5/3/2019 FACT CHECK: Did Congress Designate Confederate Soldiers as United States Veterans?

Fact Check › Politics

Did Congress Designate Confederate Soldiers

as United States Veterans?
Debates over monuments led to a rumor that
Confederate soldiers are legally considered veterans of
the United States military.
KIM LACAPRIA
PUBLISHED 24 AUGUST 2017 UPDATED 25 AUGUST 2017

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Claim

Congress passed laws in 1929 and 1958 designating all

Confederate soldiers as United States veterans, making it
illegal to remove monuments to the Confederacy.

Rating

Mostly False
About this rating

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5/3/2019 FACT CHECK: Did Congress Designate Confederate Soldiers as United States Veterans?

Origin

In August 2017, a national debate about the display of Confederate flags and monuments
once again gained steam after a protest of the planned removal of a statue of Confederate
General Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia turned deadly.

In the wake of that incident, several cities (and protestors) moved to quickly take down
monuments, statues, and plaques. Meanwhile, rumors appeared that Congress had passed
two laws retroactively declaring Confederate soldiers United States veterans, which means
that removing the statues is illegal. Some of the claims were bolstered by a link to an
extremely dubious web site:

Confederate soldiers, sailors, and Marines that fought in the Civil war were made U.S.
Veterans by an act of Congress in in 1957, U.S. Public Law 85-425, Sec 410, Approved 23
May, 1958. This made all Confederate Army/ Navy/ Marine Veterans equal to U.S. Veterans.
Additionally, under U.S. Public Law 810, Approved by the 17th Congress on 26 Feb 1929
the War Department was directed to erect headstones and recognize Confederate grave sites
as U.S. War dead grave sites. Just for the record the last Confederate veteran died in 1958.
So, in essence, when you remove a Confederate statue, monument or headstone, you are in
fact, removing a statue, monument or head stone of a U.S. VETERAN.

The rumor also appeared as a meme on the Facebook page “Uncle Sam’s Misguided
Children” on 16 August 2017:

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5/3/2019 FACT CHECK: Did Congress Designate Confederate Soldiers as United States Veterans?

The same image was previously shared by the same Facebook page in a July 2015, just
after a gunman in Charleston, South Carolina, killed nine black churchgoers. According
to the meme, two acts of Congress (Public Law 810 of 1929 and Public Law 85-425 of 1958)
bestows upon Confederate soldiers the benefits and status of a United States military
veteran.

Public Law 810 refers to Part II, Chapter 23 of U.S. Code 38 which says that the
government should, when requested, pay to put up monuments or headstones for
unmarked graves for three groups of people:

(1) Any individual buried in a national cemetery or in a post cemetery.

(2) Any individual eligible for burial in a national cemetery (but not buried there), except for
those persons or classes of persons enumerated in section 2402(a)(4), (5), and (6) of this
title.

(3) Soldiers of the Union and Confederate Armies of the Civil War.

No portion of the law appears to confer any privilege other than markers for graves of
Confederate soldiers, nor does it grant Confederate soldiers status equal to those of
veterans of the United States military. As of 1901, 482 individuals (not all soldiers) were
already interred in the Confederate section of Arlington National Cemetery.

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers, but did not grant
them U.S. veteran status. Public Law 85-425 was passed 23 May 1958, entitling the
widows of deceased Confederate soldiers (what few were left by 1958) to military pensions:

To increase the monthly rates of pension payable to widows and former widows of
deceased veterans of the Spanish-American War, Civil War, Indian War, and Mexican
War, and provide pensions to widows of veterans who served in the military or naval
forces of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War.

A National Archives and Records Administration document details the matter of

Confederate soldiers and pensions, and shows that the law seems to recognize those who
fought for the Confederacy as veterans of a war, but not necessarily of the United States
military.

The last recorded Confederate soldier deaths were in 1959, meaning that the 1957 law had
negligible effects for those under its provisions, and in any event the law again conferred
no status or other benefit to Confederate soldiers themselves.

We reached out to several historians, none of whom wished to be quoted on the record.
Several were dubious about the purported laws. One, a scholar who specializes in the Civil
War and Reconstruction, told us that he, too, had trouble locating them:

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[It’s] clear that Public Law 85-425, section 410 of 1958 was intended solely to provide a
symbolic, Civil War Centennial gesture late-life pension to Walter Williams, the supposed
only surviving Confederate veteran, and did not apply in any way to any other Confederate
soldiers. Of course it turned out (as many people knew then) that Williams was not, in fact, a
Confederate veteran – but the desire to still have a living link to the War proved more
important than fact.

