Two as-yet-unidentified Union sailors were buried today with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. This may very well have been the last Civil War burial. I could not find any mention of this here today, so I felt it was important for them to be acknowledged, however poorly I might do that.
It really is amazing what a long shadow the Civil War cast. It was just last month that Mississippi, the last state to do so, finally officially ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which these servicemen helped bring into being. It reads, simply:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
These sailors were aboard the U.S.S. Monitor when it was lost in a storm on December 31, 1862. It had already held its ground against the Confederate ship Virginia, one of the first ironclads like itself, earlier that year (151 years ago tomorrow) at the Battle of Hampton Roads, in preserving the naval blockade against the Confederacy. The sunken Monitor was not found until 1973, at which time it was determined that the ship could not be raised. In 2002, Navy divers recovered the revolving gun turret, and it was then that the remains of these two sailors were found.
[Capt. Barbara] Scholley recalled the moment when her team, sifting through the wreckage of the ironclad ship off Cape Hatteras, N.C., came upon the remains.
"My sailors, my divers, all the civilians just paused," she said. "We realized: This is why we were doing this.
"These sailors, they gave their lives for us," she said. "They fought for us, and we've got to bring them home."
The remains had been at a naval forensics lab in Hawaii until now. There is still a very good chance that they will ultimately be positively identified, and work continues.
[...] it was appropriate that for their final journey the two unidentified sailors who served to preserve the Union flew across a country "at 30,000 feet, seeing coast-to-coast the nation they helped create."
The Union forever!
May they rest in peace.