This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust

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. 46
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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
    â€œNew Lessons Caring for the Dead”
    â€œThis 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.” 1
    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.” 2
    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