The commitment to individual rights that emerged as such an important principle of the northern cause made attention to particular soldiers’ fates and identities inescapable; honoring the dead became inseparable from respecting the living. But the strongest impetus for these changes was the anguish of wives, parents, siblings, and children who found undocumented, unconfirmed, and unrecognized loss intolerable. The Civil War took place in a newly and self-consciously humanitarian age. “The world is more easily moved by the spectacle of human misery than it ever has been,” wrote a northern relief worker, explaining why “the Christian public either in this or any other country” would not allow soldiers to suffer as they had “in all previous wars.” This was an age in which family ties were celebrated and sentimentalized, an age that believed, moreover, that it possessed the agency and responsibility, as well as the scientific expertise, to mitigate suffering.48
But the dimensions of Civil War loss did not yield to small-scale, individual intervention or even to entrepreneurial improvisations, and Americans turned to the emerging philanthropic bureaucracies of the Sanitary and Christian commissions and ultimately to enhanced state power and responsibility. As Union victory became all but certain in the winter and early spring of 1864–65, the demands of the unnamed dead grew more pressing. At war’s end, the United States would embark on a program of identification and reburial that redefined the nation’s obligation to its fallen, as well as the meaning of both names and bodies as enduring repositories of the human self.
CHAPTER 5
REALIZING
Civilians and the Work of Mourning
“more trying than to face the battle’s rage”
REUBEN ALLEN PIERSON
War victimized civilians as well as soldiers, and uncounted numbers of noncombatants perished as a direct result of the conflict. The war’s circumstances created a variety of ways for ordinary Americans to die: from violence that extended beyond soldiers and battles, from diseases that spread beyond military camps, from hardships and shortages that enveloped a broad swath of the American—and especially the southern—population. It was, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, a “people’s contest,” and the people suffered its cruelties.1
Civil War engagements respected no rigid delineation between home and battlefront but raged across farms and settlements, into Gettysburg’s peach orchard and Sharpsburg’s cornfield, as well as into countless churches and dwellings. At First Bull Run, Judith Henry, a bedridden eighty-five-year-old widow, was killed by an artillery shell. Twenty-year-old Jenny Wade of Gettysburg died from a rifle bullet that passed through her front door as she worked dough to make bread for wounded soldiers. Young Alvah Shuford, who lived near Antietam, died while playing with a shell he found on the field; another boy perished the same way after Gettysburg. An estimated twenty women were killed by artillery fire during the 1863 siege of Vicksburg, but one observer noted that citizens actually suffered much more from “scarcity of provisions than from the abundance of shells.” Civilians died when Union gunboats fired on Natchez and Baton Rouge, when Union troops besieged Petersburg, when Yankees and Confederates struggled over the Shenandoah Valley—even in hand-to-hand combat in the streets of Martinsburg. In Richmond more than forty women working in an ordnance factory were killed in an explosion in 1863, and another fifteen died in similar circumstances in Jackson, Mississippi. Sherman’s March targeted property rather than persons, but civilians died nonetheless, like the eighty-year-old man driving his mule who was shot when he refused to stop at a Union colonel’s order. “That was one of the accidents of the war,” a Yankee soldier nonchalantly reported. Noncombatants were caught up in almost every military action—collateral damage, as they might be designated today. Yet no one then or since has tried to make a systematic compilation or enumeration of such deaths. In an era when military record keeping was itself flawed and incomplete, no one thought to account for civilians. Their losses remain the stuff of anecdote and even legend—largely unacknowledged casualties of a war even more devastating than its official statistics imply.2
Disease as well as violence threatened civilians, who perished from the same illnesses that produced the preponderance of military deaths. The Civil War generated significant movements of peoples that served as deadly disease vectors. Contagions and epidemics that flourished in army camps spread to surrounding populations. Citizens of Danville, Virginia, for example, were certain that their debilitating “fevers” originated in the prisoner-of-war hospital located there. Philadelphia reported a smallpox epidemic that seemed closely connected to the numbers of soldiers stationed in the city who had succumbed to the disease. In the fall of 1862 nearly five hundred cases of yellow fever and malaria appeared in Wilmington, North Carolina, in part, local physicians believed, because the construction of army breastworks had increased the number of stagnant ponds around the city. After Antietam, Maryland families paid a price for their generosity in caring for the wounded. As a result of maintaining a hospital in his parlor throughout the fall of 1862, Adam Michael reported, “the disease…has afflicted three of our family…Mother died with this disease on the 25th day of November.”3
