This Republic of Suffering

by Drew Gilpin Faust

  As soon as Moore completed this assignment, he was ordered to the site of the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, where so many Union soldiers had perished. Officially named Camp Sumter, Andersonville had held 45,000 Union soldiers between its opening in February 1864 and the end of the war. Known for its especially brutal conditions, it comprised little more than a stockade surrounding twenty-five acres of ground on which men crowded together without shelter or adequate food, polluting the stream that provided the camp’s only drinking water. The death rate from disease and violence reached nearly 30 percent, and the prison’s commander, Captain Henry Wirz, would hang in November 1865 for war crimes.7

  In late June 1865 a former Andersonville prisoner named Dorence Atwater contacted Clara Barton, offering to help identify men on her published lists. A Connecticut soldier who had been confined at the camp for almost its entire existence, Atwater had been assigned to maintain a record of the dead. Determined to document the horror he had witnessed, he had kept a hidden copy for himself. This enumeration corresponded with numbered graves, offering the possibility of identifying a great many who had endured the camp’s extreme conditions. When he learned of the existence of the list, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton authorized an expedition to Andersonville under Captain Moore’s command and invited Clara Barton to participate. Moore, Barton, Atwater, forty laborers and craftsmen, and seven thousand “unlettered headboards” departed from Washington by boat on July 8, 1865. Vying for preeminence—Barton insisted the expedition was her idea—Moore and Barton quickly grew to resent and even detest each other. Moore was overtly hostile, in part to the very presence of a woman on an official military expedition, and he reportedly declared at the outset of the trip, “God damn it to hell! Some people don’t deserve to go anywhere. And what in hell does she want to go for?” Upon her return Barton formally complained to Stanton about Moore’s behavior.8

  “A Burial Party on the Battle-field of Cold Harbor, Virginia, April 1865.” A part of the Federal reinterment effort under the command of James Moore. Negative by John Reekie; print and caption by Alexander Gardner. Library of Congress.

  The insalubrious conditions that had tormented the prisoners also took their toll. The summer heat was almost unbearable—often well over a hundred degrees—and a number of laborers became ill, including a “letterer” assigned to paint headboards, who died of typhoid—the “last martyr of Andersonville,” Barton noted in her diary. The expedition nevertheless documented 13,363 bodies and succeeded in identifying 12,912. All were reinterred in marked graves, and on August 17 their resting place was dedicated as the Andersonville National Cemetery. Barton was honored to raise the Stars and Stripes where “the flag of the country” had not “floated in four dark years.”9

  In the western theater similar efforts were under way. On June 23, 1865, Major General George H. Thomas, commander of the Department of the Cumberland, had ordered Chaplain William Earnshaw to identify and reinter soldiers scattered around Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in the Stones River National Cemetery, established in 1864 to commemorate the bloody battle that had taken place there two years before. Earnshaw began searches of the surrounding area, investigating old sites of camps and garrisons within a radius of nearly a hundred miles.

  In the summer of 1865 the ultimate intentions of the federal government toward the war dead were not yet clear, and officers acted in response to circumstances in the field. Moore had at first thought that he would move all the bodies he found on the Virginia battlefields to a central cemetery, but summer weather changed his plan. His activities came to focus on the effort just to provide decent burial for remains that were either still above ground or were buried so shallowly as to invite destruction by hogs or vandals. Ordered to attend to the Union dead, Moore also interred many Confederates in order simply to clean up the littered Virginia fields. In the West Earnshaw undertook a wider and more systematic search, with the definite purpose of transferring Union bodies to an already existing national cemetery. It was, he declared, “our solemn duty to find every solitary Union soldier’s grave that marked the victorious path of our men in pursuit of the enemy.” Indeed, by the time he was finished, he believed that within his assigned area “not more than 50 Union soldiers still sleep outside our beautiful cemetery.”10

  “Miss Clara Barton Raising the National Flag, August 17, 1865,” at Andersonville. Sketched by I. C. Schotel. Harper’s Weekly, October 7, 1865.

  Only gradually in the years following southern surrender did a general sense of obligation toward the dead yield firm policy. Only slowly did the orders of individual military commanders combine with legislative authorization and funding to create an enormous and comprehensive postwar reburial program intended to locate every Union soldier across the South and inter all within a new system of national cemeteries. But this was not the goal at the outset. Widespread and continuing public discussion about the dead gradually articulated a set of principles that influenced military and legislative policy. The experience of federal officials assigned, like James Moore, to begin the interment and identification of the slain shaped attitudes as well, as the actual conditions of wartime graves and burials became known. The transcendent ideals of citizenship, sacrifice, and national obligation united with highly practical and ever-growing concerns about southern mistreatment of gravesites and bodies to result in what was arguably the most elaborate federal program undertaken in nearly a century of American nationhood.

