This Republic of Suffering (14 page)

When armies moved operations, commission agents often made records of camp graveyards so that soldiers' bodies might at some future point be reclaimed. Orange Judd gathered details of burials when the Union army undertook a “change of base” from Belle Plain, Virginia, in May 1864, and he assembled them into an elaborate map. The graves had been marked with headboards made of cracker boxes and inscribed with penciled names, but Judd feared these might easily be “obliterated by storm or by the enemy” if the ground changed hands. His effort, he hoped, would “enable friends to find the bodies indicated.” He outlined twenty-six graves, mostly with names and regiments attached. Six bodies remained unknown, but he offered descriptions that he thought might prove useful. “About 23; Black hair, Intelligent Countenance, Buried May 15.” In nearby Port Royal commission records of another cemetery mapped twenty-three graves, including three plots occupied by soldiers who had arrived in ambulances “with their pockets cut off and all records gone.” They had been robbed of both their possessions and their identities while they lay on the field. With the departure of Union troops from the vicinity imminent, the commission agent reported, “the graves were put under the guard of george Smith A colored man who lives just south of the ground & who will do all he is allowed to do to keep them in order.”
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The resources of the Sanitary Commission stretched only so far, however. For the most part the bereaved were forced to rely upon themselves and upon the emerging network of embalmers, undertakers, and private “agents,” who followed the armies, finding work and profit for themselves in assisting grieving families who had little idea of how to find or retrieve their lost husbands, brothers, and sons. Undertaker W. R. Cornelius, who worked regularly with the Sanitary Commission in Tennessee, also offered his services to families directly. He reported that he “shipped colonels, majors, captains and privates by the carload some days,” sending them both to the Union and to the Confederacy. Sometimes families procured friends to locate missing loved ones and arrange for the return of bodies; sometimes they set off themselves, often arriving at the battlefield unsure whether they had come to nurse a wounded man or to transport his body home.
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In March 1863 Henry Bowditch left Boston by train as soon as he received a telegram reporting that his son Nathaniel had been wounded. “dangerous. come at once,” a cousin and fellow soldier had wired. “It was like a dagger in my heart when I first heard the horrible news,” the father wrote. But in the course of the trip Bowditch grew hopeful and “bought books and papers calculated to amuse a wounded man.” When he descended onto the platform in Washington, however, a friend who met him brought the news that Nathaniel was dead. Bowditch, a prominent physician who had himself volunteered his medical services in Virginia the preceding fall, was taken by train and wagon to the camp of the First Massachusetts Cavalry, where he was reunited with his dead son. There he was able to gain some comfort by hearing from Nat's fellow officers “beautiful things” about his courage and his profession of faith and hope as he died. Yet he still found himself almost incapacitated by the shock of Nat's death. “I scarcely know what to think or do,” he wrote his wife. “I seem almost stunned by the news.” Eventually Nathaniel Bowditch's embalmed body was shipped home and buried beneath a stone likeness of his saber in Cambridge's Mount Auburn Cemetery.
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Even those of privilege and position faced challenges as they sought to retrieve and honor their dead. Henry Bowditch, already distressed by the lack of ambulances and more general provision for the wounded in the Union army, now saw the direct results of this lack of system in the death of his son, who had lain unattended on the field. His son's death, he recognized, gave him “greater moral influence” to pursue his cause. The state, he insisted in a pamphlet published in the fall of 1863, had an obligation to its soldiers. “If any government under Heaven ought to be
paternal,
the United States authority, deriving, as it does, all its powers from the people, should surely be such, and should dispense that power, in full streams of benignant mercy upon its soldiers.” Bowditch's arguments not only contributed to the establishment of a comprehensive ambulance system by the following year but articulated a logic of obligation that applied not just to the wounded but also to the dead.
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Stanley Abbott's brother left home under circumstances very like Bowditch's, after being notified by a telegram that Stanley had been wounded in the chest at Gettysburg. Although the message insisted, “Doctor says not mortal,” Abbott died the next day. His brother arrived promptly enough to find his grave easily. Procuring a coffin was more difficult, however, for thousands of other parents, wives, and siblings were searching for them as well. After five days he at last succeeded and shipped his brother home, one of an estimated fifteen hundred Yankee bodies privately expressed to relatives after Gettysburg, even though the commanding Union officer ultimately felt compelled to prohibit disinterments in the heat of August and September in deference to the “health of the…community.”
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Confederate officers were often retrieved and escorted home by slaves who had accompanied them into service. More than six thousand blacks traveled with Lee's army into Pennsylvania in 1863, and Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, who had himself brought two slaves with him from the South, described the scene at the end of the battle: “Negro servants hunting for their masters were a feature of the landscape that night.” Elijah, property of Colonel Isaac Avery, was determined to bring his body back to North Carolina, but in the chaos of Lee's retreat he managed to get the corpse only as far as Maryland, where it was buried. Peter, who belonged to General James Johnston Pettigrew, and Joe, owned by General William Dorsey Pender, were more successful; both accompanied their masters' remains home to the South after their deaths in the Gettysburg campaign.
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The Adams Express Company and its Confederate counterpart, the Southern Express, did a booming business during the war, establishing careful and elaborate regulations for the safe and sanitary transport of bodies. At the beginning of the conflict many bodies were shipped in wooden coffins, but weather and delays created situations that led Adams to require metal caskets. Joseph Jeffries was one of dozens of entrepreneurs who flocked to Gettysburg after the battle to sell their services in retrieving and shipping bodies. He advertised “
METALLIC COFFINS
…Warranted Air-Tight” that would not only meet shipping requirements but could “be placed in the Parlor without fear of any odor escaping therefrom.” A “zinc-lined box covered with cloth plated mounting” for expressing Captain R. G. Goodwin of Massachusetts cost fifty dollars in 1862, no small sum even for a person of some means. No wonder one shipping agent, at least, continued to be presented with wooden coffins. He responded by creating a small cemetery to hold the bodies he could not send and, in one particularly demanding week, buried more than forty men. At the end of the war these bodies were at last disinterred and returned to their families.
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Bowen Moon of New York refused to be daunted by shipping regulations when he went in search of his brother-in-law William Salisbury after Antietam. A soldier from Salisbury's regiment described his dead comrade's gravesite, and Moon managed to purchase a serviceable, if not elegant, wooden coffin from one of several local carpenters now devoting themselves to filling the sudden and almost overwhelming demand. Moon hired a local farmer to help him exhume the body. Even though Salisbury shared his grave with two other men and even though two weeks had passed since the battle, Moon was able to identify him with little difficulty. But he faced an unexpected setback when the railroad refused to accept the consignment, insisting it “did not carry dead bodies that had begun to decompose.” Moon caulked the coffin, bribed the baggage manager, and succeeded in bringing Salisbury's remains home.
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Some Americans had attempted before the war to preserve bodies by using coffins that rested corpses on ice, and such inventions grew ever more elaborate as families sought to retrieve growing numbers of war dead for burial at home. The Staunton Transportation Company, for example, distributed handbills to civilians thronging Gettysburg in July and August 1863, promising that its new “Transportation Case preserves the body in a natural state and [as] perfect condition as when placed in it for any distance or length of time in any weather.” The case was “so arranged as to readily expose the face of the dead for inspection,” and the broadside promised that it would seem “as though the subject had died on the day of arrival at home.” It worked because “
ITS CONSTRUCTION
makes it a portable refrigerator.” J. B. Staunton offered a variety of other services to the bereaved: regular coffins, “exhumers and guides who had surveyed the whole Battle-field,” as well as “Deodorizers and Army Disinfectionists.”
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But even the elaborate refrigeration mechanism of the Staunton Transportation Case could not rival the advances in bodily preservation achieved by the spread of embalming. Significant technological advances had been made in the process in the years just prior to the war, as Americans adopted and patented chemical embalming procedures that had been known in Europe since the first decades of the century. In the 1850s embalming had been chiefly used not to prepare bodies for funerals but to contribute to the study of anatomy and pathology by providing cadavers preserved for dissection. It was during the war that embalming first became more widely practiced, not just generating a transformation in physical treatment of the dead but establishing a procedure that would serve as a foundation for the emergence of the funeral industry and the professionalization of the undertaker.

