This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

In the wake of the unprecedented death toll, corpse disposal became difficult. In the 19th century, many believed the corpse still contained an essence of the living person. According to Christian doctrine, Jesus came back from the dead, and so devout believers have the opportunity to do the same. To make that possible, at least some of the person's essence is preserved in death. The devastation that Gatling guns and rapid-fire handheld weapons delivered on Civil War soldiers, however, made this reverence of the body increasingly difficult.

Equally strong was the fear of not having a proper burial. As in the first chapter, Faust focuses on the role of a person’s home life and surroundings in the final placement of the body. Frequently, the best of intentions of the builders and maintainers of military hospitals and burial grounds were set aside when those tasked with burial duties had to keep moving with their unit and when the number of dead overwhelmed those tasked with cataloging them. Neither the North nor the South had much experience with such matters. The temporary cemetery became a reality, as did the temporary field hospital. Faust writes:

Burying the dead after a Civil War battle seemed always to be an act of improvisation, one that called upon the particular resources of the moment and circumstance: available troops to be detailed, prisoners of war to be deployed, civilians to be enlisted (1187-90).

As the temporary nature of the field hospital and burial ground took hold, reliable record-keeping fell by the wayside. It was often difficult to identify a body due to the trauma the corpse sustained, and bodies routinely lay on the field of battle for hours or even days. Those tasked with burials did the best they could, but the rate of informing the correct next of kin plummeted as the war continued. Further, as conditions worsened, the number of abandonments of the battlefield dead grew. In numerous episodes, enemy troops fired on hospital parties as they retrieved a corpse for burial. That treatment discouraged both sides from venturing out at all. Faust writes, “The needs of the living increasingly trumped the dignity of the departed” (1245).

This loss of dignity extended to individual burials. Soldiers and medics often dumped large numbers of dead men into one mass grave, whether because the army had no time for anything else or because it prioritized the needs of soldiers still fighting. Even when burying men in individual graves, they didn’t use coffins. An army that couldn’t afford to give its men clothing or weapons wasn’t prepared to spend large sums of money to buy or build coffins. The best that many dead soldiers could hope for was a sheet. As a result, thieves often removed dead men’s clothing and effects. Officers tended to fare better than those they commanded. The author lists one instance in which those of lower rank killed in a battle lay unburied for a long time while the army sent dead officers home in metal coffins.

Soldiers given a proper burial overwhelmed existing cemeteries, Faust writes, and she cites a few battles up and down Virginia as the reason for the augmentation of existing burial grounds in nearby towns. Civilians in a city often helped the soldiers complete their grim task.

The chapter ends with a discussion of how popular embalming became during the Civil War. Families that found their lost loved ones and could afford the transportation of the body home for burial depended on embalmers to preserve the body—as much as possible, given the state of the corpse—until it could be interred properly. Embalming was more common among the rich especially the Northern rich. In another reminder that there were no depths to which some people might stoop, Faust mentions embalmers who extorted money from families who might not have requested such a service but who were all too happy to pay up in order to avoid the reversal of the embalming process.