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In 1861, the U.S. Congress, responding to the growing number of Civil War dead, passed legislation regulating the burial practices of the Union Army. Six years later, the legislative body established a government-administered national cemetery system (NCS) that only interred Union soldiers killed in action. Subsequent pressure, from veterans groups, families, concerned citizens, and Congress led to the expansion of the institution’s eligibility regulations and funerary landscapes. As the product of over a century and a half of political and social negotiations, the NCS now consists of nearly 200 cemeteries, on domestic and foreign soil, that inter a vast array of individuals whom the government has deemed patriots. Drawing on cultural history, memory studies, anthropology, and art history, “These Honored Dead” illustrates how the NCS evolved from necessary wartime burial grounds into a federal memorial institution whose activities defined and announced the nations’ geographic, political, and social boundaries. Through an administrative and cultural history of the institution, this dissertation considers how Americans from diverse backgrounds and within divergent historical contexts have turned to the NCS to understand their individual and national identities and ideals. I look to the institution’s funerary landscapes as physical and affective evidence of how the federal government and the U.S. citizenry negotiate social and political relations. In the process, I interrogate “whose deaths matter?” to the national democratic mission. I argue that by developing national cemeteries and maintaining exclusionary interment regulations, the federal government announced a racialized, gendered, and politicized hierarchy of national belonging. The persistence of the NCS demonstrates that the nation mourns and memorializes patriotic sacrifice, regardless of martial victory, to make sense of contemporary anxieties. This dissertation illustrates the ways that the federal government mediates cultural and social politics, alongside its own interests, to construct a politically and socially useful memorial embodiment of patriotic sacrifice.