This Republic of Suffering (11 page)

“A Burial Party After the Battle of Antietam.” Photograph by Alexander Gardner. Library of Congress.

Some commanders at Antietam had detailed squads to inter the dead soon after the fighting ceased. New Yorker Ephraim Brown, who had proudly captured a rebel flag during the battle on September 17, found himself ordered two days later to bury Confederates along the line of his earlier triumph. His detail counted 264 bodies along a stretch of about fifty-five yards. Brown may have resented having his valor rewarded with this grisly obligation, as units were sometimes assigned to burial duty in response to some military infraction or shortcoming. S. M. Whistler of the 130th Pennsylvania ruefully reported that three days after the Battle of Antietam his regiment, “by reason of having incurred the displeasure of its brigade commander, was honored in the appointment as undertaker-in-chief” for a “particular part of the field.” In a gesture that was at once practical and punitive, officers often ordered prisoners of war to bury their own dead. A Confederate officer, for example, after an engagement later in the war, seemed to take satisfaction from the discomfort of Union prisoners “assigned to bury their neglected dead. The sight of their unburied comrades rotting in the woods & fields revolted them.”
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“Antietam. Bodies of Confederate Dead Gathered for Burial.” Photograph by Alexander Gardner. Library of Congress.

Origen Bingham of the 137th Pennsylvania was comparatively rested after the Battle of Antietam because his regiment had been held in reserve. But then he and his men found themselves confronting “the most disagreeable duty that could have been assigned to us; tongue cannot describe the horible sight.” The soldiers had been killed on Wednesday, September 17; the 137th arrived on the field on Sunday. Although Union corpses had already been interred, probably by their own units and comrades, hundreds of Confederates remained. Bingham secured permission from the provost marshal's office to buy liquor for his men because he believed they would be able to carry out their orders only if they were drunk. These were hardly conditions that encouraged respectful treatment of the deceased, and indeed ribald jokes and inebriated revelry abounded. Another burial party, overwhelmed by the number of bodies, tried a different means of making its task manageable. A squad of exhausted Union soldiers threw fifty-eight Confederates down the well of a local farmer who had unwisely abandoned his premises.
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The Battle of Gettysburg the following summer presented an even greater challenge, for the fighting stretched over three days, delaying attention to the dead as military demands on the living continued unabated. 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. One Union medical officer, who was assuming responsibility for burying those he could not save, reported that he lacked even basic tools: “I had not a shovel or a pick…I was compelled to send a foraging party to the farmhouses, who, after a day's labor, procured two shovels and an ax.” So many bodies lay unburied that a surgeon described the atmosphere as almost intolerable. Residents of the surrounding area complained of a “stench” that persisted from the time of the battle in July until the coming of frost in October. A young boy remembered that everyone “went about with a bottle of pennyroyal or peppermint oil” to counteract the smell.
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Responsibility for the dead usually fell to the victor, for it was his army that held the field. Early in the war soldiers expressed outrage when the defeated abandoned their comrades without providing for their burial. “No set of heathens in the world was ever guilty of such acts,” a Georgia soldier proclaimed after First Bull Run in July 1861. “They never did come back to bury the first one of their dead.” This was a scruple abandoned as rapidly as the bodies themselves. “I cannot delay to pick up the debris of the battlefield,” Union major general Meade baldly declared after his army's costly success at Gettysburg in July 1863. When two of his comrades were shot down trying to retrieve the body of their colonel near Winchester in 1862, Confederate Theodore Fogel explained to his parents, “I knew it was not right to expose myself in that way. Colonel Holmes was dead, and it was not right for us to risk our lives simply to get his body off the field.” The needs of the living increasingly trumped the dignity of the departed.
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Black soldiers serving as burial detail. “Burying the Dead Under a Flag of Truce, Petersburg, 1864.”
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
September 3, 1864
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Practical realities dictated that retreating armies did not have time to attend to the dead but had to depend on the humanity of their opponents, who predictably gave precedence to their own casualties. This discrimination arose largely from ties of feeling with departed comrades, but there may have been an element of tactical calculation as well. Confederate surgeon John Wyeth described how by the end of the long night after the Confederate victory at Chickamauga, “most of the Confederate dead had been gathered in long trenches and buried; but the Union dead were still lying where they fell. For its effect on the survivors it was the policy of the victor to hide his own losses and let those of the other side be seen.” Sometimes, especially if armies found themselves on the move, enemy dead were not buried at all but were left to rot in places where troops found their bones as they circled back over ground where earlier engagements had been fought. Frank Oakley of Wisconsin encountered skeletons from the First Battle of Bull Run as he fought the Second thirteen months later; soldiers at Spotsylvania and the Wilderness in 1864 continually stumbled upon human debris from the Chancellorsville battle that had taken place almost exactly a year before.
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Armies developed burial techniques intended to make the daunting task of disposal of bodies manageable, but these procedures seemed horrifying even to many of those who executed them. Burial parties customarily collected the dead in a single location on the field by tying each soldier's legs together, passing the rope around his torso, and then dragging him to a row of assembled bodies. A bayonet, heated and bent into a hook, could keep a soldier from having to touch what was often a putrescent corpse. The burial detail might then dig a grave, place a body in the hole, cover it with dirt from the next grave, and continue until the line of corpses was covered. But such individuation was usually reserved for one's comrades and for circumstances where sufficient time and resources were available. Enemy dead were more likely to be buried in large pits. G. R. Lee described the procedure in his unit: “long trenches were dug about six feet wide and three to four deep. The dead were rolled on blankets and carried to the trench and laid heads and feet alternating so as to save space. Old blankets were thrown over the pile of bodies and the earth thrown on top.” One soldier worried that the process as he witnessed it after Shiloh reduced men to the status of animals or perhaps even vegetables. “They dig holes,” he wrote, “and pile them in like dead cattle and have teams to draw them together like picking up pumpkins.”
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“Dead Confederate Soldiers Collected for Burial. Spotsylvania, May 1864.” Library of Congress.

