Black soldiers serving as burial detail. “Burying the Dead Under a Flag of Truce, Petersburg, 1864.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 3, 1864.
Practical realities dictated that retreating armies did not have time to attend to the dead but had to depend on the humanity of their opponents, who predictably gave precedence to their own casualties. This discrimination arose largely from ties of feeling with departed comrades, but there may have been an element of tactical calculation as well. Confederate surgeon John Wyeth described how by the end of the long night after the Confederate victory at Chickamauga, “most of the Confederate dead had been gathered in long trenches and buried; but the Union dead were still lying where they fell. For its effect on the survivors it was the policy of the victor to hide his own losses and let those of the other side be seen.” Sometimes, especially if armies found themselves on the move, enemy dead were not buried at all but were left to rot in places where troops found their bones as they circled back over ground where earlier engagements had been fought. Frank Oakley of Wisconsin encountered skeletons from the First Battle of Bull Run as he fought the Second thirteen months later; soldiers at Spotsylvania and the Wilderness in 1864 continually stumbled upon human debris from the Chancellorsville battle that had taken place almost exactly a year before.15
Armies developed burial techniques intended to make the daunting task of disposal of bodies manageable, but these procedures seemed horrifying even to many of those who executed them. Burial parties customarily collected the dead in a single location on the field by tying each soldier’s legs together, passing the rope around his torso, and then dragging him to a row of assembled bodies. A bayonet, heated and bent into a hook, could keep a soldier from having to touch what was often a putrescent corpse. The burial detail might then dig a grave, place a body in the hole, cover it with dirt from the next grave, and continue until the line of corpses was covered. But such individuation was usually reserved for one’s comrades and for circumstances where sufficient time and resources were available. Enemy dead were more likely to be buried in large pits. G. R. Lee described the procedure in his unit: “long trenches were dug about six feet wide and three to four deep. The dead were rolled on blankets and carried to the trench and laid heads and feet alternating so as to save space. Old blankets were thrown over the pile of bodies and the earth thrown on top.” One soldier worried that the process as he witnessed it after Shiloh reduced men to the status of animals or perhaps even vegetables. “They dig holes,” he wrote, “and pile them in like dead cattle and have teams to draw them together like picking up pumpkins.”16
“Dead Confederate Soldiers Collected for Burial. Spotsylvania, May 1864.” Library of Congress.
Confederates at Gettysburg were buried in trenches containing 150 or more men, often hurled rather than laid to rest. Sometimes the rotting bodies ruptured, compelling burial parties to work elsewhere until the stench had dissipated. Soldiers stomped “on top of the dead straightening out their legs and arms and tramping them down so as to make the hole contain as many as possible.” The press of circumstance could, on occasion, require mass burial even of one’s own men. A Connecticut chaplain remembered a desperate encounter that killed twenty-three of his company during the very last days of the war: “The best that we could do in the brief interval of our stay was to bury our dead hurriedly in a common grave…in a long trench by the wayside, the officers by themselves, and the enlisted men near them.” Mass graves obviously obliterated the names of their occupants, although the living often tried to ensure that personal items remained with the bodies, preserving at least the possibility of later disinterment and identification. Trenches might also be marked, like one at Antietam, with a simple wooden sign indicating “80 rebels buried here.” Customarily, northern and southern soldiers were interred separately; a Union colonel expressed outrage when he discovered an instance of military hospitals burying the dead indiscriminately, with no “distinction between the graves of our Brave men who have died for our cause, and the grave of the worthless invaders of our soil. This,” he proclaimed, “is all wrong.” He could only think this had been the fault of the “Undertaker who cares only to get his money for covering their heads with earth.” Separate sections of the hospital cemetery should be selected “and the bodies kept separate,” he insisted.17
Weary soldiers took advantage of natural trenches and existing declivities. After Second Bull Run eighty-five dead were laid beside a ridge created by a railroad excavation and then “covered by the levelling of the embankment over them as the most expeditious manner of burial.” James Eldred Phillips of Virginia described burying the dead in the spring 1863 campaign by placing men “down in deep gulleys on either side of the road and the dirt was dug from the side to cover them over.” But spring storms followed, and Phillips learned, “after getting some distance down the road,” that “heavy rainfall had washed up all of the men that were buried in the gulley…and carried them down toward Fredericksburg.”18
Haste and carelessness frequently yielded graves so shallow that bodies and skeletons reappeared, as rain and wind eroded the soil sheltering the dead and hogs rooted around battlefields in search of human remains. For men buried on the field, coffins were out of the question; a blanket was the most a man could hope for as a shroud. As a northern relief worker reported about burials in Virginia in 1864, “None have been buried in coffins since the campaign commenced.” At war’s outset, many Americans would have designated the coffin as the basic marker of the “decency” that distinguished human from animal interment, and they would have agreed with John J. Hardin, an Indiana volunteer, who found it “dreadful…to see the poor soldier just thrown in a ditch an covered over without any box.”19
“A Burial Trench at Gettysburg.” Photograph by Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Library of Congress.
