This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [105]
Whitman’s circular served as Gabriel’s trumpet, summoning the names and memories of the dead, raising them from neglect and anonymity, and ultimately returning hundreds of thousands of them to the nation. Whitman’s trumpet summoned another band, arousing the living as well. His request for information uncovered an army of record keepers, waiting to be asked for the details they had carefully gathered and preserved, even without any clear notion of their purpose. They had documented identities and gravesites, had spent spare hours copying names and regiments from headboards, in hopes that this information might someday and somehow assist in the return of a body or the commemoration of a grave. They had compiled their lists and drawn their maps as acts of respect and reverence in and of themselves, as a small personal statement of opposition to the war’s erasure of human life. Whitman’s appeal invited them to connect their individual efforts to the policies and actions of the state. The federal government had provided Gabriel with his horn.
On March 1, 1866, a day he described as fine, cold, and windy, Whitman left Nashville on his mission, heading first to the site of the battle at Fort Donelson with a party of ten clerks and soldiers, as well as a cook and a mule handler. He would later add three more clerks and eight more soldiers to manage the work he found. The “entire country over which the war has extended its ravages,” he soon recognized, “composes one vast charnel house of the dead.” Whitman approached his work with the system and organization that marked him as an experienced quartermaster. In each locality he first visited battlefields, then the sites of former military hospitals, then private cemeteries. He devised a memorandum of eleven points “for guidance in exploring for Graves,” a kind of checklist of matters to be considered, beginning with locating and counting graves, characterizing their condition, then listing inscriptions on headboards, identifying individuals who might have relevant information, and finally making suggestions for permanent cemeteries. He strove above all to be thorough, for he was committed to the importance of every Union body and every soldier’s grave.15
Whitman proceeded with a sense of growing urgency, recognizing that information and even the bodies themselves were highly vulnerable to both human and natural forces. News abounded of distressing incidents of vandalism of Union graves and bodies. Accounts reached Whitman of corpses thrown naked and facedown into pits, of a body left lying to rot with a pitchfork still impaled in its back, and of the “constant depredation of headboards” in battlefield burial grounds. When he pursued a father’s request that his son be moved from where he had fallen on the field in Georgia to the national cemetery in Chattanooga, Whitman learned that the body had already been claimed by local men “for the purposes of studying anatomy.” Only two small arm bones, one hand bone, and his clothing remained in Oliver Barger’s ransacked grave. Whitman received numerous reports of violence perpetrated against those who dared to care for Union bodies or graves. In Kentucky a man had even been killed for permitting two Yankees to be buried in his yard. A “constant depredation of Headboards and other trespasses and defilements, are constantly occurring,” Whitman’s superior officer in Nashville informed the quartermaster general in Washington.16
In February 1866 Major General George Thomas issued a general order forbidding desecration of Union graves and directing specifically that they must not be mutilated or obliterated in the course of the spring plowing season, which was about to begin for the first time since the end of the war. By April concerns about vandalism had