Established by the U.S. government in 1867, Nashville National Cemetery is one of the original fourteen national military cemeteries, a permanent burial ground for Union soldiers who died in and around Nashville. The cemetery holds the remains of more than 16,000 Union soldiers, a significant portion unidentified — men whose names were lost in the chaos of battlefield recovery. The Battle of Nashville in December 1864, the Battle of Stones River forty miles south in 1862, and three years of city occupation produced thousands of casualties.
For decades, the management of Civil War dead reflected the racial hierarchies of the era. Black soldiers who died in Union service were often interred separately or inadequately documented. Recent scholarship has attempted to recover those histories.
The cemetery's quiet rows, regardless of what brought you here, ask for a moment of attention to the individual lives that ended in this landscape — each numbered stone once a person who came south and did not go home.