African Americans in search of freedom frequently succumbed to illness as they fled northward. The Union army established what came to be known as “contraband camps” to help provide for the tens of thousands of slaves escaping into northern lines. Largely populated by women, children, and the elderly—often the families of black men who entered Union military service—these camps had extraordinarily high levels of mortality, due in considerable part to the conditions in which their residents were compelled to live. A Sanitary Commission observer described the camps as sites of “extreme destitution and suffering.” At one camp near Nashville in 1864, 25 percent of the residents died in a single three-month period. Many who escaped to freedom never lived to enjoy it.4
Across the South white civilians remarked upon apparent increases in illness and mortality, due in part to the economic hardships mounting within the struggling Confederacy. “I never have heard of so many dying,” a Virginia woman reported, as she sent news from home to her husband at the front. An 1864 appeal on behalf of refugee women and children near Nashville noted that “last spring the mortality among children was fearful,” and expressed worries about a significant “decrease in the population of women and children.” A petition to Jefferson Davis from forty-six citizens of Randolph County, Alabama, confirmed that by 1864 “deaths from starvation have absolutely occurred.” Southerners acknowledged that both the physical and emotional pressures of war had taken their toll. A Virginia doctor, trying to give some measure of objective reality to his sense of sharply increased morbidity and mortality, estimated that “the average of deaths is 30 per ct greater among the non-combatant population than before the war.” As a South Carolina woman remarked, “it is not strange that the body sometimes gives way when so much rests upon the mind.”5
Even the most privileged and famous could not protect themselves from the reach of war-borne disease. William Tecumseh Sherman’s nine-year-old son died of typhoid fever contracted on a visit to his father in camp; Confederate general James Longstreet lost both his young children when they moved to Richmond to join him and came down with scarlet fever soon after they arrived in the crowded wartime capital. Eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln died in 1862 from typhoid fever, the consequence, in all likelihood, of Washington’s water supply, contaminated by the army camps stationed along the banks of the Potomac River.6
Hospitals were especially dangerous places, and nurses, matrons, and other medical workers often contracted illnesses from the patients they attended or from the polluted water supply they all shared. Union general Francis Barlow’s wife, Arabella, died of typhus as a result of her service in the hospitals of the Army of the Potomac. In both North and South nurses—Louisa May Alcott prominent among them—regularly fell victim to typhoid, smallpox, and even heart failure brought on by the conditions and demands of their employment
. When Wilmington, North Carolina, was taken by Union forces, prisoners released from Andersonville and Florence crowded its hospitals, spreading new waves of epidemic disease. Of five “lady nurses” from the North, three sickened and two died, along with a chaplain and other medical attendants. Residents of the long-suffering town cannot but have been affected as well. No statistics or systematic records document the impact of war-engendered disease on noncombatant populations, but citizens, especially in the South, had few doubts about its effects.7
The enormous battles—engagements like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, the Wilderness—that constituted the central theater and focus of war often overshadow the widespread and persistent small-scale encounters, guerrilla actions, and civic unrest that inevitably involved and threatened civilians. One set of such hostilities grew naturally out of the causes of the conflict. On farms and plantations across the South, the disruptions of war encouraged slaves to challenge their subordination as they witnessed erosions of white control and anticipated the possibility of freedom. Some masters died at the hands of slaves seeking vengeance or asserting a new sense of empowerment. Mary Chesnut described the horror that swept through the highest circles of South Carolina society when the elderly Betsey Witherspoon was smothered by her slaves. In Virginia a sixteen-year-old slave girl, determined not to be whipped, killed her mistress by hitting her with a fence rail and then choking her to death. As they struggled to maintain control, masters, in turn, killed slaves. Near Natchez anxious whites hanged thirty slaves suspected of using war’s disruptions to plan an uprising against their owners. A northern woman working in the Nashville hospitals learned of a “negro boy of about nine years old who died from blows received from his mistress.” She was beating him because of her “anger that his mother had run away in search of freedom.” More commonly masters exacted retribution upon wives left behind by male slaves who had fled to join the Union army. Slaves suspected of helping the Yankees became particular targets of white southerners’ wrath. A young slave girl in Darlington, South Carolina, was hanged for yelling, “Bless the Lord the Yankees have come!” when Sherman’s troops arrived in town. Across the South slaves and masters battled over the future of the peculiar institution in a warfare, both overt and hidden, that yielded its own unacknowledged list of casualties.8