Staunton Transportation Company. “Transportation of the Dead!” The Library of Company of Philadelphia.

But more was operating here than purely practical concerns about how to arrest decomposition of bodies in order to ship them home. Americans did not want to endure the unprecedented separation from deceased kin that war had introduced. Families sought to see their lost loved ones in as lifelike a state as possible, not just to be certain of their identity but also to bid them farewell. Embalming offered families a way to combat at least some of the threats the war posed to the principles of the Good Death. To contemplate one's husband, father, or son in a state of seemingly sleeplike repose was a means of resisting death's terror—and even, to a degree, its reality; it offered a way of blurring the boundary between life and death. Corpses, at least those that had not been dismembered in combat, could be made to look lifelike, could be made to appear as if they were on the verge of awakening in a new life to come.
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Embalming attracted attention early in the war when the body of Union colonel Elmer Ellsworth, killed in Alexandria, Virginia, on May 24, 1861, by a Confederate sympathizer, was preserved. Ellsworth had been a law clerk in Lincoln's Springfield office, and the press, in this moment before casualties became commonplace, detailed every aspect of his death, from his heroic sacrifice of life, to the honoring of his body in state in the White House, to his lifelike corpse. His embalmer, Thomas Holmes, became the best-known practitioner of the war, setting up an establishment in Washington, D.C., where he embalmed more than four thousand soldiers at a price of one hundred dollars each. The war made him a wealthy man.
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Neither the Union nor the Confederate government routinely provided for embalming deceased soldiers. Surgeons would sometimes offer this service to prominent individuals who died in army hospitals, and the undertakers contracted by the federal government to assist with disposal of the dead might do embalming for a fee charged to grieving families or comrades. In a spirit of benevolent paternalism, Union officers sometimes arranged for special care of the bodies of their men. For example, a captain left directions with a nurse at a hospital of the Army of the Potomac, “
TO THE EMBALMER AT FALMOUTH STATION:
You will please embalm the body of Elijah Clifford, a private of my company. Do it properly and well, and as soon as it is done send me word, and I will pay your bill at once. I do not want this body expensively embalmed, but well done, as I shall send it to Philadelphia.” For a private, “well done” was seemingly good enough.
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Embalming remained much rarer in the Confederacy than in the North, no doubt because the invaded South was compelled to focus more directly on survival than on elaborate treatments of the dead. But embalmers advertised throughout the war in the Richmond press, announcing their readiness to perform “disinfections” and directing potential customers to newly opened field offices on the sites of recent battles. Dr. William MacClure promised “persons at a distance” that “bodies of the dead” would be “Disinterred, Disinfected, and sent home” from “any place within the Confederacy.” While the southern funeral industry remained far less developed and embalming far less common than in the North well into the twentieth century, the oldest funeral home in the South, G. A. Diuguid and Sons in Lynchburg, Virginia, handled 1,251 soldiers in 1862, including both Union and Confederates embalmed and sent home for burial.
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