Every year I attend the birthday commemoration for General George Gordon Meade. It takes place at the general’s burial spot in Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, and since Meade was born on December 31, it happens on the last day of the year.

Meade’s 202nd birthday in 2017 was certainly the coldest one I’ve attended, with temperatures hovering around 14 degrees. That kept the turnout down a bit, but the hardcores showed up to pay their respects. Andy Waskie, the General Meade Society of Philadelphia’s founder and president, made the wise decision to hold the ceremony inside the cemetery gatehouse, following a quick wreath-laying ceremony at the gravesite.

Andy asked me to be the keynote speaker this year, so I prepared a few appropriate remarks. I started off by remarking that this is certainly an interesting time to be interested in the Civil War. Americans often accused of forgetting their history and sometimes that’s true, but in 2017 activists across the country became very interested in the Civil War.

As a result, statues of Confederate leaders were taken down in cities across the south—in New Orleans, Memphis, and Baltimore. A protest, led by white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the planned removal of a Robert E. lee statue, led to the death of a young woman.

People get upset that this constitutes some kind of “erasing” of history.

Those of us who follow the life and legacy of George Gordon Meade know what being erased from history looks like.

In 1913, 50 years after the Battle of Gettysburg, Meade’s grandson published the generals Life and Letters. A reviewer was moved to note, “For fifty years Meade has been set aside, ignored, depreciated, even insulted.” Meade should have received a bit of immortality for commanding the victorious army at Gettysburg, but instead he mostly disappeared from the history books.

I think there’s little chance that Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart or Nathan Bedford Forrest are in any danger of being “erased” from history.

No, the real erasure began more than 150 years ago, with the creation of the Lost Cause narrative of history. According to this mythology, the South did not secede to preserve slavery. It fought for the noble cause of states’ rights. Never mind that before the war, the southern states pushed through the Fugitive Slave Law, which trampled on both state and individual rights by forcing people across the country to assume the role of slave catchers to help capture people who were trying to escape from bondage.

Let me quote Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy. In his famous “cornerstone” speech in March 1861, less than a month before the attack on Fort Sumter ignited the Civil War, Stephens declared that slavery “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” Furthermore, he added, the foundation of the Confederate government–its very cornerstone, in fact—“rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” As I wrote in Searching for George Gordon Meade: The Forgotten Victor of Gettysburg, claiming that slavery did not cause the Civil War is like clearing the iceberg of any responsibility for sinking the Titanic.

There’s such a thing as being on the wrong side of history. Jefferson Davis, Lee, Jackson, and other Confederate leaders were on the wrong side. That doesn’t mean there weren’t brave men fighting on both sides during the Civil War. There certainly were. But I think you have to separate the reasons why the common soldier was fighting and the reasons why the southern states seceded and started the war in the first place.

I like to remember the words of Ulysses S. Grant, who, when writing about the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, said, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

George Meade was no abolitionist. He fought to save the Union. But when eradicating slavery became official U.S. policy, he continued to do his duty. He was on the right side of history. And that’s why we gathered at Laurel Hill Cemetery on such a frigid December 31. We wanted to make sure that this man—who came close to being erased from the history books—got his due for fighting to preserve the United States of America and, by so doing, helped bring slavery to an end in this country. George Gordon Meade was on the right side of history.

I started this morning by drinking coffee out of my Old Baldy mug . It seemed appropriate, as today would have been George Gordon Meade’s 201st birthday. The annual birthday commemoration took place at Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery today. Once sufficiently caffeinated, my wife and I jumped in the car and headed for the City of Brotherly Love. This is an annual event to which we always look forward. It’s fun and respectful, and weird and wonderful, and unique. I always tell people, if you want to spend the last day of the year standing in a cemetery, this is the place to be.

It was a little odd to see Meade’s gravesite without the big Norway maple that towered over it. The tree, which had been standing there when the general was buried, finally succumbed to old age and was cut down earlier this year. Nothing lasts forever.

The tree, like the general, is gone, but yet it still lives on. At today’s event I purchased some coasters made from the old maple, and there were also things like flag holders available, too. Things fade and die, but they also live on. History keeps memory alive, and the people who show up each year for the Meade birthday commemoration obviously love history.

As I said, fun but respectful. Many thanks to the General Meade Society of Philadelphia for throwing this birthday celebration every year.

