Associated Press

ST. FRANCISVILLE, La. — For a brief time during the Civil War, hostilities at St. Francisville stilled while Masons from the Union Navy and Confederate Army buried one of their own — a 38-year-old Union gunboat commander who shot himself.
This weekend, Masons and history buffs plan a 3-day commemoration for the 150th anniversary of the June 1863 truce called to bury Lt. Cmdr. John Hart of the USS Albatross. There will be a parade, a funeral re-enactment and talks about Civil War medicine and funerals, Hart and Confederate Capt. W.W. Leake, a Mason who approved the truce and put flowers on Hart's grave three times a year long after the war had ended.
Hart's death on June 11, 1863, came during the sieges of Vicksburg, Miss., and Port Hudson, La., during Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's campaign to cut the Confederacy in two.
"It's significant in the turmoil ... that they were able to become civilized to some degree. Here was an enemy of their country, so to speak, and they decided they would bury him with not only the Masonic service but the Episcopalian service," said Frank Karwowski, historian of the Masonic lodge in Schenectady, N.Y., where Hart entered freemasonry and rose to the rank of master six years before his death.

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