Racial violence was not confined to the South. Northern resentment at the human and financial cost of the war disturbed the public peace, most dramatically in the New York City riots that followed the introduction of a draft lottery in July 1863. White citizens were angry that the recently enacted federal conscription law would lead them off to battle in a war now explicitly committed to emancipation, and they expressed their fury in vicious attacks that were directed at first against government buildings but soon focused upon African American residents of the city. Five days of violence resulted in the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum, the lynching of eleven black men, and more than one hundred deaths.9
Violence invaded everyday life in other parts of the nation as well, especially in locations where political loyalties divided the civilian population. East Tennessee, western North Carolina, southwest Virginia, and the Missouri borderlands were among the areas that experienced guerrilla conflict that made few distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. In East Tennessee a Primitive Baptist minister of northern sympathies was killed in his house by secessionists; Unionists claimed that Confederates hanged several women who had refused to reveal the whereabouts of their loyal husbands. In Shelton Laurel, North Carolina, Confederates shot fifteen male citizens, including boys as young as thirteen. Confederate sympathizers burned the town of Lawrence, Kansas, and the Union commander retaliated by ordering houses in four counties vacated and destroyed. In Missouri partisan rangers terrorized civilians and provided Jesse James with a training ground for his violent postwar career.10
“View of the Darlington Court-House and the Sycamore Tree Where Amy Spain, the Negro Slave, Was Hung.” Harper’s Weekly, September 30, 1865.
But for most civilians war’s wounds proved less direct than they were for a Judith Henry or a Jenny Wade or a victim of guerrilla violence or even epidemic disease. Most noncombatants felt war’s cruelest impact not in their own illness or death but through the sufferings of the soldiers who were dear to them. The blow that killed a soldier on the field not only destroyed that man but also sent waves of misery and desolation into a world of relatives and friends, who themselves became war’s casualties. In a poem, “Killed at the Ford,” that represented a widely shared understanding of war’s losses, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dissolved the boundary between home and battlefront, between combatants and noncombatants, between war’s physical and emotional wounds. The ball that killed the Yankee soldier in the South continued its trajectory of death:
That fatal bullet went speeding forth
Till it reached a town in the distant North
Till it reached a house in a sunny street
Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat
Without a murmur, without a cry
…….….….….
And the neighbors wondered that she should die.11
Some grieving survivors did indeed literally perish. Told that her husband had been killed, one Iowa woman declared she wished to see her mother and then die, and she proceeded to do just that. In South Carolina the parents of eighteen-year-old Oliver Middleton, killed in 1864, were perceived by their acquaintances to be unalterably transformed by the blow, and Oliver’s despairing mother followed him in death in a little more than a year.12
But Longfellow’s poem suggests the possibility of metaphorical death in his rendering of the unspecified—and thus generalized—wife, mother, or sister. Even without the actual demise of the body, the bereaved might suffer a living death of spirit, heart, and hope. Civil War fatalities belonged ultimately to the survivors; it was they who had to undertake the work not just of burial but also of consolation and mourning. This would be, as Louisiana soldier Reuben Allen Pierson wrote from the field in 1862, “more trying than to face the battle’s rage.”13
The notion of the Good Death, so often embodied in the condolence letter that bore “Aufaul knuse” from battle to home front, represented an initial collaboration between the dying and the living in managing death’s terrors. The letter and the act of dying that it described affirmed a set of assumptions about death’s meaning that established the foundations for the mourning to follow. A soldier’s actual death comprised but a moment—“sudden and swift” like the subject of Longfellow’s poem, even if it was preceded by lengthy struggle and agony. But for his survivors, his death was literally endless. His work was over, but theirs had just begun.
