This Republic of Suffering (15 page)

Business card for undertaker Lewis Ernde, Hagerstown, Maryland. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

The Virginia battlefields provided a booming business for undertakers of both North and South, and Washington, D.C., included three embalmers in its 1863 City Directory. Dr. F. A. Hutton of 451 Pennsylvania Avenue took a full page to advertise his services. “Bodies Embalmed by us
NEVER TURN BLACK!
But retain their natural color and appearance…so as to admit of contemplation of the person Embalmed, with the countenance of one asleep.” Embalming promised to transform death into slumber. Like MacClure, Hutton pledged “particular attention paid to obtaining bodies of those who have fallen on the Battle Field.” Embalmers advertised both themselves and the process by exhibiting preserved bodies—often unknown dead simply collected from the field and embalmed—as Thomas Holmes did on undertakers' premises in downtown Washington, in Georgetown, and in Alexandria. Happily, no record survives of an unsuspecting mother or wife coming upon her lost loved one displayed in a store window.
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For all its increase in popularity, embalming provoked ambivalence and suspicion. Embalmers were frequently accused of extortionate and dubious practices, and they were disturbing, too, in their intimacy with the dead. A Yankee reporter revealingly described his encounter with an embalmer who was following Union troops toward Richmond during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. “He was a sedate, grave person, and when I saw him, standing over the nude…corpse, he reminded me of the implacable vulture…His battery and tube were pulsing like ones heart and lungs, and the subject was being drained at the neck…‘If you could only make him breathe, Professor,' said an officer standing by. The dry skin of the embalmer broke into chalky dimples, and he grinned very much as a corpse might do: ‘Ah!' he said, ‘
then
there would be money made.'” Public discomfort with embalmers appeared most often in regard to this issue of money and the unsettling commodification of the dead that their business represented. In an expression of dismay at the war's emerging market of death, a Yankee newspaperman reported—and, one suspects, at least partly invented—a conversation with an especially ambitious and frank embalmer: “‘I would be glad to prepare private soldiers. They were wuth a five dollar bill apiece. But, Lord bless you, a colonel pays a hundred, and a brigadier-general two hundred. There's lots of them now, and I have cut the acquaintance of everything below a major. I might,' he added, ‘as a great favor, do a captain, but he must pay a major's price. I insist upon that! Such windfalls don't come every day. There won't be another such killing for a century.'” Making a killing seemed to be in every sense the work at hand.
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The U.S. Army was deluged with anguished protests from families of dead soldiers who believed they had been cheated by embalmers operating near the battlefront. An officer at City Point, Virginia, protested to Inspector James A. Hardie in 1864 that “scarcely a week passes that I do not receive complaints against one or another of these embalmers…[They] are regarded by the medical department of the army generally as an unmitigated nuisance…the whole system as practised here is one of pretension, swindling, and extortion.” In 1863 a case was lodged against Hutton & Williams, “
EMBALMERS OF THE DEAD
” in Washington. Hutton was imprisoned and the company's records were seized. The suit alleged that the pair regularly recovered and embalmed soldiers without permission and then demanded payment from grieving families, threatening to disinter or refuse to return the bodies if their conditions were not met.

“Embalming Surgeon at Work on Soldier's Body.” Library of Congress.

In the fall of 1864 Timothy Dwight of New York pursued a grievance with Secretary of War Stanton against Dr. Richard Burr, a prominent Washington embalmer, claiming that Burr was guilty of extortion for preying upon him in his distress after “the loss of a most excellent Boy.” Burr defended his fee of one hundred dollars to the provost marshal, saying his employees had risked their lives recovering the body from near the picket line and then carrying it several hundred yards under fire. He had then disinfected the body “by means of my embalming fluid and charcoal” and enclosed it in a zinc coffin, sealed it, and shipped it—clearly warranting, he insisted, his charges. On January 9, 1865, General Ulysses Grant responded to the chorus of grievances by withdrawing all embalmers' permits and ordering them beyond the lines. The distances separating the dead and their loved ones nevertheless continued to encourage embalming, in spite of great uneasiness about the practice and widespread hostility toward its practitioners.
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“Dr. Bunnell's Embalming Establishment in the Field (Army of the James).” Library of Congress.

