This Republic of Suffering [37]
Black soldiers serving as burial detail. “Burying the Dead Under a Flag of Truce, Petersburg, 1864.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 3, 1864.
Practical realities dictated that retreating armies did not have time to attend to the dead but had to depend on the humanity of their opponents, who predictably gave precedence to their own casualties. This discrimination arose largely from ties of feeling with departed comrades, but there may have been an element of tactical calculation as well. Confederate surgeon John Wyeth described how by the end of the long night after the Confederate victory at Chickamauga, “most of the Confederate dead had been gathered in long trenches and buried; but the Union dead were still lying where they fell. For its effect on the survivors it was the policy of the victor to hide his own losses and let those of the other side be seen.” Sometimes, especially if armies found themselves on the move, enemy dead were not buried at all but were left to rot in places where troops found their bones as they circled back over ground where earlier engagements had been fought. Frank Oakley of Wisconsin encountered skeletons from the First Battle of Bull Run as he fought the Second thirteen months later; soldiers at Spotsylvania and the Wilderness in 1864 continually stumbled upon human debris from the Chancellorsville battle that had taken place almost exactly a year before.15
Armies developed burial techniques intended to make the daunting task of disposal of bodies manageable, but these procedures seemed horrifying even to many of those who executed them. Burial parties customarily collected the dead in a single location on the field by tying each soldier’s legs together, passing the rope around his torso, and then dragging him to a row of assembled bodies. A bayonet, heated and bent into a hook, could keep a soldier from having to touch what was often a putrescent corpse. The burial detail might then dig a grave, place a body in the hole, cover it with dirt from the next grave, and continue until the line of corpses was covered. But such individuation was usually reserved for one’s comrades and for circumstances where sufficient time and resources were available. Enemy dead were more likely to be buried in large pits. G. R. Lee described the procedure in his unit: “long trenches were dug about six feet wide and three to four deep. The dead were rolled on blankets and carried to the trench and laid heads and feet alternating so as to save space. Old blankets were thrown over the pile of bodies and the earth thrown on top.” One soldier worried that the process as he witnessed it after Shiloh reduced men to the status of animals or perhaps even vegetables. “They dig holes,” he wrote, “and pile them in like dead cattle and have teams to draw them together like picking up pumpkins.”16
“Dead Confederate Soldiers Collected for Burial. Spotsylvania, May 1864.” Library of Congress.
Confederates at Gettysburg were buried in trenches containing 150 or more men, often hurled rather than laid to rest. Sometimes the rotting bodies ruptured, compelling burial parties to work elsewhere until the stench had dissipated. Soldiers stomped “on top of the dead straightening out their legs and arms and tramping them down so as to make the hole contain as many as possible.” The press of circumstance could, on occasion, require mass burial even of one’s own men. A Connecticut chaplain remembered a desperate encounter that killed twenty-three of his company during the very last days of the war: “The best that we could do in the brief interval of our stay was to bury our dead hurriedly in a common grave…in a long trench by the wayside, the officers by themselves, and the enlisted men near them.” Mass graves obviously obliterated the names of their occupants, although the living often tried to ensure that personal items remained with the bodies, preserving at least the possibility of later disinterment and identification. Trenches might also be marked, like one at Antietam, with a simple wooden sign indicating