Confederates at Gettysburg were buried in trenches containing 150 or more men, often hurled rather than laid to rest. Sometimes the rotting bodies ruptured, compelling burial parties to work elsewhere until the stench had dissipated. Soldiers stomped “on top of the
dead
straightening out their legs and arms and
tramping
them down so as to make the hole contain as many as possible.” The press of circumstance could, on occasion, require mass burial even of one's own men. A Connecticut chaplain remembered a desperate encounter that killed twenty-three of his company during the very last days of the war: “The best that we could do in the brief interval of our stay was to bury our dead hurriedly in a common grave…in a long trench by the wayside, the officers by themselves, and the enlisted men near them.” Mass graves obviously obliterated the names of their occupants, although the living often tried to ensure that personal items remained with the bodies, preserving at least the possibility of later disinterment and identification. Trenches might also be marked, like one at Antietam, with a simple wooden sign indicating “80 rebels buried here.” Customarily, northern and southern soldiers were interred separately; a Union colonel expressed outrage when he discovered an instance of military hospitals burying the dead indiscriminately, with no “distinction between the graves of our Brave men who have died for our cause, and the grave of the worthless invaders of our soil. This,” he proclaimed, “is all wrong.” He could only think this had been the fault of the “
Undertaker
who cares only to get his money for covering their heads with earth.” Separate sections of the hospital cemetery should be selected “and the bodies kept separate,” he insisted.
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Weary soldiers took advantage of natural trenches and existing declivities. After Second Bull Run eighty-five dead were laid beside a ridge created by a railroad excavation and then “covered by the levelling of the embankment over them as the most expeditious manner of burial.” James Eldred Phillips of Virginia described burying the dead in the spring 1863 campaign by placing men “down in deep gulleys on either side of the road and the dirt was dug from the side to cover them over.” But spring storms followed, and Phillips learned, “after getting some distance down the road,” that “heavy rainfall had washed up all of the men that were buried in the gulley…and carried them down toward Fredericksburg.”
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Haste and carelessness frequently yielded graves so shallow that bodies and skeletons reappeared, as rain and wind eroded the soil sheltering the dead and hogs rooted around battlefields in search of human remains. For men buried on the field, coffins were out of the question; a blanket was the most a man could hope for as a shroud. As a northern relief worker reported about burials in Virginia in 1864, “None have been buried in coffins since the campaign commenced.” At war's outset, many Americans would have designated the coffin as the basic marker of the “decency” that distinguished human from animal interment, and they would have agreed with John J. Hardin, an Indiana volunteer, who found it “dreadful…to see the poor soldier just thrown in a ditch an covered over without any box.”
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