Complicated People
Confederate veteran's marker, McKinney TX.
E.W. Kirkpatrick was a Confederate soldier who served in Company T, 5th Texas Cavalry, and later with the Partisan Rangers, an independent band of raiders who harassed Union troops across Northern Virginia. He survived the Civil War by 59 years.
His grave marker is simple. The nameplate is cast bronze on a concrete plate, not marble. The fact that unsealed concrete poured in 1924 and exposed to the extremes of North Texas weather for over a century is still intact, means multiple generations looked after it.
The latest generation put the flag there.
Kirkpatrick's final years coincided with the Lost Cause narrative, a remembrance of the war that obscured slavery as its cause. He lived through Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the rise of the Confederacy's public memorialization.
In most civil wars, the losers are killed. Ours were honored and celebrated.
That's America. He's an American. We are a complicated people.