Embalming was expensive. So were refrigerated cases; so too were trips to battlefields to recover kin. Richer Americans had resources to invest in managing and resisting death that their poorer countrymen and-women lacked. All but taken for granted through much of the war, this differential treatment began to be challenged as the federal government assumed new responsibility for the war dead. In 1862, in response to logistical problems presented by the growing number of bodies, the U.S. Congress passed a measure giving the president power to purchase grounds “and cause them to be securely enclosed, to be used as a national cemetery for the soldiers who shall die in the service of the country.” Without any appropriation or formal policy with which to implement this legislative action, the War Department established cemeteries as emergency circumstance demanded—chiefly near concentrations of military hospitals where many dead required burial. But under the terms of this measure, five cemeteries of a rather different character were created in the course of the war. These were burial grounds for the dead of a particular battle, usually established when a lull in active operations made such an undertaking possible. Three of these cemeteries, Chattanooga, Stones River, and Knoxville, were created by Union generals, and two, Antietam and Gettysburg, by joint actions of northern states whose citizens had participated in the battles. In each case the purpose of the effort extended well beyond simply meeting the need for disposing of the dead. These cemeteries were intended to memorialize the slain and celebrate the nation's fallen heroes. Gettysburg represented a particularly important turning point. The large numbers of casualties in that bloody battle were obviously an important factor in generating action, but it is not insignificant that the carnage had occurred in the North, in a town that had not had the opportunity to grow accustomed to the horrors of the constant warfare that had battered Virginia for two long years. Gettysburg made the dead—and the problem they represented—starkly visible to northern citizens, so many of whom flocked to the small Pennsylvania town in the aftermath of battle. Perhaps even more critical was the fact that the North had resources with which to respond, resources not available to the hard-pressed Confederacy.
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The impetus for the Gettysburg cemetery arose from a meeting of state agents in the weeks after the battle. With financial assistance from Union states that had lost men in the engagement, David Wills, a Gettysburg lawyer, arranged to purchase seventeen acres adjoining an existing graveyard. In October contracts were let for the reburial of Union soldiers in the new ground at a rate of $1.59 for each body. In November Lincoln journeyed to help dedicate the new Soldiers' National Cemetery. This ceremony and the address that historian Garry Wills has argued “remade America” signaled the beginning of a new significance for the dead in public life. Perhaps the very configuration of the cemetery can explain the force behind this transformation. The cemetery at Gettysburg was arranged so that every grave was of equal importance; William Saunders's design, like Lincoln's speech, affirmed that every dead soldier mattered equally regardless of rank or station. This was a dramatic departure from the privileging of rank and station that prevailed in the treatment of the war dead and different even from the policies of the Chattanooga cemetery that would be created later in the year.
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The establishment of the Gettysburg cemetery marked the beginning of significant shifts in attitude and policy produced by the nation's confrontation with Civil War slaughter. Chaplain H. Clay Trumbull wrote of “new lessons” imposed by the necessities of war, as Americans North and South endured and even practiced ways of handling the dead that would previously have seemed unthinkable. Not only did these actions dishonor the slain by treating them more like animals than humans; they diminished the living, who found themselves abandoning commitments and principles that had helped to define their essential selves. Out of the horror of Civil War burials, there grew, even in the midst of the conflict itself, a variety of efforts to resist these unwanted transformations, to establish different sorts of “lessons” as the product of the nation's experience of war. Civil War Americans worked to change death in ways that ranged from transforming the actual bodies of the dead through embalming to altering the circumstances and conditions of interment by establishing what would become the national cemetery system and a massive postwar reburial program—the latter federally sponsored in the North but also executed on a far smaller scale by private voluntary actions in the South.
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The engagement of the Union government in these matters, first made highly visible in the Gettysburg dedication ceremonies, acknowledged a new public importance for the dead. No longer simply the responsibility of their families, they, and their loss, now belonged to the nation. These men had given their lives that the nation might live; their bodies, repositories of their “selfhood” and “surviving identity,” as
Harper's
had put it, deserved the nation's recognition and care. The dead, as well as the living, had claims upon a government “deriving,” as Henry Bowditch proclaimed in his plea for ambulances, “all its powers from the people.”
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Yet these soldiers' selfhood and their identity were also inseparable from their names. The project of decently burying the Civil War dead required more than simply interment. The work of locating the missing and naming the tens of thousands of men designated as “unknown” would prove one of the war's most difficult tasks.

