On Hallowed Ground

by Robert M Poole

  Lee had reason for optimism as 1862 wound to a close. Despite horrific losses, his ragtag army had accomplished a lot with very little, while in Washington, President Lincoln was still frustrated with the Army of the Potomac. The president had shuffled through one commander after another—from McDowell to McClellan to John Pope and back to McClellan again; then to Ambrose Burnside, who was soon to be replaced by Fighting Joe Hooker, who would, in his turn, flame out to make room for yet another temporary commander. Meanwhile, the federal war debt was soaring—it was $600 million at last count—and new enlistments were sorely needed to replace casualties.20 Lincoln’s cabinet quietly discussed the possibility of recruiting black soldiers, a proposal the president resisted in this early phase of the war.

  Neither side had anticipated the war’s cost in blood. More than 100,000 soldiers, Union and Confederate, would be killed, wounded, or captured in the eastern campaigns of 1862, as the armies fought back and forth between Washington and Richmond. Even before the casualties climbed into the tens of thousands, Lee was protesting that he lacked manpower for burying the dead.21 Meanwhile, citizens and military planners in Washington watched with growing distress as the war’s human wreckage became evident. Newspapers printed long gray columns listing casualties each day, which lengthened with the fighting. Friends and relatives scrutinized the papers for some word of missing loved ones.22 Some anxious mothers and fathers even made the long journey to Washington to search for a familiar face in the city’s crowded hospitals and temporary morgues.23

  From the opening shot of the Peninsula Campaign, Washington was swamped with a tide of the wounded and dying, who arrived from the front by the hundreds, packed so closely on transport ships that the men hardly had room to roll over; when one did, the jostling set off a chain reaction of groans from stem to stern. Trains rattled into the capital with a similar cargo of broken fighters.24

  The poet and war nurse Walt Whitman was waiting to greet the first hospital ships when they arrived from the front. They usually came in the night, ghostly white steamers emerging at the Seventh Street wharves. One night, Whitman found them docked in the rain. A few sputtering torches cast the scene in spooky light as, one by one, the men were lifted off, carried ashore on stretchers, and laid on the ground, there to await transfer to one of the city’s improvised hospitals. “The pale, helpless soldiers had been debark’d and lay around on the wharf,” Whitman wrote. “The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at any rate they were exposed to it … All around—on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places—the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, & c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs … Quite often they arrive at the rate of 1000 a day … The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.”25

  Desperately short of hospital space, Washington made do with temporary fixes. The Capitol building was outfitted with cots, which filled the House and Senate chambers and overflowed into the Rotunda. Iron beds were stacked in the Patent Office, where the sick convalesced among the glass display cases of inventors’ models. Hotels were transformed into hospitals, as were a synagogue, a clutch of mansions on Minnesota Row, Georgetown College, the former Republican campaign headquarters, the Odd Fellows Hall, the Smithsonian Castle, and no less than thirteen churches; in the latter, bells were silenced in deference to those recuperating under the rafters. New hospital tents and whitewashed pavilions were hastily constructed on Judiciary Square, along the Washington Mall, and on the heights of Meridian Hill. Other war casualties—including those with no hint of mental impairment—were housed in the insane asylum. At least twenty-two hospitals came into being as a result of the Peninsula Campaign, which transformed the nation’s capital into a city of fifty thousand patients. This vast army of the wounded, in Whitman’s phrase, was “more numerous in itself than the Washington of ten or fifteen years ago.”26

  Modern sanitary practices were unheard of at this stage of the war. The new Armory Square Hospital, while convenient to the wharves and the train depot, overlooked the Washington Canal, a sluggish open sewer linking the Potomac River with its Eastern Branch tributary.27 At these and other military hospitals, amputation was the preferred treatment for serious wounds. Performed by hard-pressed and often incompetent surgeons, the procedures were frequently botched and had to be redone. “Many of the poor afflicted young men are crazy,” Whitman wrote. “They have suffered too much.”28

