Those Who Have Borne the Battle (13 page)

By 1861 the nation had in place its framework for embracing, recognizing, and supporting veterans and their survivors. Those who served in the Revolution and the wars of the first half of the nineteenth century were by then integral to the poetry of the nation, and support for them was embedded in its legislation.

However, neither poetry nor prose prepared the country for the years following April 12, 1861, when General P. G. T. Beauregard, commander of the provisional Confederate force at Charleston, South Carolina, attacked the United States Army post at Fort Sumter in the harbor. Over the next four years, each side would lay claim to the mystic chords of memory that Lincoln had described the previous month.

The scale of loss and devastation during this war would stretch the capacity of the opposing military forces and test the limits of national grief. Huge armed forces marched against huge armed forces, men were slaughtered by other men lining the tops of fortified trenches and walls, and sophisticated rifles and cannons and antipersonnel shells killed and wounded more efficiently than ever before. Technology and mass armies joined in a lethal cauldron.

When the scale of something exceeds experience and comprehension, one method of understanding is to abstract and depersonalize it. Theda Skocpol did some calculations that make the numbers more meaningful. Among Northern armies, disease, wounds, and injuries killed more than did direct battlefield deaths. For every 75 wounded, there were 100 men who died or were killed, a remarkably high ratio of death. Eighteen Union soldiers died for every 1,000 of Northern population. Moreover, at war's end, there were nearly 282,000 surviving wounded.
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David Blight argues, “The most immediate legacy of the war was its slaughter and how to remember it.”
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Walt Whitman, nurse and comforter, chronicler and poet of the carnage, wrote:

Drew Gilpin Faust's book
The Republic of Suffering
provides an essential introduction to the ways in which American society coped with slaughter during the Civil War. I would summarize that society did not do very well. The army had no provisions in place at the outset of the war to handle war dead or even to record fully their names and inform survivors. Despite all of the advances in democratizing the narrative of war, officers still received special preference in the business of death and burial.

In the battle of Antietam in Maryland on September 16, 1862, there were 23,000 casualties, with more than 3,500 dead on the battlefield. This remains the single bloodiest day in American military history. A week later a surgeon on the field observed of that place, “The dead were almost wholly unburied, and the stench arising from it was such as to breed a pestilence.”
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Oliver Wendell Holmes came down from Massachusetts to search for his missing son and observed the privileges of rank: “The slain of higher condition, ‘embalmed' and iron cased, were sliding off the railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank and file were being gathered up and committed hastily to the earth.”
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. survived to fight in other battles.

During the Revolution, Americans had learned the difficulty of simultaneously fighting wars and honoring warriors, of grieving loss even as celebrating victory—and even of recording and burying in the midst of continuing war. These lessons were underlined during the Civil War. It was hard to be poetic when surrounded by death—especially anonymous death. Eulogies and memorials could not precede the fundamental task of burying. And the steady grind of war, of fighting or of positioning, of simply stealing sleep—these often delayed the act of gathering the dead. Sometimes Union and Confederate armies would stop their warring and mutually allow all to bring in their dead comrades. This was a time-honored tradition. Homer wrote of Athenians and Trojans stopping to grieve and to attend to their dead:

The United States had only recently begun to create cemetaries for military burial. In 1847 the State of Kentucky had established the nation's first public military cemetery. This provided for the Kentucky volunteers who had been killed in the Mexican War. In 1850 the US government established a federal cemetery and a monument for war dead near Mexico City. Some 750 soldiers were reinterred there. These burials represented but a fraction of those who had died during the war. None of the men buried in this federal cemetery were identified.
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As the Civil War casualties increased, the US government determined that it would provide cemeteries on or near some battlefields for those who died as a result of the war. At war's end, many argued that this practice needed to be institutionalized and memories made indelible. In 1866 James Russling argued in an article for
Harper's
that there should be a system of national military cemeteries and a proper burial of all who had died for the Union cause. It was just, he argued, for the nation to distinguish itself in this way, for, except for “Republican Athens,” no nation had ever provided a burial place for all of the soldiers. “
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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Within a year of his challenge, Congress had committed to burying every Union soldier in a national cemetery. By 1871 there were more than 300,000 veterans buried in seventy-four government cemeteries, most of them on or near the battlefields where the men had fallen. Only 54 percent of these graves contained identified remains.
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The process of establishing a national military cemetery for the war dead had begun before the 1867 congressional action. As a matter of some pique as well as real necessity, the War Department took over Robert E. Lee's plantation along the Potomac and developed it into Arlington National Cemetery.