CHAPTER
4

NAMING

“The Significant Word Unknown”

M
en thrown by the hundreds into burial trenches; soldiers stripped of every identifying object before being abandoned on the field; bloated corpses hurried into hastily dug graves; nameless victims of dysentery or typhoid interred beside military hospitals; men blown to pieces by artillery shells; bodies hidden by woods or ravines, left to the depredations of hogs or wolves or time: the disposition of the Civil War dead made an accurate accounting of the fallen impossible. In the absence of arrangements for interring and recording overwhelming numbers, hundreds of thousands of men—more than 40 percent of deceased Yankees and a far greater proportion of Confederates—perished without names, identified only, as Walt Whitman put it, “by the significant word Unknown.”
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To a twenty-first-century American, this seems unimaginable. The United States expends more than $100 million each year in the effort to find and identify the approximately 88,000 individuals still missing from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. The obligation of the state to account for and return—either dead or alive—every soldier in its service is unquestioned. But these assumptions are of quite recent origin. There have been many revolutions in warfare in the last century and a half. Although perhaps less dramatic than transformations of military technology and organization, changing attitudes toward the dead and missing have profoundly altered the practices and experience of war—for soldiers and civilians alike. Only with the Korean War did the United States establish a policy of identifying and repatriating the remains of every dead soldier. Only with World War I did soldiers begin to wear official badges of identity—what came to be known as dog tags. Only with the Civil War did the United States create its system of national cemeteries and officially involve itself with honoring the military dead. It was the Civil War, as Walt Whitman observed, that made the designation “
UNKNOWN
” become “significant.”
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The dead of the Mexican War received no official attention until 1850, two years after the conflict ended, when the federal government found and reinterred 750 soldiers in an American cemetery in Mexico City. These bodies represented only about 6 percent of the soldiers who had died, and not one body was identified. But with the Civil War, private and public belief and behavior gradually shifted. This was a war of mass citizens' armies, not of professional, regular forces; it was a war in which the obligation of the citizen to the nation was expressed as a willingness to risk life itself. In its assault upon chattel slavery, the conflict fundamentally redefined the relationship between the individual and the nation. This affirmation of the right to selfhood and identity reflected beliefs about human worth that bore other implications, for the dead as well as the living.
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Central to the changes that have occurred since the 1860s is the acknowledgment of the importance of information: of knowing whether a soldier is dead or alive, of being able to furnish news or provide the bereaved with the consoling certainty represented by an actual body. But in 1861, neither the Union nor the Confederate government recognized this as a responsibility. With the outbreak of war both North and South established measures for maintaining records of deceased soldiers, requiring forms to be filled out at army hospitals and sent in multiple copies to Washington or Richmond. Significantly, however, not one of these copies, nor any other sort of official communication, was designated for the family of the dead. And the obstacles to fulfilling even this plan seemed daunting. Samuel P. Moore, surgeon general of the Confederate army, felt compelled in 1862 to issue a circular deploring the “indifference” of his medical officers to record keeping. But his exhortations apparently had little effect. When a January 1864 article in the
Charleston Mercury
summarized the preceding year's casualties, the newspaper concluded, “These returns show a great deal of negligence by Captains and Surgeons in reporting the deaths of soldiers.” In the North field commanders interpreted reporting requirements to apply only to rear areas, so in April 1862 the War Department issued General Orders no. 33 to include the combat zone in its efforts to provide for the identification of the dead. But as we have seen, this measure employed language—“as far as possible…when practicable”—that made it more an aspiration than an order, and commanders treated it as such. General Orders no. 33 made no provision for implementing its goals and designated no special troops for graves registration duties. And like earlier measures, it assumed no responsibility for reporting deaths to those who waited at home.
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In both North and South those on the home front struggled to fill the void of official intelligence. In the days after a major engagement Union and Confederate newspapers covered their pages with eagerly awaited reports. Sarah Palmer of South Carolina reflected the agonies of northerners and southerners alike when she wrote after Second Bull Run, “I do feel too anxious to see the papers and get the list of casualties from Co. K and yet I dread to see it.” Although civilians crowded news offices and railroad junctions waiting for information, the lists were notoriously inaccurate and incomplete.
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The sources of intelligence for these published lists varied. Sometimes the newspaper report of a regiment's dead and wounded was preceded by a statement from a chaplain indicating he had collected the information. Indeed, in some commands, this was officially the chaplain's duty, although that did not necessarily mean he carried it out. One infuriated nurse at a Nashville hospital complained that instead of performing this obligation, the chaplain there spent his time “pitching quoits.” Many regiments—more than half in the Confederate and two-fifths in the Union army—did not have chaplains at all.
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Searching the casualty lists. Detail from “News of the War.” Drawn by Winslow Homer.
Harper's Weekly,
June 14, 1862
.

