This Republic of Suffering (32 page)

But this cession of rights, of property in person, remains incomplete. It is, in effect, a contract in which the state must in return accept certain obligations—in Barton's view, to provide a record of death, an accounting for the destruction of human treasure. And tellingly, in Barton's rendering, it is undertaken between women and the state. Women, legally denied the right to make contracts in most of pre–Civil War America, here claim new rights of personhood and citizenship that derive from their wartime sacrifice. An accounting for the dead is an accounting to the bereaved. As she affirmed the individual's right to identity and humanity even in death, Clara Barton articulated a notion of citizenship founded in the nation's experience of civil war and in the suffering of both soldiers and civilians. The war that freed the slaves established broad claims to rights—for blacks as well as whites, for women as well as men, for both the living and the dead. But as Clara Barton certainly recognized, the soldier dead were all men. Survivors had not made the ultimate sacrifice; their claims upon the state would not have the same force as those of the soldiers who had suffered and perished. The rhetoric of Clara Barton's letter to Stanton sought to minimize and even erase a gendered divide and a gendered hierarchy that Civil War death had only rendered more profound. But it was no accident that when the nation, however fleetingly, sought to expand its polity in the years immediately following the war, it was black men, who had served and died in such significant numbers, and neither white nor black women, whom the Fifteenth Amendment welcomed as newly enfranchised citizens.
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“The Soldier's Grave,” by Currier and Ives, a lithograph that families could inscribe with details of a lost loved one. For those who had no actual grave to mark, this could serve as a substitute. Library of Congress
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In August 1866, as reburial efforts in the South slowed in response to summer heat,
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
published an article calling for a comprehensive system of national cemeteries to include all Union dead. Building on notions of federal obligation that Bushnell, Barton, and Whitman had already articulated, James F. Russling defined treatment of the fallen as the sign and test of democracy, as well as the indicator of progress and modernity.

Except for “Republican Athens,” Russling argued, no people or nation had ever designated a burial place for the common soldier. He has “been overlooked, as if too humble to be taken into account.” But this was “a new era,” determined to “elevate our common humanity.” And perhaps even more important, the United States was a nation that had newly displayed its dedication to the proposition of human equality.

A Democratic republic like ours, based on the equality of the race, and affirming justice for all that knows or professes to know only excellence and worth wherever found, can not afford to pass by unheeded, however humble, those who have proven themselves by fierce and sturdy warfare in its behalf at once its best citizens and brave defenders.

