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Honoring a Civil War veteran who was lost to history
This past August Army Private Sandy Wills was buried with full military honors at a veterans’ cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. Private Wills served his country, though not in this century, or the last. He died in 1889.
He was originally laid to rest in an unmarked grave, a Civil War veteran all but lost to history.
“No one knew about Sandy Wills,” said Cheryl wills, Sandy’s great-great-great-granddaughter. “An enslaved man leaves a plantation, serves during the Civil War with Lincoln’s army, and poof! Like it never happened.”
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Cheryl didn’t know of him, or her family’s long military legacy, until she started researching her ancestry. And it was tragedy that first sparked her interest in genealogy.
Her father, a New York City firefighter and Vietnam-era veteran, was killed in a motorcycle accident when she was a teenager. She recalled, “When I sat at his funeral, the one thing that was burned into my heart was when the military honored him. And then they handed my mother a folded flag. And at that moment, I realized my father was special in the eyes of the greatest army in the world.”
Like millions of Black Americans, Cheryl’s family had left the South as part of the Great Migration. Her grandparents moved from Tennessee to New York City. For the past 30 years, Cheryl, an author and journalist, has been telling other people’s stories, all the while knowing little of her own.
When asking her family about the past, she said, “No one knew anything. And that was one question I used to ask them: ‘What do you know about slavery?’ And they would look at me like, ‘What kind of question is that?’ Those who lived through slavery, it was like they had this pact: We’re not passing this story down. You don’t want to know what it was like. So, Sandy’s story disappeared from our family.”
Combing through census, birth, marriage and death records, Cheryl meticulously traced the roots and branches of her family tree. The earliest ancestor she was able to document: Sandy Wills, who was bought by Willis Wills when he was 10 years old.
The Holy Grail of her search was Sandy Wills’ military records. He’d volunteered for the colored troops in 1863 and was honorably discharged. He worked as a sharecropper on the Moore plantation after the war, and married a woman named Emma; they had nine children. Records showed when Sandy died, but Cheryl could find no trace of where he was buried. “He was nowhere to be found, essentially MIA,” she said.
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Her search did lead her to a living relative, Ethan West, a distant cousin also researching his family. “She was going through finding Sandy, and I’ve been posting a lot of stuff about my lineage,” he said. “And our lineages collided.”
She called Ethan her hero: “He physically went down there.”
“Down there” is Brownsville, in Haywood County, Tennessee. They both had come across records placing some of their ancestors, including Sandy Wills, on a plantation there owned by the Moore family. “I just wanted to know what this place that we’re reading about looked like,” said West. “I found the coordinates to where the property would have been.”
In 2013, West went driving around Haywood County looking for answers, and literally saw a sign: Mooreland. “And when he texted me that sign, I went, holy guacamole,” said Cheryl. “And I think both of our lives changed.”
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Mooreland is 900 lush acres of cotton, soybeans and pecan trees. Over the years, Cheryl and Ethan would visit, and gradually formed a unique bond with the Moore descendants, telling them of their family’s connections to the farm – and their belief that a Civil War veteran was buried on their property.
And the Moores told them something they had hoped to hear – that there is an unmarked African American burial ground on their farm. “They took me there, and for that, I’m eternally grateful,” said Cheryl. “Because we had no idea it was there. We only had a hunch.”
Cheryl hired an archeology team with experience finding America’s missing-in-action from more recent wars. Of the 38 graves they found here, they zeroed in on one – its size, date, and fragmentary remains matched every known detail of her ancestor.
“Sunday Morning” was there with the families and local veterans when Private Sandy Wills’ remains were placed in a casket, and solemnly marched from the knoll, through green fields, to a waiting hearse.
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Edie Moore, the family matriarch, said that for generations the Moores kept that African-American cemetery on their property untouched. “A farmer would come along and say, ‘Oh, if it were me, I would just bulldoze down that clump of trees and plant on top of it,” said Edie. “We said, ‘No, it’s hallowed ground. And we will never ever touch it.’ And my husband, he had daffodils that he planted over the whole cemetery.”
Knowing it was the resting place for Private Wills, she said, “adds depth to the whole experience.”
After the exhumation, the Moores hosted a picnic at the farm – two families connected by this land, and by America’s complicated history.
