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 selfâa kind of living death that could make even survivors casualties of war. 46
        Â
Killing was the essence of war. But it also challenged menâs 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
âNew Lessons Caring for the Deadâ
âThis is not how we bury folks at home.â
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 Warâs major engagements, and even the casualties of smaller skirmishes, presented an immediate challenge to those still reeling from the fightingâs 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, âOne of the striking indications of civilization and refinement among a people is the tenderness and care manifested by them towards their dead.â 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,
Harperâs New Monthly Magazine
offered an extended consideration of the subject. Its editor, Henry Raymond, founder of the
New York Times
and one of Lincolnâs strongest wartime supporters, speculated whether the âsacredness of the human bodyâ was a notion too outdated for a modern era of science and progress. Invoking history, philosophy, religion, and reason, he insisted otherwise. âThere 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.â The body, the essay continued, is not simply a possession, âlike a picture, a book, a garment, or any thing else that once
belonged
to the deceased.â In the corpse, rather, there remains âsomething of the former self hood.â And, in the terms of prevailing Protestant doctrine, something of the future and immortal selfhood as well. The human body is ânot like any other portion of matter,â for it âwill be raised againâyea, the same body.â 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 âa surviving identity.â Thus the body required âsacred reverence and careâ the absence of such solicitude would indicate âa demoralized and rapidly demoralizing community.â The body was the repository of human identity in two senses: it represented the intrinsic selfhood and individuality of a particular human, and at
Ellen J. Green
Eden Connor
K Webster
Eric Walters
Rita Herron
Susan Austin
Nora Roberts
Linh Dinh
McKenzie Hunter
Michel Faber