The purposes of the war and the treatment of the dead were inextricable. Urging that the bodies of all Union soldiers should be disinterred and “brought speedily together into great national cemeteries,” Russling emphasized the mutuality of obligation between citizen and state.
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Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
is a good sentiment for soldiers to fight and die by. Let the American Government show, first of all modern nations, that it knows how to reciprocate that sentiment by tenderly collecting, and nobly caring for, the remains of those who in our greatest war have fought and died to rescue and perpetuate the liberties of us all.
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In its invocation of modernity, in its reference to the “greatest war,” in its citation of a line from Horace that became the title of World War I's most famous poem, Russling's words almost seem to look to another Great, and yet more bloody, War, one that would install mass carnage at the core of existence in the twentieth century. That dying for one's country is sweet and proper becomes for Wilfred Owen by 1917 “the old Lie.” But a half century earlier it remained for Russling “a good sentiment”—one that he believed should animate national policy toward the Civil War dead.
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Russling's prescriptions soon became settled policy. Even before Congress passed formal legislation in February 1867, the effort to bury every Union soldier within the safe confines of a national cemetery began. During the summer of 1866 Whitman made plans for “commencement of the general work of disinterment” in the cooler weather of fall, designing record-keeping forms that would minimize errors, mapping routes, and gathering needed labor and supplies. Whitman was acutely aware of both the dangers and the opportunities in relocating so many bodies. Moving a grave could mean losing an identity tied to a place or circumstance of burial; it might also provide a final chance to discover a name. He and his superiors were sensitive, too, to the implications of this unprecedented extension of governmental responsibility into the intimate and domestic arena of death. Brevet Major General J. L. Donaldson, chief quartermaster of the Military Division of the Tennessee, introduced an uncharacteristically personal tone into the customary formality of general orders when he emphasized in an August directive that “the Government in assuming to perform a work, which belongs as a special right only to kindred and friends of the deceased, demands of its Agents to discharge the duty, with the delicacy and tenderness of near and dear friends.” Later in the month Donaldson issued a circular addressed to “Friends of Deceased Union Soldiers” announcing to the general public that disinterment of all bodies in his Military Division would begin in October. He invited those who wished to be present at exhumations in hope of identifying lost kin to contact Whitman for an exact schedule of localities. The national government had assumed the unprecedented role of the citizen's friend.
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In early September Whitman set forth on his explorations once more, moving through Kentucky from the Tennessee line to the Ohio River, embarking again in late October to Chattanooga and Chickamauga, then along the route of Sherman's March, and back through Macon and Andersonville at the close of the year. By the end of his journey, Whitman estimated he had traveled thirty thousand miles in his search for the dead. Increasing local violence, resulting from the growing national conflict over Reconstruction, made Union bodies and graves, not to mention his own mission, ever more vulnerable. “The country in that section,” Whitman wrote from Lexington, Kentucky, in late September 1866, “is in a very unsettled state and the lives of Union men are unsafe.” Whitman kept a careful eye out for land that might be suitable for permanent cemeteries, recording details about plots, owners, and purchase options. His reports to headquarters, he later remembered, called regular attention to “the wretched condition of the graves and burial places of the dead and to their miscellaneous and universal distribution throughout the entire country that had been the seat of war.” Collectively his communications powerfully reinforced “the necessity of…universal disinterment and collection of the scattered remains into permanent National Cemeteries.”
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In early 1867 Whitman's position was at last enshrined in law, as well as War Department policy. With “A bill to establish and protect national cemeteries,” passed by Congress in February 1867, and the creation of seventeen additional cemeteries in the course of that year, the federal government legally signaled its acceptance of responsibility for those who had died in its service. The locating and recording of graves that Whitman had undertaken in his 1866 expedition would be transformed into a comprehensive program of reburial, combined with acquisition of land for a system of government cemeteries adequate to hold hundreds of thousands of soldiers' remains.
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Across the Military Division of the Tennessee Whitman reaped what he described as a “Harvest of Death,” reporting that by 1869 he had gathered 114,560 soldiers into twenty national cemeteries within his assigned territory. Each body was placed in a separate coffin, its original burial site recorded and its final destination documented by cemetery section and grave number. Reinterments cost an average of $9.75 a body, with $2 to $3 of this for the coffin. Ultimately each reburied soldier would also be marked by a name—if it was in fact known—for in 1872 Congress at last yielded to Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs's insistence upon such commemoration. In December 1868, Meigs had written to the secretary of war in terms that suggested the growing importance of public opinion—the sentiment of the “friends” of the fallen—in shaping governmental policy toward the dead. “I do not believe,” Meigs declared, “that those who visit the graves of their relatives would have any satisfaction in finding them ticketed and numbered like London policemen, or convicts. Every civilized man desires to have his friend's name marked on his monument.” And every citizen deserved to be remembered as an individual and identifiable human self.
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As Whitman supervised the removal of tens of thousands of bodies to national cemeteries in the Division of the Tennessee, so the work begun in 1865 by Moore and Earnshaw continued in other parts of the South. Charged with responsibility for burials in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., Moore collected more than fifty thousand bodies into national cemeteries. Near Petersburg, Virginia, for example, he directed a force of one hundred men, forty mules, and twelve horses that over a three-year period relocated 6,718 bodies killed in the final campaigns of the war to the new Poplar Grove National Cemetery. The dead were gathered from more than ninety-five different sites in nine different counties, and only 2,139 of them could be positively identified, even though bounties were offered to local citizens for information about bodies. In the cemetery at Seven Pines, about seven miles east of Richmond, 1,202 of 1,356 dead soldiers remained unknown.
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At Antietam Moore oversaw units of the U.S. Burial Corps as they gathered what they expected to be about eight thousand soldiers from within a twenty-mile radius. Their goal was to complete the work in time for the fifth anniversary of the battle in September 1867. Some of the bodies—especially those with red hair, it seemed to one curiously analytic observer—remained “in an almost perfect state of preservation,” facilitating recognition, while others could be identified only if distinctive objects had been interred with them. The comrades who had buried a soldier with a sealed bottle containing his name, address, and details of death had ensured that William Stickney of the Seventh Maine Volunteers would not be counted among the unknown.
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Overall the rate of identification proved rather better than at Poplar Grove. When the reinterment program was completed in 1871, 303,536 Union soldiers had been buried in seventy-four national cemeteries, and the War Department had expended $4,000,306.26 on the effort to gather the dead. Quartermaster General Meigs reported that 54 percent of the men had been identified as a result of careful attention to the bodies and their original graves, as well as extensive research in military hospital records, muster rolls, casualty reports, and even documentation gathered by the Sanitary Commission about deaths and burials. Some thirty thousand of these dead were black soldiers; they were buried in areas designated “colored” on the drawings that mapped the new national cemeteries and were enumerated in columns marked “black” on the forms officially reporting the progress of interments. Separated into units of U.S. Colored Troops in life, these soldiers were similarly segregated in death, and only about a third of them were identified. The notions of equality of citizenship that animated the reburial program clearly had their limits, despite the critical role African Americans had played in the identification and interment of the war's dead.
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The reburial program represented an extraordinary departure for the federal government, an indication of the very different sort of nation that had emerged as a result of civil war. The program's extensiveness, its cost, its location in national rather than state government, and its connection with the most personal dimensions of individuals' lives all would have been unimaginable before the war created its legions of dead, a constituency of the slain and their mourners, who would change the very definition of the nation and its obligations. “Such a consecration of a nation's power and resources to a
sentiment,
” Whitman observed, “the world has never witnessed.”
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But this transformative undertaking included only Union soldiers. These were the staunch defenders the nation sought to honor; these were the bodies imperiled by vengeful former Confederates; these were the men whose survivors bombarded the War Department with petitions for information about deaths and burials. The absence of official concern for the Confederate dead stood in stark contrast, even in the eyes of some northerners. John Trowbridge, a New Englander writing for the
Atlantic Monthly,
traveled through Virginia battlefields in 1865 soon after Moore had completed the initial phase of his work. Accompanied by a local resident, Trowbridge stumbled upon the unburied remains of two soldiers at the Wilderness. He was, he reported, “appalled,” because he had heard—and had hoped—that the work of reinterment “was faithfully done.” His Virginia guide examined the uniform buttons fallen from the clothing of the rotted corpses and informed Trowbridge, “They was No'th Carolinians; that's why they didn't bury 'em.” Trowbridge was still more horrified to learn that the bodies had been left to rot as a matter of policy rather than simple negligence: “I could not believe that the true reason why they had not been decently interred.”
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