This Republic of Suffering [107]
As spring unfolded, Whitman proceeded through the battlefields of Tennessee: Fort Donelson, Fort Henry, and then Shiloh. There, at the site of the battle that had first intimated the scale of slaughter to come, he encountered human bones scattered in “large quantities,” and he learned from nearby inhabitants that their hogs, customarily left free to forage, were no longer fit to be eaten “on account of their living off the dead.” Sweeping the field “deployed in the manner of a skirmish line,” Whitman and his men sought to cover every foot of terrain involved in the battle. A list of 315 gravesites that had been compiled by a Sanitary Commission agent just after the fighting proved of critical assistance, and Whitman’s party recorded and marked by compass points 178 different areas containing graves, including 21 burial trenches that held, he estimated, 250 bodies. Hundreds of men, he reported, seemed to have been “buried indiscriminately”—Yankees and rebels together—but Whitman was deeply moved by finding many soldiers in regimental groups, obviously carefully interred at the end of the battle by their comrades. These would be kept together when they were later removed to the national cemetery. In all Whitman discovered 1,874 Union dead, of whom 620 were identified by headboards or other inscriptions. About 200, he estimated, had been removed by relatives or friends. Keeping in mind the idea of siting national cemeteries at points of great historical interest, Whitman selected a potential spot on the Shiloh field.21
Near Memphis, Whitman encountered a road built over Union graves that had been all but destroyed by teams and carts, and he wrote sadly of 810 neglected Union graves in a cemetery three miles from the city. Nine hundred rebel graves in the same burial ground were carefully tended, with identities listed in a sexton’s book. The “Association of Southern Mothers,” he learned, had assumed responsibility for these Confederate dead, while their victorious Union counterparts lay dishonored beside them.22
Locating the many graves scattered beyond actual battlefields—casualties from skirmishes, or wounded men who died on the march, or men who succumbed to disease—required Whitman to seek information from local citizens who might have seen or heard of buried soldiers or even assisted in their interments. “As a rule,” he later remembered, “no residence or person was to be passed without the inquiry. ‘Do you know, or have you heard of any graves of Union soldiers in this neighborhood?’” When he arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, Whitman called upon the town postmaster, a federal employee after all, who might be expected to be both knowledgeable and helpful to a Union official. Whitman received not assistance but a warning. The postmaster declared that he would not dare tell a Yankee soldier about Union graves, even if he knew of them. Since the postmaster had taken the loyalty oath to qualify for his position at the end of the war, all his friends, cultivated during nineteen years of residence in the town, had abandoned him. He had even been asked to cease attending his church. “I am informed,” Whitman wrote his commanding officer, “that a disposition has been shown in this vicinity to obliterate and destroy all traces of the graves union soldiers find scattered in the country.”23
Farther south the Union dead seemed to be in even more distressing circumstances. Whitman discovered “immense numbers” of bodies in the area between Vicksburg and Natchez—perhaps, he thought, as many as forty thousand. These corpses were in every imaginable place and condition: buried on river embankments and then wholly or partially washed away (there were even reports of coffins floating like little boats down the Mississippi toward the sea), or abandoned in “ravines and jungles and dense cane brakes” and never buried at all. A farmer named Linn, who wanted to extend his cotton fields, had plowed up about