This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

This chapter begins with two postwar public speeches commemorating the efforts of those who died in the war effort. One of these speeches was full of flowery language; the other reminded the living what they owed the dead. With the war over, the living could finally complete tasks like notifying families and ensuring proper burials. In effect, it gave the living time to catch up with the dead.

Faust introduces famed figure Clara Barton, the Red Cross founder and nurse whose efforts saved many lives. Barton became the public face for the “find the lost soldier” effort on behalf of many despairing families. With her characteristic skill, she set up the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army. Aware that governmental efforts often move slowly, she avoided official channels, conducted her own searches for soldiers, and disseminated the information in herself. The results were a hearty endorsement of her methods. Faust writes, “By the time she finally closed the office in 1868, she reported that it had received and answered 68,182 letters and had secured information about 22,000 missing soldiers” (3375-76).

Working in the same vein was Edmund Whitman, who rose from the ranks of quartermaster to lead the nationwide reburial initiative. Like Barton, Whitman brought a sense of order to a chaotic process.

It was a monumental task, given that graves were difficult to locate. Sometimes, local wild life or construction projects destroyed graves Whitman traveled an estimated thirty thousand miles around the country and found help from many former slaves who buried Union soldiers. One of the results of Whitman’s travels was the establishment of a network of national cemeteries.

Those tasked with recovering bodies from battlefields, hospitals and other places containing large numbers of corpses recognized the expediency with which they had to work. The ongoing conflict thwarted the work of these individuals; when the fighting stopped, the enemies of these efforts were time and weather. Many families never recovered their loved ones’ bodies because not enough of the body remained to properly identify it. In the 21st century, forensic scientists employ methods like examining teeth and clothing for DNA samples; the Civil War occurred long before such things were possible.

Faust also writes about the most notorious Civil War prison: Andersonville. The Confederate prison was open for only fifteen months. In that time, it housed 45,000 Union soldiers, exposing them to brutal conditions that killed 30 percent of them. Prisoners at Andersonville faced rampant disease, contaminated food and water, and insufficient shelter.

In both the North and the South, the solution for what to do with bodies that, for whatever reason, were not to be sent home was to put them in central places, like the national cemetery at Gettysburg. As the months passed after the war, these efforts became more widespread. Faust writes,

The transcendent ideals of citizenship, sacrifice, and national obligation united with highly practical and ever-growing concerns about southern mistreatment of gravesites and bodies [resulted] in what was arguably the most elaborate federal program undertaken in nearly a century of American nationhood (3442-45).

The author also describes the efforts of women to found memorial associations, particularly in the South but also in the North. Women were no longer bystanders struggling to afford black clothing; now, they took the lead in looking after their own loved ones or people they knew. Women were leaders in postwar efforts.

Desecration of gravesites occurred in the North but primarily in the South. Faust writes that “[i]t had proved impossible to overcome a live Union army, but bitter Confederates could still wage war against a dead one” (3528-29). A resurgence of racist violence coincided with the South’s new method of institutionalized White supremacy, the Black Codes. In no way comparable—but nonetheless a race-based decision—the US Army assigned its still-segregated Black troops to do the heavy lifting in regard to burial and reburial efforts.

Meanwhile, the national cemetery network was for Union soldiers only. It was too hard a sell for the U.S. government to fund the systematic reburial of soldiers who died fighting to leave the Union. That task was left to the South to figure out, meaning that no federal funding would be forthcoming. Into the breach stepped Southern organizations funded by private donations. Women ran many of these organizations. In many cities across the country, the survivors gathered on a particular day each year to honor the dead. This precursor to Memorial Day was called Decoration Day, among other names.

Faust writes, “[t]he reburial movement created a constituency of the slain, insistent in both its existence and its silence, men whose very absence from American life made them a presence that could not be ignored” (3940-42).