Section of the petition with the names of some of the 443 African American soldiers seeking the right to burial in the Soldiers’ Cemetery at Alexandria, Virginia during the Civil War. (National Archives)
U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs – After the Emancipation Proclamation, African American soldiers who died in service were initially buried separately. However, when units of the U.S. Colored Troops petitioned the Army’s Quartermaster General, he ordered that Black soldiers be interred alongside their fellow servicemen in one of the nation’s earliest national cemeteries.
Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs ordered all Black soldiers to be buried in the military cemetery and had those already in the segregated cemetery reinterred so they could be laid to rest alongside their comrades in arms of either color.
