As spring unfolded, Whitman proceeded through the battlefields of Tennessee: Fort Donelson, Fort Henry, and then Shiloh. There, at the site of the battle that had first intimated the scale of slaughter to come, he encountered human bones scattered in “large quantities,” and he learned from nearby inhabitants that their hogs, customarily left free to forage, were no longer fit to be eaten “on account of their living off the dead.” Sweeping the field “deployed in the manner of a skirmish line,” Whitman and his men sought to cover every foot of terrain involved in the battle. A list of 315 gravesites that had been compiled by a Sanitary Commission agent just after the fighting proved of critical assistance, and Whitman’s party recorded and marked by compass points 178 different areas containing graves, including 21 burial trenches that held, he estimated, 250 bodies. Hundreds of men, he reported, seemed to have been “buried indiscriminately”—Yankees and rebels together—but Whitman was deeply moved by finding many soldiers in regimental groups, obviously carefully interred at the end of the battle by their comrades. These would be kept together when they were later removed to the national cemetery. In all Whitman discovered 1,874 Union dead, of whom 620 were identified by headboards or other inscriptions. About 200, he estimated, had been removed by relatives or friends. Keeping in mind the idea of siting national cemeteries at points of great historical interest, Whitman selected a potential spot on the Shiloh field.21
Near Memphis, Whitman encountered a road built over Union graves that had been all but destroyed by teams and carts, and he wrote sadly of 810 neglected Union graves in a cemetery three miles from the city. Nine hundred rebel graves in the same burial ground were carefully tended, with identities listed in a sexton’s book. The “Association of Southern Mothers,” he learned, had assumed responsibility for these Confederate dead, while their victorious Union counterparts lay dishonored beside them.22
Locating the many graves scattered beyond actual battlefields—casualties from skirmishes, or wounded men who died on the march, or men who succumbed to disease—required Whitman to seek information from local citizens who might have seen or heard of buried soldiers or even assisted in their interments. “As a rule,” he later remembered, “no residence or person was to be passed without the inquiry. ‘Do you know, or have you heard of any graves of Union soldiers in this neighborhood?’” When he arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, Whitman called upon the town postmaster, a federal employee after all, who might be expected to be both knowledgeable and helpful to a Union official. Whitman received not assistance but a warning. The postmaster declared that he would not dare tell a Yankee soldier about Union graves, even if he knew of them. Since the postmaster had taken the loyalty oath to qualify for his position at the end of the war, all his friends, cultivated during nineteen years of residence in the town, had abandoned him. He had even been asked to cease attending his church. “I am informed,” Whitman wrote his commanding officer, “that a disposition has been shown in this vicinity to obliterate and destroy all traces of the graves union soldiers find scattered in the country.”23
Farther south the Union dead seemed to be in even more distressing circumstances. Whitman discovered “immense numbers” of bodies in the area between Vicksburg and Natchez—perhaps, he thought, as many as forty thousand. These corpses were in every imaginable place and condition: buried on river embankments and then wholly or partially washed away (there were even reports of coffins floating like little boats down the Mississippi toward the sea), or abandoned in “ravines and jungles and dense cane brakes” and never buried at all. A farmer named Linn, who wanted to extend his cotton fields, had plowed up about thirty Union skeletons and then delivered the bones “in bulk” to the Vicksburg city cemetery. Not far away a Union graveyard had been leveled entirely to make way for a racecourse.24
As Whitman pursued his explorations, three hundred black soldiers at the Stones River National Cemetery continued to collect and rebury Union bodies from the wide surrounding area at the rate of fifty to a hundred a day. Stones River represented a pioneering example of the comprehensive reburial effort that by the summer of 1866 had come to be seen as necessary across the South. It also represented the critical role that African Americans had come to play in honoring the Union dead. Almost invariably units of U.S. Colored Troops were assigned the disagreeable work of burial and reburial, and Whitman’s own exploration party included several soldiers from U.S. Colored regiments. Individual black civilians also proved critical to Whitman’s effort to locate corpses and graves.25
“Justice to the race of freedmen,” Whitman reported to headquarters, demands “a tribute of grateful mention.” Rebuffed in his search for information by whites like the Mississippi postmaster, Whitman learned to turn to black southerners for help as he traversed the South in the spring and fall of 1866. “Most all the information gained” at one Georgia location, he reported to his journal, “was from negroes, who, as I was told…pay more attention to such matters than the white people.” There was a good deal more at issue here, Whitman soon recognized, than just attentiveness. Black southerners cared for the Union dead as a gesture of political assertiveness as well as a demonstration of gratitude and respect.26
During the war African Americans had risked their lives burying Union soldiers and trying to preserve both their names and their graves. About two miles from Savannah, in a corner of “the Negro Cemetery,” lay seventy-seven “graves of colored soldiers” in four neat rows. All but three were identified, all in “very good condition,” and all marked with “good painted headboards.” This was the last resting place of the dead of a unit of U.S. Colored Troops, carefully buried and tended by the freedpeople of the area. Whitman encountered other sites where former slaves had interred Yankees and still watched over their graves. Behind an African Colored Church near Bowling Green, Kentucky, for example, 1,134 well-tended graves sheltered both black and white Union soldiers. A black carpenter nearby was able to provide the most useful information about the area because he had made coffins and helped to bury many of the Union dead himself.27
