Amendment had etched into the Constitution

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Most striking, perhaps, was the process of state-building that the work of Civil War death advanced. Well before the Confederate surrender, Congress and the War Department provided for the establishment of national cemeteries, the most famous at Gettysburg, where, in a departure from custom, every grave was of equal status regardless of military rank or social station. Thereafter, responding to news of the desecration of Union graves and bodies and to a growing demand for action, the federal government created additional cemeteries and, even more importantly, assumed responsibility for those who died in its service. After four years and more than $4 million in expenditures, the bodies of 303,536 Union soldiers had been gathered and reburied in seventy-four national cemeteries--an extraordinary effort at the time, and one that deepened a sense of the new citizenship that the Fourteenth Amendment had etched into the Constitution.
Of the federal burial grounds that Civil War death brought into being, one in particular seemed to capture especially well the great transformations of the era. It covered not a battleground but rather the estate of the family of Robert E. Lee, the southern slaveholder and federal officer turned Confederate general, who had been driven out shortly after hostilities had commenced. For a time the estate served as Union Army headquarters, then as a contraband camp and a freedmen's village. Finally it became a national cemetery, consecrating a newly sovereign nation-state on a landscape where slaveholding sovereigns once claimed to rule, and taking the name of the estate itself: Arlington. But there as elsewhere, black soldiers were laid to rest in a separate and segregated section, testimony both to their role in remaking America and to the distance the country had yet to travel to fulfill its ideals.their long-standing campaign against environmental protections, American conservatives have taken a kitchen sink approach: First they exalted states' rights and attacked the Environmental Protection Agency; later, they reversed course, attacking states' rights and exalting the EPA. The only consistent objective was to thwart regulation, and the only question was which strategy would be most effective in achieving that goal.