Burials like these dehumanized the dead and appalled many of the living. A Union chaplain observed that in pit burials bodies were “covered over much the same as farmers cover potatoes and roots to preserve them from the frost of winter; with this exception, however: the vegetables really get more tender care…Circumstances prevent such tenderness from being extended to the fallen hero.” Frequently corpses were quite literally naked—or clad only in underwear, which still permitted a distinction between Yankee and Confederate corpses, for northerners customarily wore wool and southerners cotton. Soldiers desperate for clothing robbed the dead with little feeling of propriety or remorse, and thieves and scavengers appeared on battlefields immediately after the end of hostilities. At the end of the Battle of Franklin in 1864 needy Confederate soldiers even stripped the bodies of their own generals, six of whom lay dead on the field. Captured at Spotsylvania, Union surgeon Daniel Holt recognized a friend among the two hundred dead Yankees “stretched out before a trench half full of water into which they were to be thrown at the convenience of their captor. Entirely naked.”20
“Rebel Soldiers After Battle ‘Peeling’ (i.e. Stripping ) the Fallen Union Soldiers.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 13, 1864.
Soldiers worried that the piles of dead might include those still living, unable to speak or let their presence be known or “extricate themselves from their former comrades.” William Gore of New York related the frightening experience of a fellow soldier in Virginia who described a “narrow escape from the grave” already dug, when a nurse happened to intervene and indicate she would arrange to have his body sent home to friends. While he lay awaiting shipment, he returned to consciousness—and soon to duty. Since at least the late eighteenth century Americans had displayed deep anxiety about premature burial, devising coffins with bells and special protocols for resuscitation to prevent interment of the living. These concerns represented a fundamental uncertainty about the boundary between life and death, a doubt that included the metaphysical quandaries of immortality, as well as the physiological definition of vitality. Coming to terms with the Civil War’s death toll began for many A
mericans with the difficulty of simply identifying and recognizing the end of life.21
When bodies remained in the control of their comrades and when troops were not hurried off to new encounters, dead soldiers fared better. Companies and regiments regularly preempted officially designated burial details by assuming responsibility for their own dead. Frequently closest comrades had sworn to provide one another with “a decent burial,” and men searched the field in the nights and days after great battles to locate missing friends and relatives. Soldiers did the best they could to make such interments respectful. A comrade of Private Albert Frost of the Third Maine described his efforts when he discovered Frost missing after the third day at Gettysburg. He and a companion received permission to return to where they had last seen Frost alive.
We found him face down and with many others the flesh eaten (in that hot climate) by maggots, but not so bad but that we could recognize him. When we went to bury him, all we could find to dig a grave was an old hoe in a small building. The bottom of the grave was covered with empty knapsacks, then we laid in our beloved brother and covered him with another knapsack, and over all put as much earth as we could find. The grave was dug at the foot of a large tree. We then found a piece of a hard wood box cover and cut his name on it with a jacknife and nailed it to the tree at the head of his grave.22
Albert Frost’s burial illustrates many of the central components of what we might call friendly burial on the field. His comrades expended considerable effort and ingenuity to provide him the dignity of an individual and identifiable grave. They tried to compensate for the general unavailability of coffins in the immediate aftermath of battle by using abandoned knapsacks to shield him from direct contact with the earth, thus providing the covering critical to the notion of a “decent burial”—of a human rather than an animal.
In the earliest years of the war, when coffinless burials had not yet become commonplace, Yankees and Confederates alike expressed their distress and struggled to find acceptable substitutes. One inventive Union soldier, unwilling to permit his uncle to be buried without some barrier between his body and the bare earth, discovered a hollow log to serve as a coffin. By the time of Gettysburg, Albert Frost’s companions had abandoned all hope of even a substitute coffin and simply covered the body. The soldiers chose a spot near a tree—no doubt as much to serve as a landmark as an aesthetic feature of the gravesite—and they tried as well to mark the place of burial. Wooden panels from boxes of hardtack (the “cast-iron” crackers that served as an army staple), pieces of board from ammunition boxes, and crossed fence rails all routinely became makeshift grave markers.
Some soldiers enacted other rituals of respect for the dead: brief prayers either with or without the participation of a chaplain. Confederate Thomas Key described the burial of two soldiers in 1864 accompanied by Bible readings, prayers, and a hymn “in the midst of a heavy cannonading and singing of minié balls.” James Houghton of Michigan, “wishing to know that my tent mate was deasently buried,” returned to the field after Gettysburg and found that others had already performed the task in the course of interring dozens of his fellow soldiers. Houghton was satisfied that “all the painess possible was taken in their burial…in some cases their Blody garments were removed and washed and dried on limbs of treas then Replased.” Nurses in field hospitals performed services over the dead when time and circumstances permitted, but as the conflict wore on, these opportunities seemed to diminish. For months after assuming her duties, Confederate Fannie Beers explained, “I insisted upon attending every dead soldier to the grave and reading over him a part of the burial service. But it had now [by the fall of 1862] become impossible. The dead were past help; the living always needed succor.”23
In their efforts to find and honor comrades amid the bodies of thousands, soldiers demonstrated their resistance to the war’s casual erasure of the meaning of individual human life. As a Connecticut chaplain revealingly explained,
Coffined and coffinless dead side by side. The former were likely officers. “Burial of Federal Dead. Fredericksburg, 1864.” Photograph by Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Library of Congress.