  After surgery, a doctor’s assistant might sponge down the operating table with cold water before a new patient was brought in and laid out to be probed, sawed, or sliced with instruments wiped off—but not sterilized—from the previous operation. Surgeons explored wounds with their bare fingers, honed their operating knives on their boots, and moistened sutures with spit before threading silk through a needle. If a soldier survived battle, and the painful journey from the front, and the brusque attentions of army doctors, he remained a prime target for gangrene, pneumonia, diarrhea, typhoid, smallpox, measles, malaria, and the other fatal diseases haunting army camps and hospitals—indeed, sickness and infection would kill many more Civil War soldiers than bullets.29

  The country, which had never before faced death on such an enormous scale, was as poorly prepared for burying its soldiers as it had been for giving them proper hospital care.30 On the front lines, where commanding officers were responsible for disposing of the dead, thousands of soldiers were interred in plots laid out near battlefields.31 One could mark the progress of the war by the sudden appearance of these rough-and-ready cemeteries, which sprouted overnight among the blasted trees, abandoned wagons, and shell-cratered fields around Washington and Richmond. If the dead could be identified by letters in their pockets or notes pinned to their uniforms, their graves were marked with crude wooden headboards noting the soldier’s name and company. In the haste of the moment, names were often misspelled or incomplete; even this scanty identifying information, scrawled in pencil or crudely carved on markers, weathered and became indecipherable in time. Fallen officers and soldiers from well-to-do families were usually shipped home, with expenses borne by relatives.32

  Many others went to their graves anonymously. In this age before dog tags, two out of five Civil War fatalities were fated to be unknown soldiers.33 If time allowed, a comrade might record a few descriptive details of an anonymous corpse for the quartermaster’s files.“Dead of gunshot wound of bowels,” one such burial report read, “age unknown, regiment, rank, and company unknown … light brown hair, light complexion, blue eyes, 5'6".”34 Such fragmentary notes were useless when, years later, grieving relatives came looking for a lost soldier, who would have been tumbled into a mass grave with scores or even hundreds of others, their tomb marked by a single headboard recording the number of dead and the dates of the action that killed them. Others simply lay where they had fallen in battle, left to the elements as the fighting rushed to another point.35 There was little time for ceremony.

  Nor was there much hope of a dignified burial for the unfortunate warrior who died in Washington’s hospitals—in part because government expenses were so tight and personnel so scarce, in part because Washington’s hot, humid climate required that the dead be disposed of quickly.36 There was no refrigeration to preserve remains, and the new science of embalming was too expensive for the farm boys, immigrants, and small-town youths who did most of the fighting. They left the hospitals as they had entered them—penniless—and far from friends and relatives who might have provided them a better send-off.37

  The quartermaster’s office, which took charge of burials around Washington, made contracts with undertakers to dispose of the dead. These contractors collected bodies, hauled them away, provided a shroud, crammed them into cheap coffins, buried them, and erected a wooden headboard—all for $4.49 per soldier.38 With trade booming, some of the capital’s undertakers had trouble keeping pace with demand. Citizens grumbled about the stench, and when the uncollected bodies piled up, irate notes flew from hospitals to the War Department.39 In a
typical message, a surgeon at Harewood Hospital gave an assistant quartermaster a tongue-lashing for leaving a dead soldier moldering in his ward for three days:

  The body of John Northrop, late Priv. of Co. I 188th Regt. N.Y. Vols. of whose death you had the usual notice on the 8th inst. not having been taken away by friends for Private Burial, you will please have interred on the 11th inst. at 2 p.m.40

