WI Removal of List of POW Dead from Cemetery

That really rubs me the wrong way. As one who is involved in cemetery preservation I find the notion of removing a stone because of affiliations of the deceased appalling. I bet they could find a lot of their 'residents' not up to their standards if they looked. This is just really beyond the pale.

The opportunity is not likely to present itself but I would go out of my way not to spend a penny in that town or support them in any way. A pox on their house.
 
Madison, Wisconsin city council has voted 16-2 to remove a stone in the cemetery listing the 140 Confederate POWs who died there during the war.
:nah disagree:

Here's a blog from Iron Brigadier that details the men who died there and the woman (Alice Waterman) who got help from former Union Generals, Lucius Fairchild and C.C. Washburn, to maintain the site. Both Fairchild and Washburn went on to be Governors of Wisconsin. Of the 140 POWs buried there.... One hundred ten of these men were from the 1st Alabama Infantry with the remainder from Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi. They were captured at Island No. 10. https://ironbrigader.com/2015/06/15/confederate-cemetery-madison-wisconsin/
 
This is a cemetery monument, marking the final resting place for 140 men. All because it "brings up memories that are not so pleasant...." At least, it appears, they aren't going to further desecrate the graves.
Sad state of affairs, even for Madison, Wisconsin.
 
Someone's idea of what ' the public ' wants. Bet they don't.

Cemeteries are not, one thing to do with who was on what side- just finished another diary by a nurse. She spoke of men dying so far from home with compassion and respect. a Union nurse. Another ( Sophronia? ) wrote of men from both sides recounting battles while in her hospital, laughing together, the usual jokes and leg pulling. You could see why the memorial was erected in the first place. Just men who never got home, remembered.
 
Someone's idea of what ' the public ' wants. Bet they don't.

You would be correct.

https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/...cle_8ea3be1b-04d6-5cd1-87af-2e31eb41fa36.html

A majority of speakers at a joint meeting of three Madison commissions expressed some support for keeping the memorials at the Confederate Rest section of the public cemetery, while others advocated for putting the monuments, the Civil War and the decades that followed in better context for visitors by adding signage.

Several people supported leaving a larger, stone cenotaph installed in 1906 that lists the names of the 140 soldiers buried at the cemetery at 1 Speedway Road, while a theme among those speakers was that the city should “respect the dead.”

“I worry what we’re using these Confederate dead for is to make a statement about our present values,” said Madison resident Paul Sherman.​
 
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

by George Santayana, "The Life of Reason. The Phases of Human Progress."
 
Perhaps the following quote from one of America's greatest teachers and philosophers would be appropriate for this matter:
"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."*
Regards
David
* Dr. Seuss aka Theodor Seuss "Ted" Geisel
 
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