I’ve long wanted to get an excuse to drop in and pay my respects to John Sedgwick, who is buried in Cornwall Hollow Cemetery in northwest Connecticut. It’s a tiny rural cemetery in the middle of nowhere. Sedgwick lies beneath a granite obelisk, one of the most prominent monuments here. On the other side of Rt. 43 from the cemetery is a fairly impressive monument to Sedgwick, with a granite obelisk, bronze profile, cannon, and stacks of cannonballs at the corners. I wonder how many people who drive past it have any idea who Sedgwick was.

The Sedgwick monument.

John Sedgwick commanded the VI Corps under Meade. He was a dependable general, if perhaps too cautious. This, of course, is a criticism that is often used against Meade, but Sedgwick could make Meade look positively reckless in comparison, as witnessed by his activities at Chancellorsville and during the pursuit of Meade after Gettysburg.

Here’s a bit of what I had to say about Sedgwick in Searching for George Gordon Meade: The Forgotten Victor of Gettysburg.

John Sedgwick (Library of Congress).

Sedgwick was a Connecticut native who had graduated from West Point two years after Meade. A lifelong bachelor, he was “married” to the army and enjoyed passing the time playing long games of solitaire. War correspondent George Smalley called him “one of the best generals we had: a man of utterly transparent honesty, simplicity, and truth of character; trusted, beloved, ardently followed by his men; a commander who had done great things and was capable of greater.” His men loved him and called him “Uncle John.”

If there were a Famous Last Words Hall of Fame, Sedgwick would hold a place of honor. On the morning of May 9 outside Spotsylvania, he was near the Union front lines when he noticed some of his artillerymen dodging sharpshooters’ bullets. He chastised them for their fear. “Why, what are you dodging about?” he asked. “They couldn’t hit an elephant at that distance.” Just then a bullet struck him below his left eye. His chief of staff, Col. Martin McMahon, was standing next to him when the bullet hit. Sedgwick turned toward him, and McMahon saw blood spurting from the wound like a fountain. Then the general fell, knocking McMahon to the ground, too. Sedgwick died almost instantly, a smile still on his lips.

Meade (left) and Sedgwick at Brandy Station before the start of the Overland Campaign (Library of Congress).

Poor Sedgwick! “We bore him tenderly to an ambulance, and followed it to army headquarters where an evergreen bower had been prepared, and there he lay in simple state with the stars and stripes around him,” remembered Major Thomas Hyde, whom the general had been good-naturedly teasing just before he died. “All who came remained to weep; old grizzled generals, his comrades for many years; young staff officers, and private soldiers: all paid this tribute to his modest greatness.”

Meade was bothered by the fact that he had been sharp with Sedgwick at their last meeting the night before. Meade thought Sedgwick had been relying too much on Warren’s judgment, so he snapped at him, saying he wished “he would take command of his own corps.” It was the last time they spoke. “I feel more grieved at his death because we had not parted entirely in good feeling,” he told Theodore Lyman. Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright took over the VI Corps.

The bronze likeness on the monument.

Sedgwick’s gravesite.

You have only one chance to turn 200. And now George Gordon Meade has done it.

Meade was born on December 31, 1815, and to commemorate his bicentennial, the General Meade Society of Philadelphia had a gala celebration at Laurel Hill Cemetery. The weather gods smiled favorably on the occasion, and it was dry and relatively warm for the event (although there’s always a cold breeze blowing off the Schuylkill River over the Meade gravesite). Several hundred people showed up, including three generations of Meade descendants, and a host of living historians. The Meade Society did a terrific job organizing everything. Beck’s Philadelphia Brigade Band provided music, President Abraham Lincoln was on hand to deliver a few appropriate remarks, and a number of speakers made remarks at the gravesite before a ceremonial wreath laying, 21-gun salute, and the traditional champagne toast.

I was honored to be one of the speakers. I kept my remarks brief (to the palpable relief of the crowd). I quoted William Faulkner, who once said, “The past is never dead; it’s not even past.” I remarked on the irony of how easy it is to realize the truth of that when you’re in a historic cemetery where all the figures from the past are indisputably dead. But the history they helped create is a living thing, and the events involving these historical figures still reverberate today. The American Civil War is one of the great defining events of American history, and George Gordon Meade had a strong influence on how that war played out. What would have happened if he had not led the Army of Potomac to victory at Gettysburg? What would have happened to the nation we know today?

Other speakers pointed out that by honoring George Meade, we also honor the thousands of soldiers who fought with him and under him. It was a huge, bloody, ugly war, but it ended with the nation intact and slavery abolished. Anyone who has been following the controversies over the Confederate flag, Confederate war monuments, and even the still-ongoing struggles over civil rights understands that the issues raised by that war are still with us, one way or another. But that’s the thing about the past—it hasn’t even passed.