Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  That goal begins here, with the Civil War, as soldiers began using a new kind of ammunition called the minié ball, a muzzle-loading bullet named after Claude-Etienne Minié, who had perfected his design in 1840. Which brings us to the second innovation in technology. Minié’s initial change was to make the rifle easier to fire by using a ball slightly smaller than the rifle’s bore. He next filled each ball with its own gunpowder, making it possible for the soldier to do something revolutionary—to load the rifle at the breech, instead of through the muzzle. Later, he added grooves to the ball and gave it a much more aerodynamic shape, both of which added to the accuracy and carrying power of the projectile and caused it to leave the muzzle of the rifle at much faster speeds than the old-fashioned ball. The percussion cap, invented in England, began appearing in the 1840s. It allowed rifles to be fired in all kinds of weather, even in the rain, something not possible with the older flint system.

  Because a soldier no longer had to spend time tamping both the ball and its gunpowder down the muzzle, Minié’s new method cut the time for loading and reloading to a fraction of the original, which helped turn the basic and undervalued rifle into an instrument of mass destruction. And because these rifles cost more than the old arms, the North (with more money) had a monopoly on them—much to the great disadvantage of the Confederacy. For the minié ball’s speed and caliber, coupled with its rapid spinning motion through the air, shocked the South by ripping through flesh and causing the most jagged and gaping wounds, leaving field surgeons, many times, to amputate limbs rather than trying to close gaping wounds and stanch bleeding. The war turned into a horror show.

  This new bullet that could fire great distances, a seemingly simple technological change, reverberated throughout the century. Innovations in the act of killing provided a new and powerful impetus to the great technological race. Consider the following example: Hiram Stevens Maxim, born in Sangerville, Maine, in 1840, loved to tinker, making various gadgets. For him, he said, invention and innovation meant only play and amusement; he had no bold ambitions. And although he had very little formal education, that did not seem to hold him back. By 1878, for example, he rose from journeyman assistant in the United States Electric Lighting Company, Edison’s main rival, to become chief engineer. In 1881, the company sent him to Paris for an exhibition of new electrical products.

  There, someone said to him, Maxim reports, “If you wanted to make a lot of money invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.”6 Use your technological know-how, that is, for killing. An entrepreneur enticed Maxim to come to England to improve on the Gatling gun, which needed to be turned by hand. In 1883, Maxim received a patent for an automatic machine gun, water-cooled and fed, automatically, by its own belts of ammunition.

  Technological change on the battlefield reverberated throughout the entirety of the next two centuries: Military people especially wanted to kill faster, more thoroughly, and always more efficiently. Total and complete eradication would be the best thing possible, and from greater and greater distances. Paul Virilio, in his book Speed and Politics, summarizes the change in a single sentence: “Territory has lost its significance in favor of the projectile.” He adds: “In fact, the strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitively supplanted that of place, and the question of possession of Time has revived that of territorial appropriation.”

  Weapons systems since World War II, Virilio goes on to argue, “have created an aesthetics of disappearance, for the arms race is only ‘the arming of the race’ toward the end of the world as distance, in other words as a field of action.” Cannons on battleships fire their missiles from distances of several miles. Fighter planes and bombers do not need to occupy territory; “shock and awe” is meant to destroy the enemy fast. Drones over Baghdad are operated by ghost pilots who move a mouse over seven thousand miles away, from inside a bunker in Las Vegas, Nevada.

  As technology comes more and more to dominate warfare, that disappearance to which Virilio alludes has come to include human beings themselves. With the military deciding to use fewer and fewer pilots and relying more and more on drones, along with its increasing use of robots to perform tasks like dismantling improvised explosive devices and destroying bunkers, the military has already announced that it no longer needs (or wants) so many able bodies. Wounded and dead soldiers just bring bad press, and the military can ill afford that. This country went from a draft in Vietnam to a volunteer military in Iraq, and will perhaps proceed to a ghost military in the next war.

  That one technological innovation, the new minié ball, greatly contributed to the astronomic numbers of wounded, near dead, and dead that littered the battlefields in the Civil War. Up to 1840 or 1850, say, the word bullet referred to a small round ball of lead. After that time, bullet referred to Minié’s innovation, that conical slug with which even young children are all too familiar. But beyond the technological horror, beyond all the killing and the wholesale industry of killing, lay that one strange and fundamental fact, a fact that stood well outside the grasp of technology: This devastating war pitted American against American.

  The killing ground went on for four long and trying years. During that time, the average American could quite easily get the feeling that nearly every man—young and old—in the country was fast passing away. Translated into today’s figures, to match the two percent of the population that died in the Civil War, over six million Americans would have to lose their lives on the battlefield. In the South, alone, an astonishing twenty percent of white males—one out of every five—of military age lost their lives.