I have been no more successful than anyone else in finding the supposed Public Law 810
passed in 1929. But, given my experience with other claims based on legislation introduced
or passed in Congress during that era, I would surmise that any such law was symbolic and
meant as a gesture.

On the other hand, there was the 1906 Foraker Law that began Federal involvement in caring
for Confederate graves. You have probably seen this VA publication [PDF] and consulted
John Neff’s important work, Honoring the Civil War Dead (University Press of Kansas,
2005) about that issue. Neff makes clear that Federal money spent on maintaining Federal
graves always kept the distinctions between the graves — and the service — of Federal
versus Confederate soldiers.

[There is, however] the decision in the case of Patrick G. Griffin, III vs. Department of
Veterans Affairs issued by the US Court of Appeals 4th District … the decision ultimately
affirmed the VA’s contention that the Confederate prisoners buried at Point Lookout were
buried and honored as American soldiers and, therefore (the issue before the court) there was
no obligation to allow Confederate flags to fly over their graves.

The cited ruling did not recognize the flag of the Confederacy as a legitimate American flag
suitable for display in veterans’ memorials. The Veterans’ Affairs document to which the
historian pointed, Federal Stewardship of Confederate Dead, contained historical context
about Confederate burials and the evolution of federal involvement in the interment of
their dead, and included President William McKinley’s 1898 remarks to legislators in
Georgia, noting that was a time when “no disabled Confederate veteran was eligible to live
in a federal soldier’s home, receive a pension, or, when they died, be buried in a national
cemetery”:

The Department of War had been content to allow Northern cemeteries where Confederates
were interred to languish. However, after the Spanish-American War (1898), the federal
government, led by President William McKinley, in the spirit of national reconciliation and
in the postwar glow of recent victory, proposed that a loving nation would reach out and care
for the graves of fallen Confederates. Recognition of these places as hallowed ground and
the individuals interred in them as deserving of honor began with the creation of the
Confederate section at Arlington National Cemetery in 1900, and continued with the renewal
through 1916 of 1906 legislation that authorized federal funds to mark all Confederate
graves.

Until the turn of the 20th century, United States government interment of Confederate
soldiers generally involved deceased prisoners buried during the Civil War on Union lands.
In 2013, The Atlantic reported that the United States government continued to follow
through on its subsequent promises to provide for all Confederate war dead:

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Providing headstones for America’s fallen soldiers is a tradition that goes back to laws
passed in 1867 and 1873 that ordered the Department of War to properly establish national
cemeteries and furnish graves with headstones … It wasn’t until the 20th century, though,
that Confederate veterans were included in this tradition. It started with legislation passed in
1906, at first providing headstones for a very limited number of Confederate veterans,
specifically prisoners of war, “who died in Federal prisons and military hospitals in the
North and who were buried near their places of confinement.” That mandate for the
Department of War was expanded to all Confederate graves with a law passed in 1929.

Responsibility for headstones was transferred to the VA in the National Cemeteries Act of
1973, which declared, “The Administrator shall furnish, when requested, appropriate
Government headstones or markers at the expense of the United States for the unmarked
graves of” a number of categories of veterans and those who’d served the country or were
buried in a national cemetery, including specifically, “Soldiers of the Union and Confederate
Armies of the Civil War.”

It’s no coincidence that many of these changes in attitude and law, and the erection of so
many Confederate monuments and memorials, occurred around the turn of the 20th century.
They followed the federal withdrawal from the South in 1877, a strategic retreat from the
failed policies of reconstruction.

When a debate over Confederate monuments and flags came under the national spotlight
in June 2015, codified changes in burials and pensions enacted in 1929 and 1958 were
puffed up to suggest that a nebulous act of Congress, either in the 1920s or the 1950s,
officially declared that Confederate soldiers were the same as United States veterans in the
eyes of the federal government. However, no legislation either explicitly or implicitly
granted Confederate soldiers status as United States veterans. Survivors of dead
Confederate soldiers often took offense at measures appearing to equate them to Union
soldiers, objections that died off as Southerners from the Civil War era did.

Correction [25 August 2017]: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this article stated that
President Andrew Jackson pardoned Confederate soldiers.

LAST UPDATED 25 AUGUST 2017

PUBLISHED 24 AUGUST 2017

BY KIM LACAPRIA

FILED UNDER CIVIL WAR, CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS, INDEPENDENT NEWS INTERNATIONAL

SOURCES

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