I found out about this program in 2002 while researching the resurgence of political activity by so-called "neo-Confederate" groups in the early part of the last decade. Since then I've spoken to at least a dozen Civil War experts who had no idea it existed and were surprised to hear about it.

But they—we, our federal government—do provide headstones for Confederate dead all over the country: 18,593 of them in the last 10 years, and an average of more than 2,000 per year going back at least several years before that, according to the VA. At an average cost of around $176 to manufacture each headstone, and an average shipping cost of $75, that's more than half a million dollars every year. (The total cost over the last 10 years is lower due to inflation: In 2003, the VA told me manufacturing was closer $100 per headstone, and shipping was around $10.) By far the lion's share of these headstones are for graves in Southern states and for a number of years, Georgia had more than twice as many orders as any other state.

The Confederate headstones are provided by the VA's National Cemetery Administration. Providing headstones for America's fallen soldiers is a tradition that goes back to laws passed in 1867 and 1873 that ordered the Department of War to properly establish national cemeteries and furnish graves with headstones. In 1879, the country began furnishing headstones for veterans buried in private cemeteries, too.

It wasn't until the 20th century, though, that Confederate veterans were included in this tradition. It started with legislation passed in 1906, at first providing headstones for a very limited number of Confederate veterans, specifically prisoners of war, "who died in Federal prisons and military hospitals in the North and who were buried near their places of confinement." That mandate for the Department of War was expanded to all Confederate graves with a law passed in 1929.

Responsibility for headstones was transferred to the VA in the National Cemeteries Act of 1973, which declared, "The Administrator shall furnish, when requested, appropriate Government headstones or markers at the expense of the United States for the unmarked graves of" a number of categories of veterans and those who'd served the country or were buried in a national cemetery, including specifically, "Soldiers of the Union and Confederate Armies of the Civil War."

In addition to headstones, the NCA is now responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of a total of 33 monuments and memorials that honor Confederate soldiers and causes, according to NCA Senior Historian Sara Amy Leach. The monuments were often erected by private groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Looking through a list of them gives a sense of the various waves of Confederate nostalgia in America: Nine were built in the years 1910 to 1912, four were built in the 1920s and '30s, and the most recent wave saw four more built between 2003 and 2006, with other key periods of concentration in the century and a half since the Civil War.