On Hallowed Ground (7 page)

A few days later, Lee celebrated another Christmas in camp, where his thoughts once more turned to home and family. Things
were going so well that he even indulged the hope that he might spend a future Christmas at Arlington, as in the old days.
“I have pleased myself in reminiscences to day, of the many happy Xmas’ we have enjoyed together at our once happy home,”
he wrote to his daughter Mildred. “Notwithstanding its present desecrated & pillaged condition, I trust that a just & merciful
God may yet gather all that He may spare under its beloved roof. How filled with thanks & gratitude will our hearts then be!”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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