  In addition to these delays, which were for the most part unavoidable, it became clear that contractors handled their dead soldiers with less care than they would accord a load of turnips bound for market: they cut corners to save money, dug shallow graves to save time, slapped coffins together with gaps between the thin pine planks, and sometimes rolled a serviceman in a blanket and buried him with no casket at all. Even in a capital inured to the cruelties of war, though, some assaults on human dignity surpassed endurance. When residents living near the Judiciary Square Hospital awoke to find a neighborhood lot filled with the naked bodies of soldiers awaiting their appointment with the undertaker, protests were raised. Such incidents gave rise to indignant newspaper articles and to complaints from relief societies, which campaigned for better treatment of the nation’s soldiers, living and dead, during that hectic year of 1862. Chaplains rallied at the Washington YMCA to call attention to another scandal: ordinary soldiers were being sent to their graves with no religious rites to mark their passage. The War Department would eventually correct this oversight, even if it meant that a lone, overworked minister had to dash around the cemetery all day murmuring a few lines of scripture over forty or fifty fresh burials.41

  With deaths from the Peninsula Campaign filling Washington’s private graveyards to the bursting point, Congress responded with a new law creating the first military cemeteries on U.S. soil.42 On July 17, 1862, President Lincoln signed the omnibus bill, which empowered him to purchase new cemetery grounds “whenever in his opinion it shall be expedient … for the soldiers who shall die in the service of the country.”43 As a result of this legislation, fourteen military cemeteries came into being by the end of 1862, among them plots at the Military Asylum, later known as the Soldiers’ Home, in Washington, D.C.; in Alexandria, Virginia; and in Annapolis, Maryland. Eleven other national cemeteries were opened in Kansas, Illinois, New York, Kentucky, and other states; most were situated on military posts or adjacent to supply depots.44 New York’s Cypress Hills National Cemetery, in Brooklyn, was established expressly for Confederate prisoners of war, their guards, and Union soldiers who died in the city’s hospitals.45

  The Soldiers’ Home in Washington was a soothing place to spend eternity. Situated on three hundred acres in the hills skirting the city, the reserve afforded cool breezes, sweeping views, and a refuge from the push and shove of war. Some 150 disabled warriors, many of them veterans of the Mexican campaign, lived on the site, shuffling between the main residence building, an infirmary, and a dining hall—all set in deep, peaceful shade. The government had purchased the place with funds furnished by Gen. Winfield Scott, the durable old Mexican War hero, who had demanded a $100,000 tribute from local authorities when his army seized Mexico City in 1847.46

  By the time of the Civil War, the Soldiers’ Home had become a favorite destination for city dwellers in need of fresh air—most famously for President Lincoln, who began commuting the three miles between the White House and his suburban retreat in the summer of 1862. There he would relax at the Anderson Cottage in the evening, sitting on the porch in his slippers, reading aloud from Shakespeare and other favorite books, swapping yarns with visiting friends, and finding some relief from the pressing business of war—relief, but no escape. Even in these shaded hills, he slept among the fresh graves of soldiers he had sent to their deaths. Week after week the wagons, piled with caskets, creaked into the cemetery, where workers were kept busy digging, burying the dead, and setting new headboards in place. The graveyard was filling.47

  So too was the capital, which bloomed from a village into a small city in the war years. Many of the newest citizens were soldiers, officers, and government workers, but the war also triggered a flood of black refugees into Washington. In April 1862, when President Lincoln signed the first Emancipation Proclamation, freeing just those slaves in the capital, about 14,000 blacks lived in Washington; of these, about 4,200 were the fleeing slaves known as contrabands. By the war’s end, the capital’s black population would swell to as many as 40,000.48 This later surge—made up of slaves sweeping into the capital on foot, in buggies, and in farm wagons—was the result of Lincoln’s second, and more famous, Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which liberated some three and a half million slaves in Confederate states.49

  As that historic New Year’s Day approached, a group of former slaves crowded into a school house in Washington to celebrate their imminent freedom. An elderly man named Thornton rose to explain how Lincoln’s announcement would change old ways: “Can’t sell your wife and children any more! … No more dat!” Thornton declared, his speech rendered in minstrel’s vernacular by a journalist. “Goin’ to work, I feel bad. Overseer behind me! No more dat! No more dat!”50 Many of the able-bodied went to work for the federal war effort, first as civilian laborers or teamsters, or later as members of the newly formed U.S. Colored Troops, segregated army units that helped tip the momentum of war in the Union’s favor.

