Honoring Our War Dead
The Evolution of the Government Policy on Headstones for Fallen Soldiers and Sailors
Spring 2003, Vol. 35, No. 1 | Genealogy Notes
By Mark C. Mollan
I do not believe that those who visit the graves of their relatives would have any satisfaction in finding them ticketed or numbered like London policemen or convicts.
—Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, Report to the Honorable John Coburn, Chairman, Senate Committee of Military Affairs, January 9, 1872.
But if he finds his . . . ancestor's name and position in full therein inscribed he will be satisfied that a grateful country had done due honor to the soldier whose sacrifice is one of the proud recollections of his family history.
—General Meigs, Memorandum, Quartermaster General's Office, February 8, 1873
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This undated photograph shows headstones for Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans lined up to be transported to their final resting places.
View in National Archives Catalog
Montgomery C. Meigs keenly understood the mood of a nation nursing the tender scars of war. As quartermaster general of the Union army, Meigs had choreographed and directed the supply lines that fed, clothed, and armed the largest army in the world for the duration of the bloodiest conflict in American history. As a father, Meigs mourned the loss of his eldest son, Lt. John R. Meigs, who died while on a scouting mission near Kernstown, Virginia. Meigs never fully recovered from his loss, but he found some solace in solemnly laying his son to rest in the newly established national cemetery at Arlington, Virginia.
With similar tenderness and attention, Meigs directed a program that laid to rest hundreds of thousands of fallen soldiers scattered on former battlefields throughout the South and became the genesis of our national cemetery system. Quartermaster deputies under Meigs's command scoured the landscape of the South to locate, unearth, and identify the remains of soldiers that lay in the former battlefields and prison and hospital yards stretching from Maryland to Texas. By 1870, the remains of nearly 300,000 soldiers had been buried in seventy-three national cemeteries. Although temporary wooden headboards were first used to mark the graves of the deceased, Meigs, with his usual diligence, saw to it that by 1879 each fallen veteran, known and unknown, would be "done due honor" with a proper permanent marker at the head of his grave.
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2003/spring/headstones.html