  In October 1865, sobered by the difficulties already encountered in the attempt to compile reliable lists of the dead, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs issued another general order, calling upon officers to provide a survey of cemeteries containing Union soldiers. He requested details about the location and condition of graveyards, the state of relevant records, and officers’ recommendations for the protection and preservation of remains. He asked specifically for an evaluation of the appropriateness of each site and a judgment as to whether bodies should be left in place or removed to a “permanent cemetery near.” After interruptions necessitated by summer heat, Moore in the East and Earnshaw in the West resumed their efforts under these new guidelines, and on December 26 Edmund B. Whitman, chief quartermaster of the Military Division of the Tennessee, was relieved of his regular duties and assigned responsibility “to locate the scattered graves of Union soldiers” across a wide area of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Whitman had served in the Quartermaster Corps during the war, enlisting from his home in Kansas soon after the opening of hostilities. A Harvard College graduate of the Class of 1838 and a New England school-teacher, he had emigrated to Kansas in 1855 as one of a number of abolitionists committed to preventing the permanent establishment of slavery in that strife-torn and “bleeding” territory. Now, a decade later, he embarked on an expedition to locate and honor those who had perished in the cause for which he had fought so long.11

  As he contemplated his assignment, Whitman concluded that “a knowledge and a record of every grave” must be “in the possession of some living person.” Like Clara Barton, he sought surviving witnesses who alone had the information necessary to enable him to locate and identify the dead. Whitman composed a circular entitled “Important Information Wanted,” addressed to “Surgeons, Chaplains, Agents of Sanitary and Christian Commissions, Quartermasters, Officers or Soldiers,” and forwarded it to three hundred newspapers and periodicals for publication. Announcing that the United States Quartermaster General had ordered the preparation of a “record…of all Union soldiers who have been buried in the Rebel States,” Whitman requested assistance in locating the fallen. Whitman later reflected, after completion of the assignment, how important this circular had proved not simply in generating information but in engaging the broader public. His communication, he judged, had proved critical in creating a “sympathetic chord” and had “exerted an influence in the creation of the public sentiment which justified and sustained the subsequent measures adopted.”12r />
  The circular provoked an outpouring of responses. Relatives begged Whitman to find the remains of lost kin; other correspondents furnished “drawings and descriptions” indicating the exact spot where a friend or comrade had been buried. Often, Whitman reported, these proved “so minute and accurate in the details, that any person could proceed with unerring certainty to the very grave.” A letter from A. T. Blackmun, for example, explained that his brother had been buried in a cemetery five miles east of Vicksburg, in an orchard near the railroad. “The grave is under & to the South side of the fourth apple tree, in the third row of trees, counting from the side nearest Vicksburg.” Pencil marks on Blackmun’s letter indicate that these detailed directions served their purpose and that his brother was indeed found. Isaac Weightman of the 29th Pennsylvania, killed in battle in Georgia, was buried “on the left side of the Railroad going towards Atlanta about a mile off along a small creek near the Breastworks of the rebels…by a big tree,” reported a letter written by a neighbor on his mother’s behalf. A fellow soldier had sent the bereaved woman information about her son’s death and burial, but she had not been able to visit or reclaim his body. A piece of cracker box inscribed with lead pencil marked his grave; his body was buried in only his trousers. “Any information will be a great solace to his mother who has given three (3) sons and (3) sons in law to the armies of our country.”13

  Chaplains wrote to Whitman with complete lists of regimental dead and their places of burial. One clergyman who had returned home to New Bedford, Massachusetts, provided documentation for two hundred graves in Tullahoma, Tennessee. Many soldiers seemed to have “whiled away boredom copying names from graves,” lists that they eagerly forwarded in response to Whitman’s request. Surgeons sent plans of hospital burial grounds with numbered graves and rolls of names. Officers who had been in charge of burial parties on the field had sometimes prepared plots of interments. “In the case of the 46 Ohio Regiment,” Whitman reported, “such a paper, stained and soiled at the time of burial,” would lead “to the identification after the lapse of more than 4 years of the entire group of dead from that regiment on the Shiloh battlefield.”14

  Whitman’s circular served as Gabriel’s trumpet, summoning the names and memories of the dead, raising them from neglect and anonymity, and ultimately returning hundreds of thousands of them to the nation. Whitman’s trumpet summoned another band, arousing the living as well. His request for information uncovered an army of record keepers, waiting to be asked for the details they had carefully gathered and preserved, even without any clear notion of their purpose. They had documented identities and gravesites, had spent spare hours copying names and regiments from headboards, in hopes that this information might someday and somehow assist in the return of a body or the commemoration of a grave. They had compiled their lists and drawn their maps as acts of respect and reverence in and of themselves, as a small personal statement of opposition to the war’s erasure of human life. Whitman’s appeal invited them to connect their individual efforts to the policies and actions of the state. The federal government had provided Gabriel with his horn.

