This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust Page A

the same time it incarnated the very humanness of that identity—the promise of eternal life that differentiates human remains from the carcasses of animals, who possess neither consciousness of death nor promise of either physical or spiritual immortality. Such understandings of the body and its place in the universe mandated attention even when life had fled; it required what always seemed to be called “decent” burial, as well as rituals fitting for the dead. 3
    Civil War soldiers worried deeply about their own remains, especially as they began to encounter circumstances that made customary reverence all but impossible. A South Carolinian wrote from the Virginia front that “some how I have a horor of being thrown out in a neglected place or bee trampled on as I have seen a number of graves here.” His hope was to be transported home. Jeremiah Gage of the 11th Mississippi felt differently. As he lay dying at Gettysburg, he wrote to urge his mother not to regret that she would be unable to retrieve his body. With his last words, he asked “to be buried like my comrades. But deep, boys deep, so the beasts won’t get me.” Confederate Thomas J. Key shared the same gruesome concern: “It is dreadful to contemplate being killed on the field of battle without a kind hand to hide one’s remains from the eye of the world or the gnawing of animals and buzzards.” Another northern soldier expressed a different worry with his last breath: “don’t let the rebels get me.” To be returned to the bosom of family or, failing that, at least to be honorably buried with one’s comrades and preserved from the desecrations of enemies, human and otherwise: these concerns were shared by soldiers North and South. 4
    When the war began, military officials on both sides sought to establish regularized burial procedures, in no small part because decaying bodies and the “effluvia” that emanated from them were believed to pose serious threats to public health. Many of the deaths in the initial months of the conflict arose from epidemics of diseases like measles and mumps that broke out as men, often from isolated rural areas, crowded together in army camps and exposed one another to new illnesses. Both North and South ordered military hospitals to establish burial grounds. Each hospital of the Union army was charged to provide a “dead house,” for storage of corpses prior to burial and for post-mortem examinations. When circumstances permitted, hospital personnel kept careful records of those interred, provided them with respectful burials, and, if the army remained stationary for a period of time, maintained graves. In Virginia in 1861, for example, accounts of the Confederate hospital at Culpeper showed regular sums expended to local laborers for digging graves and making coffins for interments in its well-tended cemetery. 5
    But as war escalated and troops began to clash on the battlefield, these cemeteries became entirely inadequate for those who were dying at the scene of the fighting, on scattered grounds, or in hastily established field hospitals. At the end of the war, a former Union hospital steward remembered ruefully the failure to maintain careful records of the dead. Field hospitals, he explained, were organized on an emergency basis. “Everything…was therefore hurriedly arranged. You will therefore understand the seeming want of order in the burial of the dead…It was with the greatest difficulty and with terrible exertion on the part of my associates and myself that we were able to care for the sick and wounded—hence the little apparent care for those who were beyond help.” As a Union chaplain put it, “We learned new lessons as to caring for the soldier dead, or as to the necessity of failing to care for them in the exigencies of more active warfare.” 6

    â€œSoldiers’ Graves near General Hospital, City Point,