This Republic of Suffering [39]
When bodies remained in the control of their comrades and when troops were not hurried off to new encounters, dead soldiers fared better. Companies and regiments regularly preempted officially designated burial details by assuming responsibility for their own dead. Frequently closest comrades had sworn to provide one another with “a decent burial,” and men searched the field in the nights and days after great battles to locate missing friends and relatives. Soldiers did the best they could to make such interments respectful. A comrade of Private Albert Frost of the Third Maine described his efforts when he discovered Frost missing after the third day at Gettysburg. He and a companion received permission to return to where they had last seen Frost alive.
We found him face down and with many others the flesh eaten (in that hot climate) by maggots, but not so bad but that we could recognize him. When we went to bury him, all we could find to dig a grave was an old hoe in a small building. The bottom of the grave was covered with empty knapsacks, then we laid in our beloved brother and covered him with another knapsack, and over all put as much earth as we could find. The grave was dug at the foot of a large tree. We then found a piece of a hard wood box cover and cut his name on it with a jacknife and nailed it to the tree at the head of his grave.22
Albert Frost’s burial illustrates many of the central components of what we might call friendly burial on the field. His comrades expended considerable effort and ingenuity to provide him the dignity of an individual and identifiable grave. They tried to compensate for the general unavailability of coffins in the immediate aftermath of battle by using abandoned knapsacks to shield him from direct contact with the earth, thus providing the covering critical to the notion of a “decent burial”—of a human rather than an animal.
In the earliest years of the war, when coffinless burials had not yet become commonplace, Yankees and Confederates alike expressed their distress and struggled to find acceptable substitutes. One inventive Union soldier, unwilling to permit his uncle to be buried without some barrier between his body and the bare earth, discovered a hollow log to serve as a coffin. By the time of Gettysburg, Albert Frost’s companions had abandoned all hope of even a substitute coffin and simply covered the body. The soldiers chose a spot near a tree—no doubt as much to serve as a landmark as an aesthetic feature of the gravesite—and they tried as well to mark the place of burial. Wooden panels from boxes of hardtack (the “cast-iron” crackers that served as an army staple), pieces of board from ammunition boxes, and crossed fence rails all routinely became makeshift grave markers.
Some soldiers enacted other rituals of respect for the dead: brief prayers either with or without the participation of a chaplain. Confederate Thomas Key described the burial of two soldiers in 1864 accompanied by Bible readings, prayers, and a hymn “in the midst of a heavy cannonading and singing of minié balls.” James Houghton of Michigan, “wishing to know that my tent mate was deasently buried,” returned to the field after Gettysburg and found that others had already performed the task in the course of interring dozens of his fellow soldiers. Houghton was satisfied that “all the painess possible was taken in their burial…in some cases their Blody garments were removed and washed and dried on limbs of treas then Replased.” Nurses