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Thursday morning a radio report reminded me that it was the 150th anniversary of the Second Battle of, well, Bull Run if one is from the North, or Manassas if one is from the South or follows the Park Service’s practice of using Southern names for battlefields in the South. The battle itself was a victory for the Confederacy. Under the command of Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia inflicted terrible losses on the Army of the Potomac under Gen. John Pope, who was subsequently relieved of his command. The Union army’s retreat opened the way for Lee to cross the Potomac River from Virginia into Maryland and take the war to the North. The two armies would meet again the following month at Antietam (Sharpsburg), resulting in roughly 23,000 casualties, the single bloodiest day in US history.
We couldn’t even agree on what to call the places where we killed each other.
In Maryland there were strong sympathies for the Confederacy and the state may well have seceded from the Union were it not for the heavy federal presence. At Point Lookout, the state became the host of the Union’s largest prisoner of war camp, located at the end of a long peninsula where the Potomac River enters the Chesapeake Bay. Fifty thousand Confederate prisoners would eventually transit the Point Lookout camp. As their numbers swelled far beyond what the camp was designed to hold, conditions in the camp deteriorated terribly. Roughly four thousand rebel soldiers died in the camp and were buried in a mass grave. My great-great-grandfather was among them.
After the war, as Reconstruction was winding down, the State of Maryland erected a 25 foot tall white marble obelisk, visible in the background of the left photo above, to mark the burial site of its putative enemies. Later, with the reassertion of political power in the South by what had been pro-secessionist elements, the US Congress erected a grander memorial obelisk, shown in the foreground of the left photo, complete with bronze tablets affixed to the base inscribed with the names and units of the 3,382 identifiable Confederate dead. My great-great grandfather and his younger brother, who was still an adolescent when forcibly conscripted into the Confederate army, are listed side by side.
I was reminded of all this when I recently stumbled across a story by Hyung-Jin Kim and Didi Tang of the AP about a dilapidated “enemy cemetery” at Paju, just south of the DMZ where the remains of an estimated 770 North Koreans and 270 Chinese are interred. (A photo of the cemetery is above, on the right.) Ironically, it is the Chinese who are forcing a reconsideration of the cemetery. Among the growing numbers of Chinese visitors to South Korea are relatives of men believed to be buried at Paju, and in response to their visits, local officials have developed plans to renovate the cemetery. As could be expected, these plans have encountered both popular opposition in some quarters as well as bureaucratic opposition from the Gyeonggi provincial government and the Ministry of National Defense.
So here’s a bit of unsolicited advice: in the interests of eventual national reconciliation, whatever you think of the Korean People’s Army, or the Korean Workers’ Party, or even Kim Jong-un himself, do yourselves a favor: restore the markers that have been knocked to the ground, replace the ones that are rotting, and cut the grass. One day you or your descendants will be glad you did.