  Six million represents a staggering number—three-fourths of the population of New York City, or over twice the population of Chicago. Imagine every person in Los Angeles dying in some protracted battle. It would be unimaginable, shocking, an absolute and utter disaster. The government would perhaps fall into chaos. Cries of the end of the world would be heard. Every person in the country would mobilize, emotionally and perhaps physically, behind one side or the other. No one does such a thing to us. We will not take it. But look, someone would eventually point out, we are delivering this horror to each other. In proportionate numbers, and in that scenario, that’s exactly what happened in this country.

  The young nation had such a huge number of heroic dead that the United States War Department created, for the first time, in 1863, a Soldiers’ National Cemetery, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Gettysburg, a battle that lasted but three days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, reached its climax on the third, when over twelve thousand Confederate soldiers attacked the Union lines. Even though the assault—named for its general, George Pickett—made the deepest incursion of the war into Northern territory, the eventual devastation surpasses the limits of the imagination. The historian Drew Gilpin Faust reflects on the killing in terms as gross as its subject: “By July 4, an estimated six million pounds of human and animal carcasses lay strewn across the field in the summer heat, and a town of 2,400 grappled with 22,000 wounded who remained alive but in desperate condition.”7 Claude-Etienne Minié had triumphed. Able bodies turned into bloated corpses, soldiers decayed into mere carcasses, and flesh got measured in pounds. Where had all the people gone?

  All that putrefying flesh turned the town of Gettysburg, in the most bizarre fashion, into something of a tourist attraction—an open-air morgue—as people from neighboring communities and distant towns came to see and touch the ground where so much slaughter had taken place. They came to hold clods of hallowed dirt in their hands and to sit on the ground, hold their picnics, and just contemplate the enormity of death. The Gettysburg cemetery held 3,512 Union soldiers. Nearly half of the 303,536 Union soldiers buried in national cemeteries lie in graves marked UNKNOWN.8

  On November 19, 1863, those who came to that plot of ground had the great privilege of hearing one of history’s most memorable speeches from the president of the Republic, Abraham Lincoln, who that day commemorated the new
cemetery. He delivered his address not so much to the assembled group but to every person alive in this young country—North and South alike. He spoke elegantly, and he spoke to make their hearts whole. He delivered one of the greatest political speeches we have. 9

  Every schoolchild knows about the Gettysburg Address; some can even recite lines (beyond the famous opening, “Four score and seven years”) from that short speech from memory. Few if any, however, can tell why Lincoln delivered it. Drew Gilpin Faust observes about that roughly two-minute address, “The ceremony and the address that historian Gary Wills has argued ‘reset America’ signaled the beginning of a new significance for the dead in public life.” The speech did, I believe, remake America, but it did not signal a new significance for the dead, unless one counts the loss of significance as something new. In my estimation, Lincoln uses the dead in the service of what he believed constituted a much larger issue—the preservation of the nation. Standing knee-deep in spilled blood, Lincoln really talked around the atrocity that was the Battle of Gettysburg.

  In that 272-word speech, Lincoln used the word dead three times. He used the word men twice, the term honored dead once, the indirect reference those once, and the indirect referent they three times. By contrast, Lincoln used the very specific noun nation some five times. To this president, much more important than the valor of the men who died on the battlefield was the rebirth of the nation. The dead cannot rise; the nation can. And thus the Gettysburg Address uses as its structure the life cycle: Lincoln begins by invoking the fathers who brought forth this nation, and he ends with a new freedom born in this nation under God, only to be reborn on the battlefield under generals.

  We should notice that Lincoln does not draw on the phrase “founding fathers,” already in use, but uses, instead, the more broadly construed word, “fathers.” Politicians and writers used the word fathers to refer to the founding fathers, but Lincoln uses it strategically here, for he needs to make a crucial point. Genealogy, continuity, responsibility—those become the key ingredients and actors on this piece of hallowed land, not some aristocratic and more abstracted notion of the founding fathers. Lincoln could be talking about your father, my father: We are all in this together. This is our nation. It will go on. It must go on. Death is not an impediment to progress. We can build cemeteries to house the dead. We can say our prayers, deliver our very short addresses, and then we must move on.

  In between those two births—the nation and the freedom of the new nation—lies the death of hundreds of thousands of men; and Lincoln for the most part lets this fact go by without very much mention—certainly without focusing on the gritty details. Even though every soul present that day knew the terrible death toll, death took a holiday during the Gettysburg Address. It is fair to say that in order for Lincoln to talk about the rebirth of the nation, something had to die; and it seems clear to me that on that brisk fall afternoon, before a rapt audience, death died.

