This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust Page B

Virginia.” Library of Congress.

    The First Battle of Bull Run late in July 1861 yielded casualties that galvanized military officials to reconsider their lack of preparation for so many fallen. In September the Union army issued General Orders no. 75, making commanding officers responsible for burial of soldiers who died within their jurisdiction and for submission of a form recording their deaths to the office of the adjutant general. A little more than six months later, General Orders no. 33 detailed more elaborate instructions:

    In order to secure, as far as possible, the decent interment of those who have fallen, or may fall, in battle, it is made the duty of Commanding Generals to lay off plots of ground in some suitable spot near every battlefield, so soon as it may be in their power, and to cause the remains of those killed to be interred, with headboards to the graves bearing numbers, and, when practicable, the names of the persons buried in them. A register of each burialground will be preserved, in which will be noted the marks corresponding to the headboards. 7

    â€œAs far as possible…when practicable”: the very language reveals how utopian a measure this would prove. The structures and resources that would have been necessary to implement such policies were hardly even imagined, much less provided: the Union army had no regular burial details, no graves registration units, and until 1864 no comprehensive ambulance service. As late as Second Bull Run, in August 1862, a Union division took the field without a single ambulance available for removal of casualties. The Confederate army passed analogous regulations specifying the commanders’ duty to bury the dead, dispose of their effects—and even pay their laundry bills. But they gave no more systematic attention to how these exhortations might actually be heeded than did their northern counterparts. Burying the dead after a Civil War battle seemed always to be an act of improvisation, one that called upon the particular resources of the moment and circumstance: available troops to be detailed, prisoners of war to be deployed, civilians to be enlisted. 8
    This lack of capacity and preparation was evident in the length of time it took to attend to the dead. Battlefield exigencies often delayed care for the wounded, much less the slain. If a military advantage seemed threatened, commanders might well reject flags of truce proposed for removal of casualties from the field. During the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, for example, Union colonel Henry Weeks reported to his commanding officer from Hanover Court House, Virginia, “the refusal of the enemy to admit our burial party.” Soldiers often lay on the field dead or dying for hours or even days until an engagement was decided. Josiah Murphey of Nantucket reported on June 6, 1864, that casualties from the Battle of Cold Harbor remained where they had fallen for three days. At last a twenty-four-hour flag of truce interrupted the unrelieved fighting and enabled soldiers to bury their dead. A northern paper explained Grant’s rejection of a forty-eight-hour “cessation of hostilities” to bury the dead during this spring 1864 campaign: “Lee was on his knees begging for time to bury his dead. But in this cruel war the business of generals is with the living.” Civilians and soldiers alike began to understand the meaning and urgency of the phrase they so often intoned: “Let the dead bury the dead.” 9
    More often delay resulted from the failure to mobilize necessary manpower and resources for the task. The Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day of combat in American history, left both Union and Confederate armies staggering. Lee slowly limped southward, leaving the field—and the dead of both sides—to the Union army. McClellan appeared to be paralyzed by the magnitude of the engagement and failed to take strategic advantage of