  On March 1, 1866, a day he described as fine, cold, and windy, Whitman left Nashville on his mission, heading first to the site of the battle at Fort Donelson with a party of ten clerks and soldiers, as well as a cook and a mule handler. He would later add three more clerks and eight more soldiers to manage the work he found. The “entire country over which the war has extended its ravages,” he soon recognized, “composes one vast charnel house of the dead.” Whitman approached his work with the system and organization that marked him as an experienced quartermaster. In each locality he first visited battlefields, then the sites of former military hospitals, then private cemeteries. He devised a memorandum of eleven points “for guidance in exploring for Graves,” a kind of checklist of matters to be considered, beginning with locating and counting graves, characterizing their condition, then listing inscriptions on headboards, identifying individuals who might have relevant information, and finally making suggestions for permanent cemeteries. He strove above all to be thorough, for he was committed to the importance of every Union body and every soldier’s grave.15

  Whitman proceeded with a sense of growing urgency, recognizing that information and even the bodies themselves were highly vulnerable to both human and natural forces. News abounded of distressing incidents of vandalism of Union graves and bodies. Accounts reached Whitman of corpses thrown naked and facedown into pits, of a body left lying to rot with a pitchfork still impaled in its back, and of the “constant depredation of headboards” in battlefield burial grounds. When he pursued a father’s request that his son be moved from where he had fallen on the field in Georgia to the national cemetery in Chattanooga, Whitman learned that the body had already been claimed by local men “for the purposes of studying anatomy.” Only two small arm bones, one hand bone, and his clothing remained in Oliver Barger’s ransacked grave. Whitman received numerous reports of violence perpetrated against those who dared to care for Union bodies or graves. In Kentucky a man had even been killed for permitting two Yankees to be buried in his yard. A “constant depredation of Headboards and other trespasses and defilements, are constantly occurring,” Whitman’s superior officer in Nashville informed the quartermaster general in Washington.16

  In February 1866 Major General George Thomas issued a general order forbidding desecration of Union graves and directing specifically that they must not be mutilated or obliterated in the course of the spring plowing season, which was about to begin for the first time since the end of the war. By April concerns about vandalism had reached Washington, and Congress passed a joint resolution requiring the secretary of war “to take immediate measures to preserve from desecration the graves of the soldiers of the United States who fell in battle or died of disease…and secure suitable burial places in which they may be properly interred.” Now the legislative branch joined the military in the disposition of the Union dead.17

  Whitman’s superiors delivered elaborate orders about his responsibilities and their goals: “so far as practicable every Union soldier in the Milt Div of the Tennessee, shall finally rest in a well enclosed and decent ground, with a neat index to his grave, and with an accessible record of his final resting place.” On “battle fields of national interest,” where the northern public might be enlisted to support the “work of ornamentation,” or where graves were “scattered and unprotected,” it would be advisable to collect the bodies together in one place. But if remains lay peaceably in a churchyard or cemetery, “it is not desirable to incur an increase of expense to remove them, simply to carry out a general scheme.” Whitman was to locate graves, mark and protect isolated burial spots, and “form some plans” about graves that should be moved and about sites to which they might be relocated. Whitman’s superiors insisted that bodies that had been decently interred should be left where they lay except when “a savage and vindictive spirit of the part of the disloyal inhabitants” suggested “a disposition to molest the remains.” Increasingly, Whitman was coming to regard such vengefulness as less the exception than the rule.18

  In the year since Appomattox the defeated white South had moved from stunned disbelief to a posture of growing defiance. Encouraged by President Andrew Johnson’s sympathy, former Confederates tested the limits of northern will, challenging Yankee claims to the fruits of victory. In the summer of 1865 southern legislatures passed restrictive and discriminatory Black Codes, designed to reestablish slavery in all but name; in the fall the recently rebellious states elected former Confederate military officers and politicians to represent them in Washington; throughout the South white southerners perpetrated and tolerated relentless violence against freedpeople. The hundreds of thousands of Union bodies in their midst provided an irresistible target for southern rage as well as a means to express the refusal to accept Confederate defeat. It had proved impossible to overcome a live Union army, but bitter Confederates could still wage
war against a dead one.19

  A particularly virulent outbreak of white violence in fact served as a direct cause of intensified congressional interest in Union graves. During the first four days of May 1866, Memphis erupted in what were generally designated as riots, although the death toll of forty-six blacks and two whites suggests that those who wrote of a “massacre” were more accurate. Ninety-one houses, all but one occupied by African Americans, four churches, and twelve schools were destroyed. Fear became so widespread among African Americans in the area that Whitman reported he was for some time unable to persuade black laborers to continue to work for him. Congress promptly dispatched a committee of three members of the House of Representatives to investigate causes of the disturbance. Ultimately the legislators made recommendations about controlling white defiance that played a significant role in the movement toward Radical Reconstruction. But the assistant quartermaster of the Division of the Tennessee, George Marshall, seized the opportunity provided by the congressmen’s presence in Memphis to impress upon them the importance of the effort to bury the Union dead and the danger in which many soldiers’ bodies lay. A delegation including Chaplain William Earnshaw, who had been overseeing reinterments at Stones River, convinced the congressmen that a comprehensive reburial program was imperative. The committee chair, Representative Elihu Washburne of Illinois, was particularly moved by the account of Union dead scattered across the South, and Whitman believed that this meeting led directly to the National Cemeteries Act that passed, along with a fifteenfold increase in appropriation, in the next Congress. But even before the bill became law, it was clear that after the discussion in Memphis the reinterment effort would assume a new and enhanced scope and importance.20