This Republic of Suffering (10 page)

Soldiers acted with as little concern as if it were not men but “hogs dying around them.” Human life diminished sharply in value, and the living risked becoming as dehumanized as the dead. Soldiers perhaps found it a relief to think of themselves not as men but as machines—without moral compass or responsibility, simply the instruments of others' direction and will. As a common soldier, Angus Waddle believed he was “but a machine by which fame and glory is manufacted for some great Gen.'” Texan Elijah Petty explained to his wife that “we have no right to think. Others have been appointed to think for us and we like the automation must kick (or work) when the wire is pulled.” Civilians caring for the fallen in battle's immediate aftermath adopted a similar strategy. Katherine Wormeley, who served on a hospital ship during the Peninsula Campaign, believed that to permit herself to “feel acutely at such times is merely selfish.” It was imperative “to put away all feeling. Do all you can, and be a machine—that's the way to act; the only way.”
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While many soldiers welcomed this numbing as a means of escaping the horrors around them, others worried about the implications of such detachment. “The fact that many men get so accustomed to the thing, that they can step about among the heaps of dead bodies, many of them their friends and acquaintances[,] without any particular emotion, is the worst of all,” a Federal officer observed. Indifference to suffering and death was “demoralizing,” a failure to care about what should matter most in human life. A religious tract widely distributed in the Confederate army issued a stern “warning to soldiers.” “Guard against unfeeling recklessness,” it cautioned. “By familiarity with scenes of violence and death, soldiers often become apparently indifferent to suffering and anguish, and appear to be destitute of the ordinary sensibilities of our humanity.” Hardening represented in the eyes of the church an abandonment of the compassion that lay at the core of human and Christian identity. Loss of feeling was at base a loss of self—a kind of living death that could make even survivors casualties of war.
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Killing was the essence of war. But it also challenged men's most fundamental assumptions about the sanctity of their own and other human lives. Killing produced transformations that were not readily reversible: the living into the dead, most obviously, but the survivors into different men as well, men required to deny, to numb basic human feeling at costs they may have paid for decades after the war ended, as we know twentieth-and twenty-first-century soldiers from Vietnam to Iraq continue to do; men who, like James Garfield, were never quite the same again after seeing fields of slaughtered bodies destroyed by men just like themselves.

CHAPTER
3

BURYING

“New Lessons Caring for the Dead”

“This is not how we bury folks at home.”

ROLAND E. BOWEN, 15TH MASSACHUSETTS,
SEPTEMBER
28, 1862

H
owever stunned, exhausted, and overwhelmed, soldiers at the end of battle had more work to do. The carnage created by the Civil War's major engagements, and even the casualties of smaller skirmishes, presented an immediate challenge to those still reeling from the fighting's physical and emotional impact. Soldiers had to disregard their own misery and attend to the wounded and dead. The sheer number of bodies requiring disposal after a Shiloh, an Antietam, or a Gettysburg defied both administrative imagination and logistical capacity, for each death posed a pressing and grimly pragmatic problem: What should be done with the body?

Nineteenth-century Americans confronted this crisis of the Civil War slain within a broader context of assumptions about appropriate treatment of the dead. Humanity, not just particular humans, was at stake. As the trustees of the Antietam National Cemetery would explain in 1869, “One of the striking indications of civilization and refinement among a people is the tenderness and care manifested by them towards their dead.”
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Why do living humans pay attention to corpses? There is, of course, the compelling need for disposal. But that is simply the most tangible and immediate problem dead bodies pose. In 1854, well before the intrusions of war,
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
offered an extended consideration of the subject. Its editor, Henry Raymond, founder of the
New York Times
and one of Lincoln's strongest wartime supporters, speculated whether the “sacredness of the human body” was a notion too outdated for a modern era of science and progress. Invoking history, philosophy, religion, and reason, he insisted otherwise. “There ever has been, in all places, in all ages, among all classes and conditions of mankind, a deep-feeling in respect to the remains of our earthly mortality.” The body, the essay continued, is not simply a possession, “like a picture, a book, a garment, or any thing else that once
belonged
to the deceased.” In the corpse, rather, there remains “something of the former self hood.” And, in the terms of prevailing Protestant doctrine, something of the future and immortal selfhood as well. The human body is “not like any other portion of matter,” for it “will be raised again—yea, the same body.”
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Redemption and resurrection of the body were understood as physical, not just metaphysical, realities, and therefore the body, even in death and dissolution, preserved “a surviving identity.” Thus the body required “sacred reverence and care” the absence of such solicitude would indicate “a demoralized and rapidly demoralizing community.” The body was the repository of human identity in two senses: it represented the intrinsic selfhood and individuality of a particular human, and at the same time it incarnated the very humanness of that identity—the promise of eternal life that differentiates human remains from the carcasses of animals, who possess neither consciousness of death nor promise of either physical or spiritual immortality. Such understandings of the body and its place in the universe mandated attention even when life had fled; it required what always seemed to be called “decent” burial, as well as rituals fitting for the dead.
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Civil War soldiers worried deeply about their own remains, especially as they began to encounter circumstances that made customary reverence all but impossible. A South Carolinian wrote from the Virginia front that “some how I have a horor of being thrown out in a neglected place or bee trampled on as I have seen a number of graves here.” His hope was to be transported home. Jeremiah Gage of the 11th Mississippi felt differently. As he lay dying at Gettysburg, he wrote to urge his mother not to regret that she would be unable to retrieve his body. With his last words, he asked “to be buried like my comrades. But deep, boys deep, so the beasts won't get me.” Confederate Thomas J. Key shared the same gruesome concern: “It is dreadful to contemplate being killed on the field of battle without a kind hand to hide one's remains from the eye of the world or the gnawing of animals and buzzards.” Another northern soldier expressed a different worry with his last breath: “don't let the rebels get me.” To be returned to the bosom of family or, failing that, at least to be honorably buried with one's comrades and preserved from the desecrations of enemies, human and otherwise: these concerns were shared by soldiers North and South.
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When the war began, military officials on both sides sought to establish regularized burial procedures, in no small part because decaying bodies and the “effluvia” that emanated from them were believed to pose serious threats to public health. Many of the deaths in the initial months of the conflict arose from epidemics of diseases like measles and mumps that broke out as men, often from isolated rural areas, crowded together in army camps and exposed one another to new illnesses. Both North and South ordered military hospitals to establish burial grounds. Each hospital of the Union army was charged to provide a “dead house,” for storage of corpses prior to burial and for post-mortem examinations. When circumstances permitted, hospital personnel kept careful records of those interred, provided them with respectful burials, and, if the army remained stationary for a period of time, maintained graves. In Virginia in 1861, for example, accounts of the Confederate hospital at Culpeper showed regular sums expended to local laborers for digging graves and making coffins for interments in its well-tended cemetery.
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But as war escalated and troops began to clash on the battlefield, these cemeteries became entirely inadequate for those who were dying at the scene of the fighting, on scattered grounds, or in hastily established field hospitals. At the end of the war, a former Union hospital steward remembered ruefully the failure to maintain careful records of the dead. Field hospitals, he explained, were organized on an emergency basis. “Everything…was therefore hurriedly arranged. You will therefore understand the seeming want of order in the burial of the dead…It was with the greatest difficulty and with terrible exertion on the part of my associates and myself that we were able to care for the sick and wounded—hence the little apparent care for those who were beyond help.” As a Union chaplain put it, “We learned new lessons as to caring for the soldier dead, or as to the necessity of failing to care for them in the exigencies of more active warfare.”
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“Soldiers' Graves near General Hospital, City Point, Virginia.” Library of Congress.

