ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608260070
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SPOTSYLVANIA
SOURCE: Associated Press
HIS SKULL WAS TAKEN by a Union doctor, then displayed in a museum for 70 years. Saturday, ``Rebel Butler'' was buried.
With a light breeze lifting the Confederate banner, a soldier known only as ``Rebel Butler'' was buried Saturday, 132 years after he died during one of the Civil War's fiercest battles.
Men in scratchy gray wool uniforms and women in black veils dropped clods of rust-colored Virginia clay atop a tiny casket containing what remains of the dead man - a skull found on the battlefield and carried home as a memento by a Union soldier.
The burial helps right a wrong done to the countless Southern families unable to bury sons lost on battlefields far from home, said Gregory T. Collins, a Civil War re-enactor who led two dozen others in period garb on a march to the gravesite in the Spotsylvania Confederate Cemetery.
``The tears for this man were shed long ago, perhaps by a sweetheart, maybe a wife and children, certainly a mother and father,'' Collins said during a 30-minute graveside service.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a service league of Southern Civil War descendants, arranged the military burial for the skull near where the soldier fell.
About 20,000 men fell dead or wounded in May 1864 at Spotsylvania Courthouse. In their dying, they gave names such as Bloody Angle to places that had no name before.
A year after the battle, a Union doctor found the skull lying on the battlefield. Historians surmise the body was hastily buried in a shallow grave, and the dirt was washed away from the bones.
The doctor labeled the skull ``Rebel Butler,'' apparently taking the name from bits of uniform found with it, and took it home to Pennsylvania. When the doctor moved later to New Castle, Ind., the skull went with him.
The skull was donated to the Henry County Historical Society Museum in New Castle in 1923, and remained on display there for 70 years, curator Betty Lou Heintz said.
`A human being, no matter who they are, is not intended to be on display as some kind of exhibit,'' said Wayne Retter, local leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. ``He's had a proper Christian burial.''
Retter and the other re-enactors are sensitive that their actions not be misconstrued as honoring an ugly period in the country's racial history.
``This has nothing whatsoever to do with slavery or the misuse of our sacred symbols,'' Collins said afterward. ``This is a burial for a soldier who gave the full measure for his cause.''
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Re-enactors with the Sons of Confederate Veteransby CNBsprinkle soil on the soldier's casket.