Chattanooga Backs Away From Confederate Past

“Did we not learn from the Vietnam War to not blame the soldiers for a war which the politicians and governmental powers created?” Hall wrote.

The maintenance of Confederate graves is a big part of what the Sons of Confederate Veterans does as an organization, Hall said.

Another is to advocate for and teach what the group says is the true cause of the so-called War of Northern Aggression: That the Southern states wanted to be independent and their rich, poor, black and white residents took up arms to stop the pillaging armies of the North.

Little will change in practice if Chattanooga’s petition to appoint a successor trustee is approved. The Sons of Confederate Veterans has maintained the cemetery for years – at least since the early 1990s – using volunteers. But the city’s move is a symbolic one, aimed at distancing itself from the region’s Confederate past.

Besides the graves of Confederate soldiers, a pair of faded American flags stand at the base of the stones commemorating the two Union soldiers buried in the Chattanooga Confederate Cemetery.

And at least one former slave made this ground his final resting place: Across the cemetery stands a white headstone for Shaderick Searcy, who was born a slave and died in 1936 after fighting as a private in the Confederate army “under masters J.D. and W.K. Searcy … Both killed in battle.”

He’s not the only black Confederate buried there, Hall wrote.

Hall said he was not aware of any other southern cities that no longer wanted to care for the Confederate cemeteries in their communities.

“Anyone with any religious morality would respect a burial ground,” he wrote. “I am aware of none that have shirked the community ideals of providing care and assistance to public cemeteries.”

While Chattanooga’s move to be dropped as a trustee was unusual, the city’s relationship with the cemetery on East Third Street was unusual as well.

According to the city, it had never actually owned the property and had no responsibility to maintain it.

At first, a group of three people held the deed to the cemetery in 1867. It wasn’t until 1942 that a judge decreed Chattanooga would be a temporary trustee for the cemetery for a period of five years because all the original trustees had died.

The 1942 decree said it was necessary to appoint successor trustees to carry out the mission of Confederate veterans and their families “to care for, protect and beautify the graves of their departed dead.”

In this month’s petition for a successor trustee, Chattanooga said the state of Tennessee “recognizes that the proper maintenance of a cemetery or burial grounds … is in the interest of the public health and safety.”

However, the city claims its time as trustee for the cemetery technically expired in 1947.

In the past, the Sons of Confederate Veterans asked the city for permission to maintain the cemetery and Chattanooga said yes.

“The city believes it is in the best interest of the cemetery to remove any bureaucratic barriers for the maintenance of the cemetery,” the petition states.

In the decades since the Civil War, the federal government’s treatment of Confederate graves has evolved and changed. In the immediate aftermath, it established national cemeteries to house the remains of only the Union’s dead.

Confederate soldiers were buried in national cemeteries if they died as prisoners of war in the North and for years their graves remained neglected, according to a 2016 report by the National Cemetery Administration, or NCA.

It wasn’t until the end of the Spanish-American War that President William McKinley said the federal government would care for Confederate graves, as a way to reconcile with the South.

At that time, the “Lost Cause” ideology – which, despite the Civil War defeat, views the Confederate cause as a heroic fight to preserve the Southern way of life against great odds – was well established. It was the Lost Cause thinking that fueled the push to erect monuments to the Confederacy across the South, according to the NCA report.

The NCA, which is a part of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, now tries to keep a balance between respecting visitors to the cemeteries, the dead soldier and history, according to an emailed statement from the VA press secretary’s office.

The NCA only allows small Confederate flags to be displayed on Confederate soldiers’ graves on Memorial Day and Confederate Memorial Day, an unofficial Southern holiday. The stars and bars are prohibited from flying on a fixed flagpole.

“Monuments to Confederate soldiers stand only in cemeteries where Confederate soldiers are buried or memorialized,” according to the VA statement, “and we have no plans to disturb those gravesites or monuments.”

Jefferson Hodge, a board member of Chattanooga Organized for Action, said in an interview that there is historic value in the local Confederate cemetery and the graves should be maintained. The only question is by whom.

Chattanooga Organized for Action runs The People’s History Project, which seeks to tell the history of the role of minorities, women and the working class in the development of the city. It created posters and conducts walking tours to teach people about the early civil rights leaders and other relevant topics like the actions of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 60s.

Hodge said the Sons of Confederate Veterans is a “complicated and problematic organization” because, in the early 2000s, individuals associated with modern white supremacist movements filled national leadership positions in the group.

Hodge would have no problem if an agency like the National Park Service or even the city itself cared for the cemetery, he said.

From what Hodge knows of Chattanooga’s decision, the petition to remove itself as trustee of the cemetery was merely a “recognition of reality.”

But he sees the question of who maintains a cemetery differently than the question considered by Hamilton County – the county in which Chattanooga sits – when it decided to keep a statue of Confederate General Alexander P. Stewart displayed on the courthouse lawn.

“When it comes to cemeteries, it’s a matter of letting the dead lie,” Hodge said. “I think there are plenty of areas to engage in that conversation. I think living in the South, the Lost Cause manifests itself all over the place in all sorts of ways, in our education programs, and to a certain extent who we allow to curate certain things for sure. But I don’t think the cemetery should be anyone’s central political fight as far as the political telling of history.”

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