Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War

Battle over the Bodies: Burying and Reburying the Civil War Dead, 1865–1871

Battle over the Bodies Burying and Reburying the Civil War Dead, 1865–1871  DREW GILPIN FAUST  Neither conflict nor violence came to an end with the surrender of Confederate armies in the spring of 1865. Reconciliation would require decades, as North and South struggled over the meaning of the war and the character of the newly triumphant American nation. And intersectional harmony would at last come about, as David Blight has so powerfully illustrated in Race and Reunion, through the creation of a national ideology of shared loss and sacrifice that all but erased the place of slavery and emancipation in the memoryof thewar’s origins and purposes.The Civil Wardead—and the braveryand suffering common to the fallen of both North and South— became the foundation for renewed national unity. In thewar’s immediate aftermath, however, the dead played a quite different role, serving as a divisive, rather than a unifying force, pitting former Confederates against Yankees, black southerners against white southerners, in a battle over the disposition and treatment of the 620,000 men who had lost their lives in the conflict.1 In April 1865, thework of killing was officiallycomplete, but the claims of the dead persisted. Many soldiers lay unburied, their bones littering battlefields across the South; still more had been hastily interred where they fell, far from family and home; hundreds of thousands remained unidentified , their losses unaccounted for. The end of combat offered an opportunity to attend to the dead in ways war had made impossible. Information could now flow freely across North and South; military officials would have time to devote to compiling and scrutinizing casualty records; bodies scattered across the defeated Confederacy could be located and identified; the fallen could be honored without encroaching on the immediate needs of the living. For the Union military, war’s end permitted systematic assessment of losses that the unrelenting pressures of battle had prohibited. In July 1865, 185  BATTLE OVER THE BODIES Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered every Union commander to submit a report of “all interments registered during the war.” Wartime records had noted only 101,736 registered burials, fewer than a third of the estimated total of Union fatalities. It was clear that hundreds of thousands of northern soldiers lay in undocumented locations, their deaths unknown to their families as well as to military record keeping.2 Official policy toward the dead would evolve slowly over the next several years, but immediate action seemed imperative, as a matter of both decencyand expediency.The longer bodies were left without proper burial, themorevulnerabletheybecametodepredation,eitherbyex-Confederates or by rooting animals, and the less likely they were to be identifiable. Militarycommanders improvised in face of need and opportunity. In June 1865, Assistant Quartermaster James Moore was ordered to the Wilderness and Spotsylvania “for the purpose of superintending the interments of the remains of Union soldiers yet unburied and marking their burial-places for In the spring of 1862, a northern photographer made this study of rough wooden markers over graves of soldiers killed eight months earlier in the First Battle of Bull Run. Untold thousands of Union and Confederate dead lay in graves lacking even this type of temporary identification. Francis Trevelyan Miller, ed., The Photographic History of the Civil War, 10 vols. (New York: Review of Reviews, 1911), 9:278. 186  Drew Gilpin Faust future identification.” Moore found hundreds of unmarked graves, as well as skeletons that had been left for more than twoyears without the dignity of burial. On these two fields, he estimated he oversaw the interment of 1,500 men, although the scattering of so many bones made an exact count impossible. Soldiers of the U.S. Colored Troops, not yet mustered out of service, did the often repellent work.3 As soon as Moore had completed this assignment, he was sent to the site of the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, where so many Union soldiers had perished. His expedition documented 13,363 bodies and succeeded in identifying 12,912. All were reinterred in marked graves, and on August 17, their resting place was dedicated as the Andersonville National Cemetery.4 In the Western Theater, similar efforts were under way. On June 23, 1865, Maj. Gen. George H.Thomas, commander of the Department of the Cumberland, had ordered Chaplain William Earnshaw to identify and rebury Union soldiers in the vicinity of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in the Stones River National Cemetery...