Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  The total number of the dead on the battlefields of the Civil War absolutely staggers the imagination. As I said earlier, Americans would find it hard if not impossible, today, to cope with such wholesale and seemingly rampant devastation, particularly on the most familiar soil imaginable, in their own country. Recall the level of public outrage that followed the attack of the Twin Towers in New York City, on September 11, 2001, when nearly three thousand people perished. Beyond that, recall the Bush administration’s preemptive retaliation, attacking both Afghanistan and Iraq. The numbers for the Civil War dead—over 620,000—total over two hundred times as many dead as those nearly three thousand Americans who lost their lives in Manhattan. As Faust points out:The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities. As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital. Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.11

  The rampage of death greatly affected the collective imagination; it changed attitudes toward the humanness of human beings. Men on the battlefield came to describe dead human beings as “putrefied meat, not so much killed as slaughtered.” A soldier who stepped on a dead man’s leg remembered it not as a person’s leg, but as “a piece of pickled pork—hard and yet fleshy.”12 A Union soldier described Antietam a week after the killing stopped: “The dead were almost wholly unburied [and] stretched along, in one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads.”13

  The fact that there were almost as many dead bodies lying on battlefields as living soldiers standing on them reinforced such seemingly callous attitudes toward human beings. Bodies lay everywhere, and to prevent those hundreds of thousands of corpses from decaying beyond all recognition on the battlefield required new technologies of recovery. Undertakers went through professional training, and funeral homes, certified by various municipal agencies, sprang up all over the East Coast. Much of this new mobilization in the name of death came about because it took such an extremely long time for workers to collect, identify, and remove the hundreds of thousands of bodies from the scores of places where they had fallen.

  As it had helped so much with creating the dead, so technology now stepped in on the other side of war, to aid in the removing of the fallen. Both sides of combat—the killing and the interring—underwent wholesale revision in the movement toward modern warfare. Here, as we come face to face with the technology of preserving the flesh, the professional serves to repeal, for the family, for loved ones, the awful and final sentence of death. Technological innovation attempted, in a bizarre way, to erase the gruesome realities of such methodical killing. Such a promise, for instance, lives at the heart of the newly improved and utterly necessary technology of embalming. Through artistic mastery, the embalmer seems to say that the man laid out on the slab, looking like just so much meat, is only peacefully asleep. I beg you, do not think of your son or husband as existing no more. He is merely resting, just waiting in peaceful repose to sally forth into heaven.

  To get those hundreds of thousands of bodies back home in some reasonable state of wholeness meant returning them to their places of rest as fast as possible. At odds with that goal, however, to slow down the process of decay—once again, technology responsible for the collapsing of time—physicians tried all kinds of new embalming fluids that they could administer while still in the field. By themselves, however, all the fluids proved insufficient (formaldehyde did not come on the market until 1867), which prompted the reliance on further technological innovation. In this case, entrepreneurs borrowed the technology from the meatpacking industry, which used refrigerated boxcars to ship dressed cattle from, say, Chicago to places in Missouri and farther west. Driving cattle overland meant that the animals would shed precious weight and take even more precious time to get to the slaughterhouses. And so the Chicago meat-packer Gustavus Swift developed these new “reefer” cars, in the 1840s, to take his dressed cut meats to distant markets, where sides of meat arrived much faster and in much fresher condition. Through his adaptation of new refrigeration methods, Swift helped usher in the age of cheap beef. (Jacob Perkins, born in Massachusetts, and who eventually held some nineteen separate American patents, developed the first practical refrigeration machine in 1834.)

  On the battlefield, the same technology that resulted in cold storage, modified for human beings, took hold fast. The new device went by the rather gory name of the icebox coffin, a refrigerated casket designed to keep corpses cold so they would remain intact and, much more important, recognizable as they made their sometimes long journeys back home.14 Surely, some people must have noticed the comparison of dead bodies with dressed beef, one more instance in the slow draining away of human essence. And so, to soften that demeaning psychological blow, entrepreneurs began marketing those portable refrigerated coffins under a more palatable (and commercial) name, transportation cases. Advertisements boasted that the new transportation cases could “Preserve the Body in a natural and perfect condition . . . for any distance or length of time.”15

  Working outside the world of technology, philanthropic organizations inaugurated a series of “sanitary commissions,” through whose auspices thousands of volunteers “in the field assumed care of hospital graveyards and registries of death [while] others worked to arrange for burials in the aftermath of battle; still others assisted families in locating lost loved ones and providing for their shipment home.”16 Civilians, too, roamed the battlefields, curious to see the great numbers of dead, but also to help in identifying loved ones lost in battle, and to help with burials as well. It is difficult to separate searching for loved ones on the battlefield from mere spectating about death, a pastime that we have seen taking place in other conditions, in other countries. Maybe the two activities—searching and spectating—can never be made discrete.

