This Republic of Suffering [46]
Bowen Moon of New York refused to be daunted by shipping regulations when he went in search of his brother-in-law William Salisbury after Antietam. A soldier from Salisbury’s regiment described his dead comrade’s gravesite, and Moon managed to purchase a serviceable, if not elegant, wooden coffin from one of several local carpenters now devoting themselves to filling the sudden and almost overwhelming demand. Moon hired a local farmer to help him exhume the body. Even though Salisbury shared his grave with two other men and even though two weeks had passed since the battle, Moon was able to identify him with little difficulty. But he faced an unexpected setback when the railroad refused to accept the consignment, insisting it “did not carry dead bodies that had begun to decompose.” Moon caulked the coffin, bribed the baggage manager, and succeeded in bringing Salisbury’s remains home.47
Some Americans had attempted before the war to preserve bodies by using coffins that rested corpses on ice, and such inventions grew ever more elaborate as families sought to retrieve growing numbers of war dead for burial at home. The Staunton Transportation Company, for example, distributed handbills to civilians thronging Gettysburg in July and August 1863, promising that its new “Transportation Case preserves the body in a natural state and [as] perfect condition as when placed in it for any distance or length of time in any weather.” The case was “so arranged as to readily expose the face of the dead for inspection,” and the broadside promised that it would seem “as though the subject had died on the day of arrival at home.” It worked because “ITS CONSTRUCTION makes it a portable refrigerator.” J. B. Staunton offered a variety of other services to the bereaved: regular coffins, “exhumers and guides who had surveyed the whole Battle-field,” as well as “Deodorizers and Army Disinfectionists.”48
But even the elaborate refrigeration mechanism of the Staunton Transportation Case could not rival the advances in bodily preservation achieved by the spread of embalming. Significant technological advances had been made in the process in the years just prior to the war, as Americans adopted and patented chemical embalming procedures that had been known in Europe since the first decades of the century. In the 1850s embalming had been chiefly used not to prepare bodies for funerals but to contribute to the study of anatomy and pathology by providing cadavers preserved for dissection. It was during the war that embalming first became more widely practiced, not just generating a transformation in physical treatment of the dead but establishing a procedure that would serve as a foundation for the emergence of the funeral industry and the professionalization of the undertaker.
Staunton Transportation Company. “Transportation of the Dead!” The Library of Company of Philadelphia.
But more was operating here than purely practical concerns about how to arrest decomposition of bodies in order to ship them home. Americans did not want to endure the unprecedented separation from deceased kin that war had introduced. Families sought to see their lost loved ones in as lifelike a state as possible, not just to be certain of their identity but also to bid them farewell. Embalming offered families a way to combat at least some of the threats the war posed to the principles of the Good Death. To contemplate one’s husband, father, or son in a state of seemingly sleeplike repose was a means of resisting death’s terror—and even, to a degree, its reality; it offered a