners would have an extra bounce and snap as they trailed along on the autumn breeze.

Four soldiers remain to be reburied, Burbage says. Crewmen from the Hunley, the famed Confederate submarine that destroyed a Union ship, their funeral will be held next spring, when the Hunley itself is raised from the bottom of the sea, four miles off Sullivan’s Island.

And, so long as old times here are not forgotten, Burbage says he’ll be among the pallbearers again.

“One of the guys a couple of weeks ago pulled me off to one side,” he said. “And he told me, ‘You know, when you get to heaven, you might feel a tap on your shoulder, and a fella might say, ‘I appreciate what you done for us.’ ”

Burbage stopped himself and looked down, watering the new graves with more tears.

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Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.