Gettysburg Burial

The Battle of Gettysburg claimed the lives of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers as the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. 

Months later,  President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the new Soldiers National Cemetary to commemorate the site.  The president told listeners,  "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but can never forget what they did here."

Black men were used digging up remains of the Union dead from graves scattered throughout the battlefield and surrounding countryside to be reinterred at the new cemetery on Cemetary Hill, not far from where many of the bodies were first laid to rest.  Confederate loved ones who could be identified was shipped mainly to Virginia to be disseminated across the South. 

The men endured the heavy stench and possible disease of hastily buried corpses in "various stages of decomposition."  After completing the gruesome task,  they received little fanfare or compensation for their hard work, which resulted in little more than a footnote in history until now.

Their story is being re-told thanks to historians, ancestors, and black Civil War reenactors to America's youth and others who knew nothing about their contribution like me.  

Source: Michael E. Ruane of the Washington Post