  In the nineteenth century, death and dying quickly drift to that dividing line of dead and alive. In the rush to rid the battlefield of its dead, tales—or what we sometimes today call urban legends—circulated of soldiers finding themselves buried prematurely; and of desperate men suddenly and eerily screaming and clawing to get out of their suffocating prisons as their coffins were being shipped back home. Some of those stories were no doubt fueled by a genre of gothic literature made popular in the 1840s by that premier author of the maudlin and the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe had a morbid fascination with characters so evil and perverse, they routinely entombed their rivals while the latter were still alive, a calamity that occurred often enough in the period for it to have its own name, “living inhumation.” Poe made those sinister killers into the heroes of several works, most graphically present in stories like “The Premature Burial,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”

  The unnamed narrator of “The Premature Burial,” to take just one story, believes he has been buried alive, and narrates the story from inside his coffin. Adopting the tone and demeanor of a university scholar, the narrator informs the reader that “to be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think.” The narrator’s own profound fear of being buried alive has been intensified, in great part, because of a malady from which he has greatly suffered his entire lif
e, “attacks of the singular distraction which physicians have agreed to term catalepsy.”

  The malady causes the narrator to fall into unpredictable, deathlike trances—into what he terms a “hemi-syncope, or half swoon”—sometimes for days at a time, so that he resembles one who has died. He has a great fear that, during one of these spells, he might be mistaken for dead and so buried alive. As the narrator describes his strange and chilling condition, he seems at the same time to describe the spirit of the age:The boundaries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not forever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken.

  And then Poe ends this line of reasoning with the key question for him, and a line that reverberates all through the nineteenth century: “But where, meantime, was the soul?”

  Enough people took those stories of premature burial seriously enough for the period to coin a new word, taphophobia, which translates literally as “fear of the grave,” but more figuratively as “fear of being buried alive.” One well-known American funeral director, T. M. Montgomery, reported that “nearly two percent of those [bodies he had] exhumed were no doubt victims of suspended animation.”17 Families paid Montgomery, and funeral directors like him, to dig up bodies on the battlefield for reburial in family plots or in a national cemetery. The nineteenth century was a time of wholesale exhumation of bodies—either for the reasons I just mentioned, or for sale to medical students for experiments. Body snatching grew into a large and thriving business.

  The New York Times also seems to have taken living inhumation quite seriously, for in 1899 the newspaper of record reported on a bill—introduced by the state assembly of New York—designed to prevent premature burial: “No body shall be received unless a statement on the part of the attending physician or Coroner, whether he has found the following signs of death or not, is with it.” The bill then goes on to list the five undeniable signs of death, emphasizing the most obvious and fleshy of those signs, the decomposition of the body.

  Prominent Europeans who found themselves stricken with severe cases of taphophobia joined the Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive, in large numbers, in order to protect themselves. They wrote wills that contained fairly wild clauses as preventions against premature burial. Some members demanded that, upon their seeming death, some disinterested person must cut their heads off, or pierce their hearts with a stake, or dismember them, or drain all the blood from their bodies. Some wanted crowbars and axes placed inside their coffins; some wanted a pipe installed that would lead from inside their coffin aboveground, so that the one entombed could command the attention of those hanging around outside.

  The United States Patent Office approved nineteenth-century inventions designed to make such a profoundly macabre mistake impossible. They went by their commercial names “safety coffins” or “security coffins,” and typically involved nothing more than a string that ran from the inside of the coffin to an aboveground bell, so that the not-so-deceased could signal his or her continuing connection to this world. Some linguists believe that the phrases “saved by the bell” and “dead ringer” come from these patented safety devices.

  In Poe’s “Premature Burial,” the narrator rigs his family’s tomb with one of those hell’s bells for easy exit. He also remodels the family tomb with the most elaborate mechanisms, all with the aim of opening the vault with ease from inside:The slightest pressure upon a long lever that extended far into the tomb would cause the iron portals to fly back. There were arrangements for the free admission of air and light, and convenient receptacles for food and water, within immediate reach of the coffin intended for my reception. This coffin was warmly and softly padded, and was provided with a lid, fashioned upon the principle of the vault-door, with the addition of springs so contrived that the feeblest movement of the body would be sufficient to set it at liberty.