A headstone now marks Sandy Wills’ grave at the West Tennessee State Veterans Cemetery. For Cheryl Wills, it’s mission accomplished.
“History really meant for him to be anonymous forever,” she said. “He was a man without a legacy for 135 years. And now, it’s been taken back.”
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Story produced by Jack Weingart. Editor: Ed Givnish.
A man who failed in an attempt to break into Brazil’s Supreme Court killed himself in explosions outside the building Wednesday that forced justices and staff to evacuate, authorities said.
The two strong blasts were heard about 7:30 p.m. after the day’s session finished and all the justices and staff left the building safely, Brazil’s Supreme Court said in a statement.
Local firefighters confirmed one man died at the scene in the capital Brasilia, but did not identify him.
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Celina Leão, the lieutenant governor of Brazil’s federal district, said the suspect had earlier detonated explosives in a car in a Congress parking lot, which did not cause injuries.
“His first action was to explode the car. Then he approached the Supreme Court and tried to get in the building. He failed and then there were the other explosions,” Leão said in a news conference.
Local media reported that the car that exploded belonged to a member of Brazil’s Liberal Party, the same of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Leão said only investigations will determine whether the owner of the car is the same man who died in the blasts.
Leão recommended that Congress be closed Thursday to avoid new risks. Brazil’s Senate heeded her call and the lower house will be shut until noon, speaker Arthur Lira said.
“It could have been a lone wolf, like others we’ve seen around the world,” Leão said in a news conference. “We are considering it as a suicide because there was only one victim. But investigations will show if that was indeed the case.”
Leão added only forensics will be able to identify the body, which remained outside the Supreme Court for three hours after the blasts.
The blasts outside the Supreme Court took place about 20 seconds apart in Brasilia’s Three Powers Plaza, where Brazil’s main government buildings, including the Supreme Court, Congress and presidential palace, are located.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was not in the neighboring presidential palace at the time, spokesman José Chrispiniano said.
Police blocked all access to the area and the presidential security bureau was conducting a sweep of the grounds around the presidential palace.
Brazil’s federal police said it is investigating and did not provide a motive.
The Supreme Court in recent years has become a target for threats by far-right groups and supporters of Bolsonaro’s due to its crackdown on the spread of false information. In particular, Justice Alexandre de Moraes has been a focus for their ire.
Lula’s spokesman said that late on Wednesday the leftist leader was gathering at the presidential residence with federal police chief Andrei Rodrigues, and Supreme Court Justices de Moraes and Cristiano Zanin.
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What to know about Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy
Donald Trump is vowing to reduce wasteful federal spending by tapping two billionaires — Tesla CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy — to spearhead the initiative, which the president-elect is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The appointments, announced by Trump on Tuesday, raise a host of questions about the effort, including whether Musk and Ramaswamy will have the authority to make changes in federal outlays, given that Congress authorizes the nation’s spending, as well as where the businessmen might look to cut spending. Under the plan, meanwhile, DOGE is not an official government department, raising questions about how its powers and how it will operate.
The announcement comes a week after Trump won a second term as president, with voters expressing their dissatisfaction with the economy under the Biden administration. As part of his campaign vows, Trump promised to slash government spending. Musk’s bio on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022, now reads, “The people voted for major government reform.”
“Frankly, it does need to be done again, so every few decades you really need to look at everything,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution who managed the Clinton Administration’s National Performance Review, an effort to cut government spending in the 1990s, told CBS MoneyWatch.
But Kamarck also harbors reservations about Musk and Ramaswamy’s mandate, especially after the former recently suggested he could find more than $2 trillion in savings — almost one-third of the federal government’s $6.7 trillion in annual spending. Two-thirds of that spending is mandatory through programs including Social Security and Medicare, while discretionary spending is largely spent on defense.
“This is the first warning sign that this is going to be a failed operation,” Kamarck said. “That’s insane.”
The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Here’s what to know about the Department of Government Efficiency.
What is the Department of Government Efficiency?
Trump announced the DOGE in a statement on Tuesday, describing it as an effort to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
The name is a nod to Musk’s support for a cryptocurrency called dogecoin, which was created as a joke by two software engineers and uses the image of a smiling Shiba Inu dog. (Dogecoin has more than tripled in price during the last month, and now trades at 38 cents.)
