The History of Military Funerals and the 21-Gun Salute

While the realities of warfare is are often distant to much of the world, the men and women who sign up for military service face the possibility of life-or-death combat and other dangers. The United States military recognizes the sacrifice of its fallen service members with the dignified proceedings of military funeral honors.

Today, the steps of these funerals for eligible veterans are codified in official government guidelines. However, these customs didn’t simply emerge in the wake of Continental Army musket fire or the high-pitched strands of a fife. Like many aspects of American culture, the revered traditions that make up a military funeral trace their roots to much older European customs.

Although the United States came into existence during a time of war, no formal procedures existed for honoring those who died while taking up arms for the new nation.

“Officers who were considered of a much higher social rank in early America, where the social hierarchy was very important, they would often receive maybe a burial or a better treatment of their remains, or maybe their families or their comrades would pay to try and give them a burial or funeral with a marked grave,” explains Allison S. Finkelstein, a military historian with Arlington National Cemetery and author of A Tomb in the Heart of the Nation. “But that was not even fully guaranteed, and the common rank-and-file service members did not have an organized method of being buried.”

Over the ensuing decades, the U.S. military gradually shouldered increased responsibility when it came to respectfully handling the remains of battlefield casualties. This included a program enacted during the Second Seminole War (1835-42) that allowed families to have deceased soldiers transported home if they supplied a coffin. Additionally, in 1850, Congress authorized the creation of a burial site in Mexico City for service members killed in the Mexican-American War.

However, a seismic shift in burial procedures came during the Civil War, driven by the sheer number of casualties and a growing public perception that the fallen soldiers deserved proper burial sites. Beginning in September 1861, the War Department overhauled the process of administering to the deceased. General Orders No. 75 mandated the keeping of record books to log the names and burial sites of those killed as well as the placement of an identifying headboard at each soldier’s grave. General Orders No. 33 required commanding generals to locate suitable burial grounds as soon as possible following a battle.

“Congress begins to intervene in 1862, allowing the president to purchase cemetery grounds for national cemeteries,” Finkelstein explains. “As the years continue, there’s more legislation, more laws eventually allowing veterans who served but didn’t die in battle to be buried at these national cemeteries, and eventually there’s this network of national cemeteries that was created.”

The combination of improved means for documenting and burying the dead, along with the formation of hallowed resting grounds like Arlington National Cemetery, fostered the development of the following military funeral traditions.

Per Department of Defense Instruction 1300.15, a military funeral must include “the playing of the National Song of Military Remembrance,” more commonly known as “Taps.” Although a live bugler is preferred for the service, a recording may also be used.

“Taps” was composed in July 1862 by Union Brigadier General Daniel Butterfield, with assistance from brigade bugler Oliver Willcox Norton. Said to be a revision of an earlier bugle call known as the “Scott Tattoo,” the new melody was intended to mark the end of the day’s activities, replacing the existing French call “Lights Out.”

“Taps” first surfaced in a funeral context shortly afterward. Concerned that ceremonial gunfire would spur a new round of fighting, Captain John C. Tidball instead ordered the popular new bugle call to be played at the funeral of a cannoneer. “Taps” was officially recognized by the U.S. Army in 1874 and became a mandatory part of military funerals in 1891.

Also mandated by the Defense Department is the presentation of a folded American flag to a family member or other designated recipient on behalf of the deceased. Draped over the casket for the funeral, the flag is then carefully folded 13 times and handed to the recipient with the spoken words: “On behalf of the president of the United States, the (military branch) and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

The connection of flags to battlefield casualties dates to at least the Napoleonic Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the dead were covered in a flag as they were carried away. However, according to In Honored Glory; The Story of Arlington, the act of draping the casket and presenting the flag to the next of kin was the idea of U.S. Major General George W. Cocheu. Reportedly dismayed by austere burial conditions that many grieving families endured, Cocheu wrote up new procedures in 1918 to ensure the flag would be included in military funerals to come.

Puncturing the air of funeral proceedings is the traditional three-volley salute fired by a ceremonial detail. The 1917 Officers’ Manual links the significance of the number three to Roman funerals, which had mourners thrice toss dirt on a coffin, call out the name of the deceased and repeat the word “vale” (Latin for “farewell”). Another tradition emerged on 17th- and 18th-century European battlefields in which the firing of three shots signaled the end of a temporary halt to the fighting in order to pull away the dead and wounded, an act familiar to both Union and Confederate soldiers in the Civil War.

The three-volley salute is sometimes confused with the 21-gun salute, which is reserved for the funerals honoring the nation’s commanders-in-chief, the U.S. presidents. The 21-gun salute traces back to a centuries-old naval custom of ships firing ammunition out to sea to signal peaceful intentions. British vessels typically carried seven cannons, and because larger quantities of gunpowder could be stored on land, a ratio of three shots fired from a fort was acknowledged as the equivalent of one from a ship. Over time, this practice evolved into the 21-gun salute.

While early American salutes reflected the number of states in the union, 21 shots was recognized as the official “presidential salute” in 1842. In 1875, the U.S. joined Britain in designating 21 guns as its international salute.

Among the more visually arresting elements of a military funeral is the riderless caparisoned horse, an honor reserved for Army and Marine Corps officers ranked colonel or above and for U.S. presidents. Led by a cap walker, the horse bears a saddle and a pair of boots lodged backward into the stirrups. This is said to signify that the deceased will never ride again or is taking a final look back at their troops.

The origins of the riderless horse are unclear, though some accounts trace it back at least a millennium to the days of Genghis Khan. In the United States, one of the earliest recorded examples of the custom appeared during the December 1799 funeral procession for George Washington.

The November 1963 televised funeral of John F. Kennedy famously featured a riderless horse named Black Jack. Black Jack also participated in state ceremonies for Herbert Hoover and Lyndon B. Johnson, before receiving military funeral honors of his own in 1976.

The horse-drawn caisson originated as a cart used to transport ammunition and remove the wounded from battlefields. Finkelstein says the first documented use of a caisson in a military funeral came during the August 1888 burial of General Philip Sheridan at Arlington National Cemetery. These carts also played a prominent role when the remains of the crew of the USS Maine—the Navy ship whose sinking helped ignite the Spanish-American War in 1898—were moved from the Washington Navy Yard to Arlington in 1912.

Since 1948, the caisson team at Arlington has fallen operated the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army’s 3d U.S. Infantry Regiment, known as “The Old Guard,” which was established in 1784.

Members of the armed forces have the option to be laid to rest beneath the waves. The fifth edition of Naval Ceremonies, Customs, and Traditions describes burial at sea an ancient rite that “antedates all other ceremonies,” with the Greeks and Romans known to partake in this exercise. The Navy, itself, points to Nordic burial traditions that date back to at least the 15th century as a precedent of this modern custom.

Specific guidelines need to be followed for this rite, particularly when the remains of the deceased are not cremated. Navy regulations require metal caskets to be drilled with holes, weighted and banded to ensure they properly sink and remain intact. Additionally, caskets must be unloaded at least 3 miles from the continental shelf and at a depth of more than 100 fathoms (600 feet).

Because burial at sea is typically performed during a time of training or deployment, the Navy does not permit family members to be involved. Otherwise, the ceremony resembles the military funerals conducted inland, with the firing of volleys, the playing of “Taps” and the presentation of the American flag.