Civil War Dead

In a review of Drew Faust’s recent Republic of Suffering , Geoffrey Ward writes, “When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead, no national cemeteries in which to bury them. The corpses of officers often received special treatment, boxed up and sent home in what one entrepreneur advertised as ‘METALLIC COFFINS . . . Warranted Air-Tight’ that could ‘be placed in the Parlor without fear of any odor escaping therefrom.’ Dead enlisted men were generally just wrapped in blankets and buried where they died. Officers ‘get a monument,’ a Texas soldier wrote, ‘you get a hole in the ground and no coffin.’ Men going into combat were issued no identification tags. One soldier made sure he always carried a used envelope ‘somewhere about me so that if killed in battle my friends might know what became of me.’”

The problem was not solved until some years after the war ended: :In 1862, Congress empowered the president to purchase grounds for ‘a national cemetery for the soldiers who shall die in the service of their country’ but provided him with no funds with which to buy it. By war’s end, there were just five such cemeteries, three established by Union generals in the western theater, and two — Antietam and Gettysburg — paid for by states from which many of those killed there had come. Only after the war was over — and amid news reports that vengeful Southerners were desecrating Union graves — did Congress finally provide a national solution to what had become a national need. The Union dead were to be gathered from scores of Southern battlefields, identified when possible, then re-interred in burial grounds to be protected and maintained by the federal government. The ghastly work went on for six years, much of it performed by African-American soldiers. When the last body was reburied in 1871, 303,536 Union soldiers had been laid to rest in 74 national cemeteries at a cost of $4 million. Almost half remained nameless. ‘Such a consecration of a nation’s power and resources to a sentiment, the world has never seen,’ wrote one of the officers charged with recovering the bodies. ”