Often an officer introduced the list. In some instances civilians representing charitable organizations assembled the data, recognizing that military officials were too occupied with the concerns of the living to make this a priority. W. P. Price, who represented a South Carolina relief agency, tried to establish a formal system and reported from Atlanta in June 1864 that he had made arrangements for colonels of Carolina regiments to furnish him with regular reports, “by which means I hope to be enabled to furnish correct lists.” But, he continued, his plan seemed imperiled because “I regret to state that several important letters [with information] sent from the field…have miscarried.”
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Lists frequently included statements acknowledging the inadequacy of their information. As a Confederate newspaper stated in 1863, “Of Company I, 38 men were lost in action. 31 of these are accounted for as prisoners. The remaining seven,” the article conjectured, “must have been killed.” Sons or brothers listed as “slightly wounded” often turned out to be dead, and husbands reported as “killed in action” later appeared unharmed. “I have known so many instances where families have been held in agonised suspense for days by the report of relatives being dangerously wounded when they were not,” one Confederate wrote to an anxious mother in South Carolina. Mathew Jack Davis of the 19th Mississippi kept his family in suspense for four years. “I had been reported killed on the day I was captured,” he related. “I read my own obituary.” Joseph Willett of New York hastened to reassure his sister after the Battle of the Wilderness, “You may have heard before you read this that I was killed or wounded but allow me to contradict the report.” Journalist Henry Raymond, founder of the
New York Times,
rushed to Virginia in 1863 in response to news of his brother's death. He engaged an embalmer but could not locate the body, so he went to army headquarters to inquire. Instead of answering his query, an aide produced his brother, quite alive and well. Yankee private Henry Struble was not only listed as a casualty after Antietam but assigned a grave after his canteen was found in the hands of a dead man he had stopped to help. After the war ended, Struble sent flowers every Memorial Day to decorate his own grave, to honor the unknown soldier it sheltered and perhaps to acknowledge that there but for God's grace he might lie. Recipients of bad news repeated and cherished such narratives, hoping that a different story with a happier ending might emerge, and denying as long as possible the reality and finality of death.
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More reliable and certainly more consoling than casualty lists were the personal letters that custom required a dead soldier's closest friends and immediate military superiors to write to his relatives. But months often passed before soldiers in the field found time, circumstance, or strength to write. These communications were, moreover, dependent upon the vicissitudes of the postal service, which, in the Confederacy, grew increasingly unreliable. Southerners complained that by 1864 so many of the postal clerks in Richmond had been conscripted into the army that the mail between the Virginia theater and the home front had entirely broken down.
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Voluntary organizations worked to fill the void left by the failure of military and governmental officials to provide information to families. In the North both the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission, the two most significant Union-wide charitable efforts to grow out of the war, came to regard communication with families as central to their efforts. The Christian Commission proclaimed its commitment in words printed at the top of each page of the stationery it distributed to soldiers at the front: “The U.S. Christian Commission send this sheet as a messenger between the soldier and his home. Let it hasten to those who wait for tidings.” In just three months during the spring of 1864 the commission reported that it had supplied 24,000 quires of paper and envelopes to the Army of the Potomac, and in the days after large battles it transported hundreds of letters from military hospitals and camps to nearby post offices. After Sherman's army reached Savannah in December 1864, the commission delegates who had been following his troops rented rooms and installed fifty writing desks, where soldiers produced three hundred letters a day.
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In cases of soldiers' grave illness or death, commission delegates—the unpaid volunteers upon whom the work of the organization rested—wrote in their behalf, composing letters “for soldiers still lingering” or “to carry ‘last words.'” It was one of the fundamental responsibilities of its five thousand delegates, as the commission described it, “to spare no pains to give immediate and accurate information of the wounded and dead to those who waited” at home, and the commission estimated they had written more than 92,000 letters for soldiers by the end of the war. General field agents, regional supervisors of the commission, reported the active effort that delegates undertook to identify the dead in order to be able to send news to loved ones. After the Battle of Chattanooga, one agent related with satisfaction, “We were able to fill out many home letters, by the memoranda gathered during the night from the lips of the dying and from the letters and diaries found on the dead. Ordinarily, unless the body had been robbed, in the inside breast pocket of the blouse there would be a letter from friends, a photograph, a Christian Commission Testament, or a hymn-book, with the name and regiment and home address.”
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