Freedmen provided Whitman with assistance and information throughout his travels. Moses Coleman, “an intelligent negro,” sought Whitman out to tell him about the graves of nine Union soldiers who had been shot by Confederate cavalry after being taken prisoner: “one of whom he saw shot after being compelled to climb a tree.” A freedman eagerly offered the names and locations of two soldiers he had buried more than a year before; another former slave reported his employer’s desecration of soldiers’ graves and offered to identify thirty on his plantation that still remained undefiled.28
Such concern on the part of African Americans was hardly limited to Whitman’s experiences in the Military Division of the Tennessee. At the very end of the war, for example, African Americans in Charleston had tended the graves of more than two hundred Union captives who had died while confined in a makeshift prison on the city racecourse. Enclosing the burial ground and mounding and planting the graves, the freedmen painted a sign over the entryway inscribed “Martyrs of the Race Course.” On May 1, 1865, the African American population of the city, under the protection of a full brigade of Union infantry, including three regiments of U.S. Colored Troops, honored the federal dead with flowers, processions, and oratory in what historian David Blight has argued was the first Decoration Day. In the warfare over the disposition of the dead, black southerners showed little hesitation in choosing sides.29
At the end of June Whitman proposed sites for national cemeteries at Fort Donelson, Pittsburgh Landing, Corinth, Memphis, and Vicksburg and presented his views about the future to the chief quartermaster of the Military Division of the Tennessee. Whitman affirmed his “conviction, which seems to have impressed itself in some degree upon all,” of the government’s “duty” toward the remains of those who “have died in so noble a service.” The experiences of the preceding months, he reported, had produced a “daily deepening in my own mind” of the importance of this federal obligat
ion, as he had witnessed the “total neglect” or “wanton desecration” of Union graves by a southern population whose “hatred of the dead” seemed to exceed their earlier “abhorrence of the living.”30
Whitman’s travels across what he described as the “vast charnal house” of the South had, he confessed, “awakened a feeling of deep personal interest” in an undertaking that was “technically official.” He urged that in spite of the concerns his superiors had expressed about scope and cost, “the work be well and thoroughly done, with a true conception of its magnitude and significance.” Arguing that the federal government stood “in loco parentis” toward the Union dead, Whitman displayed a growing emotional engagement that was evident in his eloquent plea, phrased, like Bushnell’s oration, in the language of debt and obligation. The government, he insisted, held “a stewardship, the account of which must be rendered to the spirit of humanity and Christian patriotism, to the friends of republican liberty and of human freedom and progress throughout the world, to the free people of the North, whose dearest sons have been sacrificed to the demon of slavery and whose choicest treasures have been poured out.” Those who had fallen were not “hireling mercenaries” but citizens of a “Republican America where every man is himself a constituent and integral part of the Government.”31
The understanding of governmental obligation to the dead that Whitman advanced—“a stewardship, the account of which must be rendered”—was not his alone. By the middle of 1866 a chorus of voices in the North had begun to advocate policies toward the fallen that reflected fundamental assumptions about the principles for which the war had been fought. With the passage of conscription legislation in 1863, the nation had, for the first time in its history, mandated the obligation of the citizen to fight in its defense; it had mobilized millions of volunteers; now it had an obligation to those who had served. Citizenship represented a contract in which the state and the individual both assumed certain rights and duties, for which either could be called to account.
Clara Barton embraced these principles in her insistence that the work of naming the dead be regarded as a governmental responsibility. Late in 1865 she had explained her position in a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton seeking federal support in the search for missing men. “The true patriot,” she declared,
willingly loses his life for his country—these poor men have lost not only their lives, but the very record of their death. Common humanity would plead that an effort be made to restore their identity…As call after call for “three hundred thousand more” fell upon their stricken homes, the wife released her husband and the mother sent forth her son, and they were nobly given to their country for its necessities: it might take and use them as the bonded officer uses the property given into his hands; it might if needs be use up or lose them and they would submit without complaint, but never…has wife or mother agreed that for the destruction of her treasures no account should be rendered her. I hold these men in the light of Government property unaccounted for.32
Like Bushnell, Barton wrote of accounts and treasures; like Whitman, she called for federal engagement with the care of Union dead. She explored basic notions of human rights, of the mutual obligations that bind state and citizens. Significantly, at the end of a war about slavery, she situated her discussion in concepts of property in persons. But this was not the property of slavery; this was citizenship, not bondage. Here the individual freely acted as his own agent, as a true patriot “willingly” ceding control over his life. And here, again in contrast to an institution that tore families asunder, the wife and mother consented to give up her husband and son “to their country for its necessities.”