  Nineteenth-century physicians evidently did not possess great skill at determining if a person had actually died. Pulses, they believed, were unreliable indicators; temperature offered no sure gauge. Many of them took as the safest sign of death the odor of decaying flesh—what we commonly refer to as putrefaction—which placed those physicians in opposition, of course, with the desire of families to receive their loved ones back home quickly. In Austria and Germany, physicians relied so extensively on putrefaction as a test of certain death that funeral homes built special places called leichenhäuser, or waiting rooms, which they kept at fairly warm temperatures. Funeral directors placed the recently deceased in those rooms until the corpses began to rot, and of course to smell—sometimes, of course, quite badly. When a body really began to stink, morticians knew they could then safely put the body in the ground.

  One of the characters in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, a book that he published in 1883, visits one of those leichenhäuser and gets a job there as a night watchman. (The great rise in body snatching necessitated the use of guards to watch over the corpses.) One night, after working the job for a year, with no interruptions in his routine, he receives a fright that nearly kills him:I was sitting all alone in the watch-room, one gusty winter’s night, chilled, numb, comfortless; drowsing gradually into unconsciousness; the sobbing of the wind and the slamming of distant shutters falling fainter and fainter upon my dulling ear each moment, when sharp and suddenly that dead-bell rang out a bloody-curdling alarum over my head! The shock of it nearly paralyzed me; for it was the first time I had ever heard it.

  I gathered myself together and flew to the corpse-room. About midway down the outside rank, a shrouded figure was sitting upright, wagging its head slowly from one side to the other—a grisly spectacle! Its side was toward me. I hurried to it and peered into its face.

  Notice how Twain sets up the reader: The guard character slowly loses consciousness—he is chilled and numb, almost paralyzed at one point in the narrative. He is still and lifeless, without sensation, as Twain nearly turns him into a corpse. The wind, on the other hand, comes alive: It sobs. As for the real corpse, someone, it turns out, whom the guard knows from several chapters earlier in the story—it suddenly rises from the dead, or not so dead, or never dead. One does not know what category in which to place him. Twain’s point is that not very much, really, separates the two states, living and dead, and that we might do well to see them, as Poe surely did, more as states along a continuum, rather than as discrete categories. In this regard, Twain the trickster, acting as Twain the philosopher, very much captures the attitude of the period, which viewed living as a kind of suspended animation between birth and earth.

  The stench of putrefying flesh announced the certainty of death, making the job of the undertaker so much easier, for a truly putrid smell eliminated all doubt about the end of life. While putrefaction took place over a period of time, family members, recall, wanted the return of their loved ones fast—now! Those two timetables played themselves out in stark opposition to each other. And so one reads descriptions from the battlefield like the following: “The dead and the dying actually stink upon the hills.”18 And a Union surgeon declares, “The stench arising from [the countless dead bodies was] such as to breed a pestilence.”19 Faust herself claims that “for a radius of miles, the ‘mephitic effluvia’ caused by rotting bodies ensured that even if the dead were out of sight, they could not be out of mind.”20

  And so it’s possible to believe that amid all the other weirdness about death and near death and premature death, at least with some of the corpses, military officials deliberately allowed bodies to decay on the battlefield so as to preclude any mistakes. In a period
marked by ghosts and specters and a movement called spiritualism, the invisible held great significance and meaning. Bear in mind Marx’s dictum that “all that is solid melts into air.” “All that is solid”: Even death in this period ultimately turns invisible, ghostly—but nonetheless present, definitely present, powerfully present, even though the bodies have long since gone. That is, the smell of death—death’s ghost, in a very real sense—lingers long after the bodies have been removed.

  Mothers and fathers, wives and brothers, sisters and daughters—all the family members and relatives—wanted desperately to see their loved ones one more time. For them, removing the bodies from the battlefield with all due speed was of paramount importance. They needed to know that, yes, that unidentified body was once my living and breathing husband or son. This, in great part because nearly forty percent of Union and Confederate soldiers died anonymously and got buried by fellow soldiers in mass graves. Identifying the dead, as one might imagine, most often proved both a complicated and daunting task: Soldiers did not carry identification, except for the introduction in the Civil War of what in World War I would come to be called dog tags. But serial numbers oftentimes proved little help; soldiers typically lost them in the heat of battle, or passed them on to buddies to bring back home in the event they died. Reports from other soldiers on the field about the death of a loved one also proved not very useful and certainly not conclusive. For good reason, the notion of the Unknown Soldier dates from this time.

  The open casket, the viewing, the visual inspection of the body, were all absolutely essential clues to making death final, but such steps accomplished much more. Family members needed to know in what state of mind—with what expression on the face, that is—their loved one left this earth. Such concentration on detail made up an important part of what the period called the “good death”—how the person died would determine how he or she would take up residence in the hereafter. The good death meant an easy death, one in which a person passed over without pain or much suffering—a true blessing from Providence. Religious leaders encouraged people to adopt a pattern of good behavior their entire lives if they desired a holy way of dying.