  Senator Charles Sumner remarked that Lincoln’s speech was more important than the battle; that history would remember the Gettysburg Address long after it had forgotten Gettysburg. And so Lincoln gave the world an important transitional speech. He gave his country a speech that accorded the idea of men dying in great numbers a secondary or tertiary place to the ultimate importance of the nation itself. Men would have to sacrifice themselves—and it did not matter much which ones they were—to the greater good, which in this case was freedom or democracy or republican values, or any number of other politically articulated and abstract goals. How ironic that the man who delivered that speech would himself soon die, but that the nation would of course continue. (The king is dead; long live the king.) In a chilling reversal, in a very short speech, Lincoln managed to turn death into an abstraction and the idea of the nation into something specific and tangible. It’s as if his speech had become as streamlined as combat on the battlefield.

  Death surrounded the president; it would not let him go. Death seeped into the life of every person, young and old, alive in the country at that time. But Lincoln contained all that death within a much larger issue, and he made it almost vanish. That was his rhetorical strategy. For in November 1863, the end of the war was still nowhere in sight, and he had to assure his audience that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Both war and death extended far beyond the horizon of anyone’s imagination. Lincoln may have “reset America,” as Gary Wills suggests, but he did it, for better or worse, by sacrificing American deaths to the American republic. After nearly three years of an amazingly grueling war, Lincoln seemed to tire of death, to pass it by in favor of something much more sacred: the survival of a unified republic. He was, after all, the president of the United States.

  Not everyone shared Lincoln’s views about this country. William James, in a speech honoring the Civil War dead, spent time honoring individual people, including his own brothers. But he refused to praise the war itself. He simply did not believe in war. William James’s brother, Wilkie, had died of battle wounds suffered during the war. Nations find their salvation in pursuing avenues other than war, James declared in a speech he delivered in 1864 (his third year at Harvard), through “acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.”

  We can see the values that Lincoln articulated in his speech reflected in the radical architectural changes of the cemetery he had come to dedicate. Beginning with Gettysburg, national cemeteries differed from all other military burial places by according to each and every grave the very same importance. Unlike at other military cemeteries, a visitor could discern no difference in rank in the individual plots; no grave stood out in importance from any other ones. Death had not only entered the national consciousness; it had now taken over as a great leveler, smoothing out those differences in rank and identity, background, and even hometown or state that loom so large on the field of battle. Death had thrown a true blanket of crepe not just over the country but over the collective imagination. Death was the ultimate unifying sacrifice: No one’s passing, regardless of rank or background, should trump anyone else’s.

  But even with a capacity for holding over three thousand dead souls, Gettysburg proved insufficient for the countless number of soldiers who lost their lives during the more than four years of the Civil War. So many soldiers lost their lives that Lincoln found himself presiding over the inauguration of five separate national cemeteries. By 1871, death—elevated and consecrated death—had become so commonplace that Congress had authorized an astonishing seventy-four national cemeteries. (From 1872 to 2007—over the next 135 years, that is—the country consecrated only sixty-five more. One implication here: Death shifted away from our own military and, due to our continual technological advances—the snappy military-industrial complex—hit the enemy and civilians alike with much more force, resulting in a whole new vocabulary, including “friendly fire,” “collateral damage,” “surgical strikes,” and the especially annoying “human error” or “command error.”)

  Union soldiers told of routinely tripping over bodies as they slogged their way across the battlefield. Thousands upon thousands of corpses lay bloated and decaying in the mud, their skin gradually giving up its fleshy tones and turning a strange shade of blue and then, perhaps even more disturbing and certainly shocking for the great majority of white people in the United States, ending up a frighteningly deep black. Witness this revealing testimony from a Northern soldier at Gettysburg: “The faces of the dead, as a general rule, had turned black—not a purplish discoloration, such as I had imagined in reading of the ‘blackened corpses’ so often mentioned in descriptions of battlegrounds, but a deep bluish black, giving to a corpse with black hair the appearance of a negro.”10

  If people did not get the point about the enormity of death on the battle
field of that one place, Gettysburg, the French artist Paul Philippoteaux let them have it up very close. Over twenty years after the battle, in 1884, he and a team of assistants painted four versions of Pickett’s Charge, the Confederate general George Pickett’s attack against Union troops, on a 360-degree cyclorama. Of massive size, the cyclorama paintings stretched longer than a football field and towered into the air fifty feet or more. These paintings, the largest ever done in America, enjoyed amazing popularity in this country and in England and were displaced only by a much more powerful and arresting screen, the one for motion pictures.

  Typically, the artist painted the scene with oil on a canvas that totally encircled the viewer, and which curved inward to heighten the illusion of reality. Philippoteaux made some of the figures life-sized. Auditoriums held special showings of cycloramas, where the audience stood on a platform in the middle of the action. On such a scale, the observer can almost count each of the twenty thousand or so troopers, both North and South, standing toe to toe and killing each other. One can see in minute detail bodies and body parts lying strewn about; some soldiers are burying their compatriots, and still others lie on the ground bleeding and dying. It is a huge and ghastly scene of outright chaos and mayhem.