At the grave site, Confederate reenactors unfurled a rebel flag embroidered with the words “Michael Westerman Martyr” and fired their muskets in salute. Women dressed as Confederate mourners wept. The service concluded with the playing of “Dixie” and a eulogy by an SCV “commander” from Mississippi. Michael Westerman, he declared, had joined “the Confederate dead under the same honorable circumstances” as rebels who fell in battle. “He was simply one more casualty in a long line of Confederate dead of over one hundred thirty years of continuous hostility towards us and our people.”
