William Lathem

Descendants of some who served with the armies of the Confederacy are celebrating their Southern heritage this weekend at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.

“We are talking about family, about our great great-grandfathers, our great-grandmothers,” said John Culpepper, city manager in Chickamauga and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

“This is in our DNA,” said historian and re-enactor. “We must not let the sacrifices they endured be forgotten.”

Local members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans will hold their 10th annual observation of Confederate Memorial Day this afternoon at the park’s Georgia Monument.

“We always take the last Sunday in April to recognize the citizen soldiers of Georgia who served during the Civil War,” Mr. Culpepper said.

State offices will be closed Monday because Gov. Sonny Perdue, following the tradition of Georgia governors since 1874, proclaimed April as a time to celebrate Confederate history and designated a Confederate Memorial Day.

The Southern legacy lingers on the battleground at Chickamauga, where about 35,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or captured in the two days of fighting that was the Confederacy’s last great victory.

Re-enactors with the 37th Georgia Volunteer Infantry will camped Saturday at Poe Field. That was where more than 180 men in gray were cut down by 20 Union cannon concealed in a tree line.

The slaughter took about three minutes just before sunset on Sept. 19, 1863.

Famed author Ambrose Bierce was with the 9th Regiment, Indiana Volunteers, when he witnessed the carnage at Poe Field from behind the Union battery. Some scholars claim the horrors on Poe Field, where 600 Confederates charged headlong into a setting sun and blazing cannon, were reflected in Bierce’s story “Chickamauga.”

The Sons of Confederate Veterans will gather there in homage to ancestors who served the South. The Sons groups, or camps, from Chickamauga, LaFayette, Ringgold and Trenton organize the ceremony at Chickamauga Battlefield.

This year, William Lathem, a member of the Robert E. Lee Camp in of Cobb County, Ga., will deliver the keynote address, followed by the traditional Confederate 18-gun salute.

Mr. Lathem’s speech — “Our Confederate Heritage: Why echoes of the past are relevant for today” — touches on today’s misunderstandings of what the Confederacy was about, he said.

“We grieve, and rightly so, over the loss of a single life in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Mr. Lathem said. “It is difficult to comprehend the loss of tens of thousands of men in just a two- or three-day period.”