When Confederate Flag Brought The Races Together

Flags decorate both Union and Confederate graves on Memorial Day.

The recent controversy over the Confederate flag reminded me of a story from the fall of 1999.

On a crisp October Saturday that year, about fifty family members gathered around a flag-draped grave in the Landa Cemetery in Suffolk, Virginia.

The event was the dedication of a new military grave marker for Civil War soldier Jason Boone. It was no different from dozens of such ceremonies which occur all across the United States every year.

Well, it was abit different. The flag on the grave was the Confederate Stars and Bars, the family was black and the soldier had served in the 41^st Virginia Infantry of the Confederate States Army. The black Boone descendants sat in a place of honor at the ceremony, surrounded by dozens of Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy wearing period dress.

The incongruent graveside tableau reminds us that history is not as “black and white” as we think.

The ceremony fifteen years ago was put together by Boone’s descendants led by Mrs. Katheryne B. Hamilton of Portsmouth and F. Lee Hart IV, then commander of the Tom Smith Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, in Suffolk.

The story was chronicled in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot by Linda McNatt (“Black Confederate Honored In Suffolk,” October 24, 1999) and later in the Washington Post by Linda Wheeler (“Honoring a Son of the South, Descendants of White Confederates Salute Black Man’s Service,” December 4, 1999).

Mrs. Hamilton had been researching family roots when she read a newspaper article about Hart’s efforts to restore Suffolk’s Cedar Hill Cemetery and mark the graves of every Confederate buried there.

 

She did not hesitate to call the SCV commander to tell him about her great grandfather Boone. He immediately asked if he had a headstone. Mrs. Hamilton did not even know where her ancestor was buried at that point, but when she located the grave in the old Landa Cemetery in the Skeetertown community south of the city near the airport, she found only an old concrete block marker.

Hart readily agreed to procure a new military gravestone from the United States Veterans Administration which provides stones for all American veterans, including those who served the Confederacy. In a perfect world we would salute an “only in America” moment and celebrate the happy ending to our story. But real life is not so simple.

Hart had traditions to uphold. That summer, he and some other SCV members visited Hamilton’s home to explain how the group conducts its dedication ceremonies and how seriously they take their duty to honor Confederate veterans. Remember that Jason Boone was not buried at Cedar Hill with most of the other Southrons. His new gravestone would require its own dedication ceremony, Hart told her, and the Tom Smith SCV Camp would not leave even one man behind, so to speak. It did not matter to Hart that Jason Boone was black. He deserved all the honors that any Confederate soldier would get.

But here’s the thing, he went on. A Confederate honor guard would march in Skeetertown's largely black neighborhood. The Confederate flag, the Stars and Bars, not the Battle flag, would lay across the grave and re-enactors in gray and butternut would parade other Rebel flags. The Confederacy had many in the four years of the war: the Battle flag modeled after the St. Andrew’s Cross; the Stars and Bars or First National Flag, the Second National Flag known as the Stainless Banner and the Last National Flag, sometimes called the Blood-Stained Banner, among them. Private Boone’s ceremony could be no different from other Confederate dedications, Hart told her matter-of-factly. This is how we do this; it is a solemn ritual and we cannot change it, he said.

But Mrs. Hamilton had a problem with the SCV group displaying Confederate flags in a black neighborhood, in a black cemetery. She expressed concern that children might see them. Her 24-year-old daughter Tanya had the typical visceral revulsion to the thought of seeing those flags as well. "Definitely not!" other family members counseled.

But Hart’s sincerity touched Mrs. Hamilton, who was then a hospice nurse. She respected him when he told her he could not furl the flags for which his ancestors fought. He told her he understood how white supremacist groups had poisoned minds against the flag—but explained that all of that had occurred well after the war. Jason Boone knew nothing of the political hi-jacking of the flag he fought under.

Hart told her what the flag meant to him and his brothers in the SCV and he assured her that no offense was meant in its display by them.

And that’s when hearts began to change. Mrs. Hamilton took some time to think about the situation. She checked the historical record that Hart had hinted at; she considered Hart’s conviction and heartfelt sincerity.

And she thought about Jason Boone. He was someone she had come to proudly love. She liked his independence. She admired his loyalty to the mixed-race community where he had prospered.

Boone was mixed-race himself, the free-born great grandson of Joseph Skeeter, an English surveyor in Suffolk’s Colonial period. Boone was a farmer when the war began. He married twice and fathered 30 children. In Mrs. Hamilton’s thinking, Boone, along with his brother Anthony, chose to fight with the men they farmed, fished and hunted with, though another brother fought for the Union. Boone lived to be 105 years old and was granted a Confederate pension in 1924. She was especially proud that none of his children had been born out of wedlock.

And so Mrs. Hamilton decided to go forward with Hart’s vision for the ceremony. She put the word out to her family, to the Suffolk neighborhoods, to the city’s black community.

“We can’t judge 1865 by the standards of 1999,” she later told the Post. “I decided that I didn’t own Jason Boone and I had no rights to him. This is the thing to do for Jason…Jason marched under that flag. He wasn’t ashamed. He was proud of it. I can’t be in the way of that.”

The Fredericksburg National Cemetery.

And so that October day, Confederate flags snapped in the autumn breezes of Skeetertown. A piper piped, prayers were recited, historians marked the occasion. Hart spoke as did Mrs. Hamilton and her daughter Kristin. Daughter Tanya later said the ceremony was wonderful. She said her feelings about the flag changed that day. “I know the history now. When I see it I realize it’s part of their heritage.” And after a pause, “It’s part of my heritage.”

A Confederate artillery battery from North Carolina fired a three-gun salute, a Rebel bugler sounded “Taps.”

And then the honor guard unveiled Jason Boone’s new smooth granite gravestone.. The men dressed as Confederate soldiers removed and reverently folded the National Flag of the Confederacy—Jason’s flag—and presented it to the remarkable Mrs. Hamilton—and she accepted it—for Jason.