The First Battle of Bull Run late in July 1861 yielded casualties that galvanized military officials to reconsider their lack of preparation for so many fallen. In September the Union army issued General Orders no. 75, making commanding officers responsible for burial of soldiers who died within their jurisdiction and for submission of a form recording their deaths to the office of the adjutant general. A little more than six months later, General Orders no. 33 detailed more elaborate instructions:

In order to secure, as far as possible, the decent interment of those who have fallen, or may fall, in battle, it is made the duty of Commanding Generals to lay off plots of ground in some suitable spot near every battlefield, so soon as it may be in their power, and to cause the remains of those killed to be interred, with headboards to the graves bearing numbers, and, when practicable, the names of the persons buried in them. A register of each burialground will be preserved, in which will be noted the marks corresponding to the headboards.
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“As far as possible…when practicable”: the very language reveals how utopian a measure this would prove. The structures and resources that would have been necessary to implement such policies were hardly even imagined, much less provided: the Union army had no regular burial details, no graves registration units, and until 1864 no comprehensive ambulance service. As late as Second Bull Run, in August 1862, a Union division took the field without a single ambulance available for removal of casualties. The Confederate army passed analogous regulations specifying the commanders' duty to bury the dead, dispose of their effects—and even pay their laundry bills. But they gave no more systematic attention to how these exhortations might actually be heeded than did their northern counterparts. Burying the dead after a Civil War battle seemed always to be an act of improvisation, one that called upon the particular resources of the moment and circumstance: available troops to be detailed, prisoners of war to be deployed, civilians to be enlisted.
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This lack of capacity and preparation was evident in the length of time it took to attend to the dead. Battlefield exigencies often delayed care for the wounded, much less the slain. If a military advantage seemed threatened, commanders might well reject flags of truce proposed for removal of casualties from the field. During the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, for example, Union colonel Henry Weeks reported to his commanding officer from Hanover Court House, Virginia, “the refusal of the enemy to admit our burial party.” Soldiers often lay on the field dead or dying for hours or even days until an engagement was decided. Josiah Murphey of Nantucket reported on June 6, 1864, that casualties from the Battle of Cold Harbor remained where they had fallen for three days. At last a twenty-four-hour flag of truce interrupted the unrelieved fighting and enabled soldiers to bury their dead. A northern paper explained Grant's rejection of a forty-eight-hour “cessation of hostilities” to bury the dead during this spring 1864 campaign: “Lee was on his knees begging for time to bury his dead. But in this cruel war the business of generals is with the living.” Civilians and soldiers alike began to understand the meaning and urgency of the phrase they so often intoned: “Let the dead bury the dead.”
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More often delay resulted from the failure to mobilize necessary manpower and resources for the task. The Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day of combat in American history, left both Union and Confederate armies staggering. Lee slowly limped southward, leaving the field—and the dead of both sides—to the Union army. McClellan appeared to be paralyzed by the magnitude of the engagement and failed to take strategic advantage of his victory by pursuing the Confederate army. A similar paralysis seemed to grip his troops as they confronted the devastation before them. Twenty-three thousand men and untold numbers of horses and mules lay killed or wounded. A Union surgeon reported that a week after the battle “the dead were almost wholly unburied, and the stench arising from it was such as to breed a pestilence.” He described “stretched along, in one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads.” A nurse arriving more than ten days later found men still scattered on the field.
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