  About the same time, almost unnoticed, Robert E. Lee summoned a justice of the peace in Spotsylvania County, where he was camped for the winter at Fredericksburg, and went over the papers that finally freed his family’s slaves, in accordance with his late father-in-law’s wishes. Given Lincoln’s sweeping Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the reality that many of the Lee slaves were already living within Union lines, one might wonder if the general’s gesture was a needless formality. But Lee was nothing if not punctilious, even amid the distractions of war.

  “I desire to do what is right and best for the people,” Lee wrote his wife that December, referring to the slaves. “Any who wish to leave may do so … They can be furnished with their free papers & hire themselves out … Those at Arlington & Alexandria I cannot now reach. They are already free & when I can get to them I will give them their papers.” Like other men of his day, Lee took a paternalistic view toward blacks, which caused him to worry about how they would fare without masters. “The men could no doubt find homes,” he wrote, “but what are the women & children to do?” Without resolving that question, he made it clear that any slaves remaining on Lee family property would be expected to work, with the net proceeds of their labor set aside “for their future establishment.”51 In the deed conveying their liberation, Lee scrupulously listed each of the 196 slaves by name, along with their places of residence, and ordered that they be “forever set free from slavery.” He signed the deed of manumission on December 29, 1862, beating Lincoln’s historic declaration by barely three days.52

  That winter, when Lee was not basking in the glow of his recent military triumphs, he took a moment to assess his own financial prospects. They looked anything but promising. His wife was living in a rented house in Richmond. His enemies occupied family properties at Arlington and Smith Island. Their White House home had burned to the ground as Union forces withdrew from the peninsula. Only the Lees’ Romancock plantation remained largely untouched by war, at least for the moment. Lee’s meager investments in Virginia bonds and railroad stocks would soon be worthless. And now the slaves were going. Even though he disapproved of slavery, the pernicious institution had made possible his family’s sprawling land holdings and the earnings flowing from them. That affluence was dissolving, along with the old certainties of Virginia’s aristocratic order, in which the Lees had been leading actors. “I have no time to think of my private affairs,” he confided to Mrs. Lee that winter. “I expect to die a pauper, & I see no way of preventing it.”53

  With nothing to lose, Lee would become all the more dangerous in the months ahead. He provided thousands of new casualties for the hospitals and
cemeteries as the campaign of 1863 unfolded. Emboldened by his success at Chancellorsville in May, but still desperately short of food and supplies, he risked an offensive into Pennsylvania that summer, when both armies squared off near the village of Gettysburg in July. As many as 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured in three days of fighting, with Rebels suffering almost 60 percent of the losses. Lee barely escaped across the Potomac River with his reduced and mangled army.54 After the bloodbath of Gettysburg, the Union would gain the upper hand. Robert E. Lee, who had begun to feel the twinges of a heart condition that would eventually kill him, no longer seemed invincible. On his long retreat from Gettysburg, he got the news that his son Rooney, a Confederate cavalry officer, had been captured and jailed by Union forces. And Lee would soon be facing a new Union commander—Gen. Ulysses S. Grant—who was not afraid of him.

  Meanwhile, blacks continued streaming into Washington, where about a thousand had been settled in a squalid freedmen’s camp within sight of the Capitol. The congested neighborhood of shacks and tiny row houses became a breeding ground for disease and disappointment, hardly the paradise the refugees had dreamed of finding along the Potomac. Although military officials and the newly formed Freedman’s Relief Association provided food, shelter, clothing—and even schooling—for some of the former slaves, no agency could keep pace with the torrent of new arrivals.