Drew Gilpin Faust - This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Contents

IN MEMORY
OF
MCGHEE TYSON GILPIN
19192000

Captain, U.S. Army

Commanding Officer

Military Intelligence Interpreter Team #436

6th Armored Division

Wounded, August 6, 1944

Plouviens, France

Silver Star

Purple Heart

Croix de Guerre

Illustrations

The True Defenders of the Constitution

Confederate Dead at Antietam, September 1862

Dying of Gangrene

An Incident at Gettysburg

The Letter Home

The Execution of the Deserter William Johnson

The Sixth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers Firing into the People

The Army of the PotomacA Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty

The War in TennesseeRebel Massacre of the Union Troops After the Surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12

Unidentified Sergeant, U.S. Colored Troops

Funeral of the Late Captain Cailloux

Soldiers Graves near General Hospital, City Point, Virginia

A Burial Party After the Battle of Antietam

Antietam. Bodies of Confederate Dead Gathered for Burial

Burying the Dead Under a Flag of Truce, Petersburg, 1864

Dead Confederate Soldiers Collected for Burial. Spotsylvania, May 1864

A Burial Trench at Gettysburg

Rebel Soldiers After Battle Peeling the Fallen Union Soldiers

Burial of Federal Dead. Fredericksburg, 1864

A Contrast: Federal Buried, Confederate Unburied, Where They Fell on the Battlefield of Antietam

Horse killed in the war. Sketch by Alfred R. Waud

The Burial of Latan

Maryland and Pennsylvania Farmers Visiting the Battlefield of Antietam While the National Troops Were Burying the Dead and Carrying Off the Wounded

Transportation of the Dead!

Business card for undertaker Lewis Ernde

Embalming Surgeon at Work on Soldiers Body

Dr. Bunnells Embalming Establishment in the Field (Army of the James)

Searching the casualty lists. Detail from News of the War by Winslow Homer

The United States Christian Commission Office at 8th and H Streets, Washington, D.C., 1865

Nurses and Officers of the United States Sanitary Commission at Fredericksburg, Virginia, During the Wilderness Campaign, 1864

Telegram from William Drayton Rutherford to Sallie Fair Rutherford

Advertisement for soldiers identification badges

Note by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Detail from News of the War by Winslow Homer

Ward K at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C.

An Unknown Soldier

Henry Clay Taylor

Libby Prison, Richmond Virginia, April 1865

View of the Darlington Court-House and the Sycamore Tree Where Amy Spain, the Negro Slave, was Hung

John Saunders Palmer with his wife of less than a year, Alice Ann Gaillard Palmer

Half-mourning dress of Varina Howell Davis

Women in Mourning, Cemetery in New Orleans

View of the Burnt District, Richmond, Va.

Godeys Fashions for June 1862.

Women in Mourning at Stonewall Jacksons Grave, circa 1866

President Lincolns FuneralCitizens Viewing the Body at the City Hall, New York

Henry Ingersoll Bowditch at the time of the Civil War

The Dying Soldier

Battle-field of Gaines Mill, Virginia

Clara Barton, circa 1865

A Burial Party on the Battle-field of Cold Harbor, Virginia, April 1865

Miss Clara Barton Raising the National Flag, August 17, 1865

The Soldiers Grave

Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, VirginiaDecorating the Graves of the Rebel Soldiers

Confederate Cemetery of Vicksburg

Walt Whitman

Preface

THE WORK OF DEATH

Mortality defines the human condition. We all have our deadwe all have our Graves, a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an 1862 sermon. Every era, he explained, must confront like miseries every age must search for like consolation. Yet death has its discontinuities as well. Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space. Even though we all have our dead, and even though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.1

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War Is Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil Wars rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities. As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital. Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.2

But these military statistics tell only a part of the story. The war killed civilians as well, as battles raged across farm and field, as encampments of troops spread epidemic disease, as guerrillas ensnared women and even children in violence and reprisals, as draft rioters targeted innocent citizens, as shortages of food in parts of the South brought starvation. No one sought to document these deaths systematically, and no one has devised a method of undertaking a retrospective count. The distinguished Civil War historian James McPherson has estimated that there were fifty thousand civilian deaths during the war, and he has concluded that the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II. The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.3

The impact and meaning of the wars death toll went beyond the sheer numbers who died. Deaths significance for the Civil War generation arose as well from its violation of prevailing assumptions about lifes proper endabout who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances. Death was hardly unfamiliar to mid-nineteenth-century Americans. By the beginning of the 1860s the rate of death in the United States had begun to decline, although dramatic improvements in longevity would not appear until late in the century. Americans of the immediate prewar era continued to be more closely acquainted with death than are their twenty-first-century counterparts. But the patterns to which they were accustomed were in significant ways different from those the war would introduce. The Civil War represented a dramatic shift in both incidence and experience. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans endured a high rate of infant mortality but expected that most individuals who reached young adulthood would survive at least into middle age. The war took young, healthy men and rapidly, often instantly, destroyed them with disease or injury. This marked a sharp and alarming departure from existing preconceptions about who should die. As Francis W. Palfrey wrote in an 1864 memorial for Union soldier Henry L. Abbott, the blow seems heaviest when it strikes down those who are in the morning of life. A soldier was five times more likely to die than he would have been if he had not entered the army. As a chaplain explained to his Connecticut regiment in the middle of the war, neither he nor they had ever lived and faced death in such a time, with its peculiar conditions and necessities. Civil War soldiers and civilians alike distinguished what many referred to as ordinary death, as it had occurred in prewar years, from the manner and frequency of death in Civil War battlefields, hospitals, and camps, and from the wars interruptions of civilian lives.4