This Republic of Suffering [106]
Whitman’s superiors delivered elaborate orders about his responsibilities and their goals: “so far as practicable every Union soldier in the Milt Div of the Tennessee, shall finally rest in a well enclosed and decent ground, with a neat index to his grave, and with an accessible record of his final resting place.” On “battle fields of national interest,” where the northern public might be enlisted to support the “work of ornamentation,” or where graves were “scattered and unprotected,” it would be advisable to collect the bodies together in one place. But if remains lay peaceably in a churchyard or cemetery, “it is not desirable to incur an increase of expense to remove them, simply to carry out a general scheme.” Whitman was to locate graves, mark and protect isolated burial spots, and “form some plans” about graves that should be moved and about sites to which they might be relocated. Whitman’s superiors insisted that bodies that had been decently interred should be left where they lay except when “a savage and vindictive spirit of the part of the disloyal inhabitants” suggested “a disposition to molest the remains.” Increasingly, Whitman was coming to regard such vengefulness as less the exception than the rule.18
In the year since Appomattox the defeated white South had moved from stunned disbelief to a posture of growing defiance. Encouraged by President Andrew Johnson’s sympathy, former Confederates tested the limits of northern will, challenging Yankee claims to the fruits of victory. In the summer of 1865 southern legislatures passed restrictive and discriminatory Black Codes, designed to reestablish slavery in all but name; in the fall the recently rebellious states elected former Confederate military officers and politicians to represent them in Washington; throughout the South white southerners perpetrated and tolerated relentless violence against freedpeople. The hundreds of thousands of Union bodies in their midst provided an irresistible target for southern rage as well as a means to express the refusal to accept Confederate defeat. It had proved impossible to overcome a live Union army, but bitter Confederates could still wage war against a dead one.19
A particularly virulent outbreak of white violence in fact served as a direct cause of intensified congressional interest in Union graves. During the first four days of May 1866, Memphis erupted in what were generally designated as riots, although the death toll of forty-six blacks and two whites suggests that those who wrote of a “massacre” were more accurate. Ninety-one houses, all but one occupied by African Americans, four churches, and twelve schools were destroyed. Fear became so widespread among African Americans in the area that Whitman reported he was for some time unable to persuade black laborers to continue to work for him. Congress promptly dispatched a committee of three members of the House of Representatives to investigate causes of the disturbance. Ultimately the legislators made recommendations about controlling white defiance that played a significant role in the movement toward Radical Reconstruction. But the assistant quartermaster of the Division of the Tennessee, George Marshall, seized the opportunity provided by the congressmen’s presence in Memphis to impress upon them the importance of the effort to bury the Union dead and the danger in which many soldiers’ bodies lay. A delegation including Chaplain William Earnshaw, who had been overseeing reinterments at Stones River, convinced the congressmen that a comprehensive reburial program was imperative. The committee chair, Representative Elihu Washburne of Illinois, was particularly moved by the account of Union dead scattered across the South, and Whitman believed that this meeting led directly to the National Cemeteries Act that passed, along with a fifteenfold increase in appropriation, in the next Congress. But even before the bill