President Lincoln had affirmed the importance of official cemeteries when he spoke at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery. In July 1863 a defining battle and a bloody Union victory on the hills around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, had engaged more than 170,000 soldiers. Following three days of fighting, nearly 8,000 of them lay dead, along with thousands of horses, rotting in the summer sun. Provision for their burial soon became a national occasion to honor and to grieve. When Abraham Lincoln came to the cemetery dedication on November 19, 1863, he spoke eloquently and timelessly, evoking the “great civil war” that engaged the nation.

Lincoln's words were profoundly moving, yet they were also fundamentally impersonal. He did not call up reminders of blood and bodies, of lives and dreams ended in an instant. No generals, no officers, no soldiers, no names of individuals, of places, or of battles, appeared in Lincoln's remarks. There were no individual heroes cited; instead, there was a poignant and poetic reminder of heroic sacrifice by many, which underlined their devotion to and sacrifice for a greater purpose. The president celebrated the narrative of heroic democracy, defining the war as a cause engaged in for the basic principles of the nation, and embracing the war dead, undifferentiated and anonymous, but heroes all.
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In addition to the president's eloquent reminder of the principles for which the war was fought, he also added to the emotional responsibility of those who would continue the war. Lincoln challenged the “living” to make certain that those who lay in the cemetery, freedom's fighters, should not have died “in vain.” The “unfinished work,” the “great task remaining,” was now a shared obligation. This theme, of completing the fight for which citizens have made the ultimate sacrifice, would persist into our time as a means for energizing and rationalizing a cause and a war.

Lincoln fully embraced and indeed glorified the broader cause that necessitated the Civil War in his remarks. But in less deft hands the argument would shift: if one dies in a legal war on behalf of the nation, then those who survive are obliged to pick up the spear and the flag and continue the battle. This obligation becomes a cause now justified by the sacrifice rather than the sacrifice being justified by the cause. Sacrifice not only leads to more sacrifice; it requires more if we are fully to honor our heroes. In 1869, speaking at Gettysburg Cemetery, Henry Ward Beecher insisted, “May the soldiers' children never prove unworthy of their fathers' name.” And Beecher believed that such worthiness could be proved in heroic battle on behalf of the nation: “Let them be willing to shed their blood, to lay down their lives, for the sake of their country.”
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Such rhetoric escalated war to a test of national will rather than a summons for possible sacrifice for a challenge to the Republic.

The gathering that would initiate the Northern (and then national) celebration called Decoration Day, or Memorial Day, was organized in 1868 by the Grand Army of the Republic, an already powerful organization of Union veterans of the Civil War. John Logan, a former Union general and then a US senator from Ohio, was the head of the GAR. On the first Decoration Day, he called upon the nation to honor the “heroic dead” and to resolve to guard their graves “with sacred vigilance” so that all in the future would understand the price that they had paid for “a free and undivided Republic.”
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This occasion provided an opportunity for orators to challenge and obligate as well as to honor and remember. Speaking on Memorial Day 1895, at Harvard, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., veteran of Antietam and several subsequent brutal battles, told the students and guests that being a “gentleman” is a worthy goal: “Yet what has that name been built on but the soldier's choice of honor rather than life? To be a soldier or descended from soldiers, in time of peace to be ready to give one's life rather than suffer disgrace, that is what the word has meant; and if we try to claim it at less cost than a splendid carelessness for life, we are trying to steal the good will without the responsibilities of the place.”
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As David Blight summarizes, “Many a widow or mother at Memorial Day observances must have strained for forbearance of endless expressions of joyous death on the altars of national survival. Northern speeches tended to be mournful, celebratory, and fiercely patriotic all at once.” In this telling, the “soldiers had died necessary deaths; they had saved the republic, and their blood had given the nation new life.” In the “cult of the fallen soldier,” a new “manly ideal of heroism was redefined for coming generations . . . Memorial Day became a legitimizing ritual of the new American nationalism forged out of the war.”
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