Day 827
Lieutenant Henry B. Hidden
April 5th, 2014
I'm walking every street in New York City.
This is the counterpoint to my walk across the US. Instead of seeing a million places for just a minute each, I'm going to spend a million minutes exploring just one place. By the time I finish walking every block of every street in all five boroughs, I'll have traveled more than 8,000 miles on foot — all within a single city. Details!
Email me at matt@imjustwalkin.com
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Maps: Progress | Photos
9,326 miles walked
Your donations allow me to keep walking full-time. If you think what I'm doing is valuable and you'd like to offer some support, I would be very grateful. On the other hand, if you think I'm a worthless bum, feel free to email me and tell me to get a job, bozo. Both are excellent options!
Matt,
Wikepedia indicates that he was from a wealthy and influential family, but do you know whether it was common for civil war dead to be recovered from the battlefield and buried elsewhere or whether it was just something for VIPs?
Here‘s a great article that answers your question. In short: the Civil War, with its staggering loss of life, led to a change in the way America treated its war dead. At the start of the war, the normal practice was to anonymously bury the dead in mass graves after a battle. “In such circumstances, tens of thousands of soldiers died unknown, and tens of thousands of families were left without any consoling knowledge of their loved ones’ fates, circumstances of death, or place of burial. . . . As the war continued, these realities became increasingly intolerable, and Americans worked in both official and informal ways to combat such dehumanization and loss.” The federal government established national cemeteries and reburied some 300,000 fallen Union soldiers in them after the war, while similar private southern efforts were undertaken to reinter Confederate battlefield dead in cemeteries.
I should also note that Green-Wood has a burial section specifically for soldiers who died in the Civil War. Check it out.
Thanks Matt. A very sobering article. Unfortunately the human race doesn’t seem to learn from tragedies such as this.
Is Johnny B. Goode buried anywhere nearby?