But this cession of rights, of property in person, remains incomplete. It is, in effect, a contract in which the state must in return accept certain obligations—in Barton’s view, to provide a record of death, an accounting for the destruction of human treasure. And tellingly, in Barton’s rendering, it is undertaken between women and the state. Women, legally denied the right to make contracts in most of pre–Civil War America, here claim new rights of personhood and citizenship that derive from their wartime sacrifice. An accounting for the dead is an accounting to the bereaved. As she affirmed the individual’s right to identity and humanity even in death, Clara Barton articulated a notion of citizenship founded in the nation’s experience of civil war and in the suffering of both soldiers and civilians. The war that freed the slaves established broad claims to rights—for blacks as well as whites, for women as well as men, for both the living and the dead. But as Clara Barton certainly recognized, the soldier dead were all men. Survivors had not made the ultimate sacrifice; their claims upon the state would not have the same force as those of the soldiers who had suffered and perished. The rhetoric of Clara Barton’s letter to Stanton sought to minimize and even erase a gendered divide and a gendered hierarchy that Civil War death had only rendered more profound. But it was no accident that when the nation, however fleetingly, sought to expand its polity in the years immediately following the war, it was black men, who had served and died in such significant numbers, and neither white nor black women, whom the Fifteenth Amendment welcomed as newly enfranchised citizens.33
“The Soldier’s Grave,” by Currier and Ives, a lithograph that families could inscribe with details of a lost loved one. For those who had no actual grave to mark, this could serve as a substitute. Library of Congress.
In August 1866, as reburial efforts in the South slowed in response to summer heat, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published an article calling for a comprehensive system of national cemeteries to include all Union dead. Building on notions of federal obligation that Bushnell, Barton, and Whitman had already articulated, James F. Russling defined treatment of the fallen as the sign and test of democracy, as well as the indicator of progress and modernity.
Except for “Republican Athens,” Russling argued, no people or nation had ever designated a burial place for the common soldier. He has “been overlooked, as if too humble to be taken into account.” But this was “a new era,” determined to “elevate our common humanity.” And perhaps even more important, the United States was a nation that had newly displayed its dedication to the proposition of human equality.
A Democratic republic like ours, based on the equality of the race, and affirming justice for all that knows or professes to know only excellence and worth wherever found, can not afford to pass by unheeded, however humble, those who have proven themselves by fierce and sturdy warfare in its behalf at once its best citizens and brave defenders.
The purposes of the war and the treatment of the dead were inextricable. Urging that the bodies of all Union soldiers should be disinterred and “brought speedily together into great national cemeteries,” Russling emphasized the mutuality of obligation between citizen and state.34
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a good sentiment for soldiers to fight and die by. Let the American Government show, first of all modern nations, that it knows how to reciprocate that sentiment by tenderly collecting, and nobly caring for, the remains of those who in our greatest war have fought and died to rescue and perpetuate the liberties of us all.35
In its invocation of modernity, in its reference to the “greatest war,” in its citation of a line from Horace that became the title of World War I’s most famous poem, Russling’s words almost seem to look to another Great, and yet more bloody, War, one that would install mass carnage at the core of existence in the twentieth century. That dying for one’s country is sweet and proper becomes for Wilfred Owen by 1917 “the old Lie.” But a half century earlier it remained for Russling “a good sentiment”—one that he believed should animate national policy toward the Civil War dead.36
Russling’s prescriptions soon became settled policy. Even before Congress passed formal legislation in February 1867, the effort to bury every Union soldier within the safe confines of a national cemetery began. During the summer of 1866 Whitman made plans for “commencem
ent of the general work of disinterment” in the cooler weather of fall, designing record-keeping forms that would minimize errors, mapping routes, and gathering needed labor and supplies. Whitman was acutely aware of both the dangers and the opportunities in relocating so many bodies. Moving a grave could mean losing an identity tied to a place or circumstance of burial; it might also provide a final chance to discover a name. He and his superiors were sensitive, too, to the implications of this unprecedented extension of governmental responsibility into the intimate and domestic arena of death. Brevet Major General J. L. Donaldson, chief quartermaster of the Military Division of the Tennessee, introduced an uncharacteristically personal tone into the customary formality of general orders when he emphasized in an August directive that “the Government in assuming to perform a work, which belongs as a special right only to kindred and friends of the deceased, demands of its Agents to discharge the duty, with the delicacy and tenderness of near and dear friends.” Later in the month Donaldson issued a circular addressed to “Friends of Deceased Union Soldiers” announcing to the general public that disinterment of all bodies in his Military Division would begin in October. He invited those who wished to be present at exhumations in hope of identifying lost kin to contact Whitman for an exact schedule of localities. The national government had assumed the unprecedented role of the citizen’s friend.37
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