Trump said Musk and Ramaswamy’s work “will conclude no later than July 4, 2026,” or by the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Trump only outlined the initiative’s contours and didn’t disclose how it will be staffed or funded. The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request about the DOGE’s funding or whether Musk or Ramaswamy will be paid for their work on the effort.
Can the DOGE actually cut federal spending?
At the moment, that appears unlikely given that the DOGE isn’t a real government department, which would need to be created by congressional approval. Federal spending is authorized by Congress, and senators and House representatives may hesitate to support cuts to major programs like Social Security or Medicare, which are popular with millions of voters, or to the nation’s military.
It’s also not clear how the organization will operate. It could come under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which dictates how external groups that advise the government must operate and be accountable to the public.
Trump described Musk and Ramaswamy’s role as providing “advice and guidance from outside of government.”
That doesn’t amount to much, Kamarck said.
“They have no authority — none whatsoever,” she added, while noting that the backing of the president can help convince lawmakers to throw their support behind efficiency efforts.
What have Musk and Ramaswamy said about federal spending?
Musk, the world’s richest person with a net worth of $319 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has described the U.S. government as bloated and said it its spending is unsustainable. The Tesla founder also said he wants to reduce the number of federal agencies to 99, down from more than 400.
“There are so many [agencies] that people have never heard of, and that have overlapping areas of responsibilities,” Musk said earlier this month.
While on the campaign trail with Trump, Musk also said he could cut “at least $2 trillion” from the annual budget. “Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency will fix that,” Musk said.
Musk is known for cost-cutting at his own companies, slashing most of X’s workforce after he bought the business two years ago as well as focusing on manufacturing costs at Tesla. Even so, those efforts have had mixed results, with X’s valuation falling by about 80% since his purchase. Tesla’s stock price, meanwhile, has surged 48% in the past year, bumping its value above $1 trillion.
Ramaswamy, whom Forbes says has a net worth of about $1 billion, dropped out of the presidential race in January after running on an “anti-woke” campaign. He also advocated for government cuts by eliminating the Department of Education, a goal shared by President-elect Trump.
Have administrations previously tried to cut costs?
Yes, both Republican and Democratic presidents have created efforts to cut government spending.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan created the Grace Commission, led by wealthy businessman J. Peter Grace, the CEO of W. R. Grace & Company, a chemicals business. About 150 business people volunteered for the commission, which ultimately recommended 2,500 reforms, according to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
“Most of the recommendations, especially those requiring legislation from Congress, were never implemented,” the library notes. “However, the Commission’s work provided a starting point for many conservative critiques of the federal government.”
In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton created the National Performance Review with the goal to create a government that would work better and cost less, Kamarck said. The group was staffed with civil servants who understood the bureaucracy, and many of whom had frustrations with it, she added.
The group had some successes in streamlining operations and paring costs, eventually cutting more than 300,000 jobs, according to a study from the Congressional Research Service. Kamarck noted that the group also focused on integrating technology into departments at a time when the internet was just emerging, leading to efficiencies such as online tax filing.
Where could the Trump administration cut spending?
While experts are skeptical of Musk’s claim he can cut $2 trillion in spending, they also point out there are opportunities to look at efficiencies.
Eliminating Medicare fraud is one area that could result in savings, according to the Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan group that looks at government spending. Its recommendations also include reducing the nation’s contributions to the U.N. and ending subsidies for some agricultural products, like dairy and sugar. Its projected savings: $377 billion in the first year, or about 19% of the $2 trillion that Musk is eyeballing.
But efficiency goes beyond cost-cutting, Kamarck noted. It’s also about understanding how the bureaucracy works,
“Every single thing in the federal government is big and complicated, and there are layers and layers of complexity,” she noted. “Al Gore and I relied on hundreds of experienced civil servants to tell us how this worked — and if you don’t do this, which I suspect they won’t because Musk is an arrogant billionaire, you will fail.”
Does Musk have conflicts of interest?
Yes, as Musk’s SpaceX works with the Department of Defense and NASA, with the federal government pledging $3 billion to his companies last year, according to the New York Times. Tesla, meanwhile, has been investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as well as by other agencies.
Federal employees are generally required to disclose their financial assets and entanglements to ward off any potential conflicts of interest, and to divest significant holdings relating to their work. Because Musk and Ramaswamy would not be formal federal workers, they would not face those requirements or ethical limitations.
contributed to this report.