To say that two thousand or twenty thousand men are killed in a great battle, or that a thousand of the dead are buried in one great trench, produces only a vague impression on the mind at the fullest. There is too much in this to be truly personal to you. But to know one man who is shot down by your side, and to aid in burying him, while his comrades stand with you above his open grave, is a more real matter to you than the larger piece of astounding information.24
Soldiers paid homage to their dead comrades out of respect for the slain men, endeavoring to reclaim the individual and what Harper’s had called “its…selfhood” from the impersonal and overwhelming carnage. But they also did it for themselves: to reassert their own commitment to the sanctity of human life and the integrity of the human self. They were reaffirming the larger purposes of their own existence and survival and hoping that if they were killed others would similarly honor them.
But some individuals inevitably seemed to matter more than others. Officers received privileged treatment on the field—at the hands of the enemy, who customarily returned their bodies, as well as from their own men. In 1864 J. W. McClure of South Carolina described to his wife a practice common throughout the war: a flag of truce used for the exchange of “bodies of prominent officers” who had been killed and left in enemy hands. By contrast, when Robert Gould Shaw died leading his black troops in an assault on Fort Wagner in 1863, Confederates explicitly dishonored him and his abolitionist commitments by refusing to surrender his body and interring it in a trench with his black soldiers.25
Both Union and Confederates provided their own dead officers with privileged treatment. In Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, where men were brought from surrounding battlefields throughout the war, the informal practice of burying officers together and apart from their men soon led to the establishment of an officially separate Officers’ Section. After the Battle of Cedar Mountain in 1862 most of the Federal dead lay unburied for days, although the bodies of their officers were packed in charcoal and sent to Washington, where they were to be placed in metallic coffins and shipped to their homes across the North. Confederate Charles Kerrison described a similar differentiation in treatment according to rank when he attempted to retrieve the body of his brother Edwin, a private killed in the spring of 1864. When one of four officers for whom metallic coffins had been provided proved lost, Kerrison hoped he might appropriate the surplus casket for Edwin. But he seemingly never questioned that a higher-ranking soldier should have been provided a coffin while his brother had none. A Texas soldier was less accepting. “The officers get the honor,” he wrote, “you get nothing. They get a monument, you get a hole in the ground and no coffin.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, searching for his son in the bloody aftermath of Antietam, took these contrasts for granted: “The slain of higher condition, ‘embalmed’ and iron cased, were sliding off the railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank and file were being gathered up and committed hastily to the earth.”26
A Commission of Inquiry investigating the conditions of Union prisoners of war in 1864 reported that these distinctions persisted and perhaps even intensified in captivity. Dead Yankee enlisted men at one prison camp were thrown into a cellar where they might be devoured by rats and dogs before being carted off for burial, while officers, “secured by contributions, made up among themselves, metallic coffins and a decent, temporary deposit in a vault…until they could be removed to the North.” This systematic privileging of rank marked the fact that an officer was in a quite literal sense some body. When captured Yankee surgeon Daniel Holt watched Confederate burial squads deny that identity to a group of his dead comrades, he forcefully articulated his conviction that their status in life ought to have carried over into death. “It is a sad, sad sight,” he wrote to his wife, “to see men who at home occupied position and place, possessing wealth…deposited a
s they are here, in the ground, with nothing but a blanket and mother earth over them.” Coffins, embalming, shipment home, a marked and honored grave: these were the privileges that Civil War Americans were most eager to provide their dead comrades and kin.27
It was not just soldiers who had to deal with the dead in the days after fighting ceased. Combat respected no boundaries, spreading across farms, fields, and orchards, into gardens and streets, presenting civilians with bodies in their front yards, in their wells, covering their corn or cotton fields. The capacities of existing cemeteries in towns like Richmond and Atlanta were taxed, then exceeded, as communities struggled to provide graves for the escalating numbers of the fallen.
“A Contrast: Federal Buried, Confederate Unburied, Where They Fell on the Battlefield of Antietam.” Caption and photograph by Alexander Gardner. Library of Congress.
After three days of battle Gettysburg confronted the problem of 7,000 slain men and 3,000 dead horses, far too many for Union troops—who held the field as Lee rapidly retreated southwards—to inter with adequate dispatch. Civilians joined in the burial of the dead out of both sympathy and necessity. Fifty Confederates lay on George Rose’s fields; seventy-nine North Carolinians had fallen in a perfect line on John Forney’s farm; the widow Leister confronted fifteen dead horses in her front yard; Joseph Sherfy’s barn, which had been used as a field hospital, was left a burnt ruin, with “crisped and blackened limbs, heads and other portions of bodies” clearly visible in the rubble.28
One of the estimated 1.5 million horses and mules killed in the war. Sketch by Alfred R. Waud. Library of Congress.
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