For many bereaved, even assimilating the fact of a loved one’s death was difficult. Civil War letter and diary writers confronting news of loss repeatedly proclaimed their inability to “realize” a death—using the word with now antiquated precision to mean to render it real in their own minds. This word choice encompasses an important aspect of the process of grief as it has been described by psychologists and indeed observers through the ages. Freud, for example, contrasted mourning, a grief that understands that a loved object no longer exists, to melancholia, in which an individual “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost” and thus remains mired in “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love.” Freud writes of “the work of mourning,” defined by the effort to come to grips with the reality of loss and then to withdraw emotional investment from the departed. Mourning is a process with an end; melancholia a state, and, in Freud’s terms, a pathology. The particular circumstances created by the Civil War often inhibited mourning, rendering it difficult, if not impossible, for many bereaved Americans to move through the stages of grief. In an environment where information about deaths was often wrong or entirely unavailable, survivors found themselves both literally and figuratively unable to “see clearly what…has been lost�
� and instead encouraged to deny it. In such conditions the temptation to distrust and resist bad news was all too alluring and the capacity for the genuine consolations of mourning severely compromised.14
Denial and numbness were, in fact, prominent means by which civilians—like soldiers—attempted to cope with war’s losses. Abbie Brooks of Georgia confessed that sufferings had “purified and petrified me. I care very little for anybody or anything, am neither sorry nor glad, but passive.” After her brother’s death, Kate Foster of Mississippi felt emotionally altered: “My heart became flint. I am almost afriad to love too dearly anyone now.” Kate Stone, who spent much of the war as a refugee from her Louisiana home, acknowledged that “death does not seem half so terrible as it did long ago. We have grown used to it.” Cornelia Hancock, nursing in Union hospitals, felt the same as the young Confederate: “One can get used to anything.” She had come to understand why hospital administrators so often failed to make the required list of fatalities: death had become too commonplace even to take note of. When she was told of the demise of a neighbor at home, Hancock confessed to her sister that a single death seemed not to mean “anything to me now.” The young wife of a Confederate officer reported that some bereaved southerners became almost paralyzed by their losses, “stunned and stupefied…forever, and a few there were who died of grief.” Mary Lee, living amid the constant battles over Winchester, agreed: “no one feels anything now.” Such denial represented its own kind of loss, an abandonment of emotion and sensibility that was a death in itself, another dimension of war’s dehumanization.15
Making a death real, feeling and accepting its certainty, required effort. After her brother James was killed at Second Bull Run, Sarah Palmer wrote in anguish to her sister Harriet, “I can’t realize that I am never to see that dear boy again…it is too hard to realize.” Death itself seemed impossible to understand, much less to connect with their vibrant young brother: “We have never known what death was before.” Their mother, Esther, turned to fantasies of denial, trying to reject rather than embrace the reality of his loss, which she found unbearable. “I sometimes think he is not dead, it might have been a mistake,” she wrote several weeks after he was killed. “I cannot begin to realize the death of my beloved brother,” wrote another sister, Elizabeth. “I find myself continually thinking of him as alive.” Five months later Harriet still struggled to accept the fact of his loss. “It is very hard to believe that dear Jim is dead. Were it not for the cessation of those letters we used to hail with so much gladness…I could not realize it.” Death seemed ineffable, a void that she could understand best through the physicality of the letters that came no more.16
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