This is Roll Tweet on Rock Island.
Near the upstream tip of Rock Island, surrounded by woods and the Mississippi River, lie 1,964 graves of Confederate soldiers who died between 1863 and 1865 while prisoners of war at the Rock Island barracks nearby. They died from disease, from wounds, and from the harsh effects of northern winters. In Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell called this prison "the Andersonville of the North."
The Confederates lie in 20 rows of identical gravestones listing the name, rank and company and numbered by the order in which they died. Number one is Joseph T. Reeves, Company D of the 4th Tennessee Regulars. 903 is Sergeant William L. Lightsley, Company D of the 25th Georgia Regulars. And next to him, in 904 lies E.T. Scott, Company G, 3rd Alabama Cavalry. In the entrance to the cemetery, facing away from the graves, four captured Confederate cannons stand as sentinels, flanking a bronze plaque in which General Stonewall Jackson says, "Let us cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees."
None of these soldiers will ever return home to the south, but once each year on Memorial Day, each grave is decorated with its own Confederate battle flag by local Boy and Girl Scouts.* Seeing this field of flags, I am reminded of that sentimental poem, the Blue and the Gray, written by Francis Miles Finch after watching the women of Columbus, Missouri, scattering flowers on the graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers.
In part, that poem goes like this:
By the flow of the inland river,
Whence the fleets of iron have fled,
Where the blades of the grave grass quiver,
Asleep are the ranks of the dead:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day;
Under the one, the Blue,
Under the other, the gray.
No more shall the war cry sever,
Or the winding rivers be red;
They banish our anger forever
when they laurel the graves of our dead!
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment day,
Love and tears for the blue,
Tears and love for the gray.
So bravery outlasts bitterness and brutality.
Rock Island Lines with Roll Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
* This essay was originally published in 1995. The activity of placing Confederate flags at the graves of Confederate soldiers is no longer observed on the Rock Island Arsenal.
