This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [109]
At the end of June Whitman proposed sites for national cemeteries at Fort Donelson, Pittsburgh Landing, Corinth, Memphis, and Vicksburg and presented his views about the future to the chief quartermaster of the Military Division of the Tennessee. Whitman affirmed his “conviction, which seems to have impressed itself in some degree upon all,” of the government’s “duty” toward the remains of those who “have died in so noble a service.” The experiences of the preceding months, he reported, had produced a “daily deepening in my own mind” of the importance of this federal obligation, as he had witnessed the “total neglect” or “wanton desecration” of Union graves by a southern population whose “hatred of the dead” seemed to exceed their earlier “abhorrence of the living.”30
Whitman’s travels across what he described as the “vast charnal house” of the South had, he confessed, “awakened a feeling of deep personal interest” in an undertaking that was “technically official.” He urged that in spite of the concerns his superiors had expressed about scope and cost, “the work be well and thoroughly done, with a true conception of its magnitude and significance.” Arguing that the federal government stood “in loco parentis” toward the Union dead, Whitman displayed a growing emotional engagement that was evident in his eloquent plea, phrased, like Bushnell’s oration, in the language of debt and obligation. The government, he insisted, held “a stewardship, the account of which must be rendered to the spirit of humanity and Christian patriotism, to the friends of republican liberty and of human freedom and progress throughout the world, to the free people of the North, whose dearest sons have been sacrificed to the demon of slavery and whose choicest treasures have been poured out.” Those who had fallen were not “hireling mercenaries” but citizens of a “Republican America where every man is himself a constituent and integral part of the Government.”31
The understanding of governmental obligation to the dead that Whitman advanced—“a stewardship, the account of which must be rendered”—was not his alone. By the middle of 1866 a chorus of voices in the North had begun to advocate policies toward the fallen that reflected fundamental assumptions about the principles for which the war had been fought. With the passage of conscription legislation in 1863, the nation had, for the first time in its history, mandated the obligation of the citizen to fight in its defense; it had mobilized millions of volunteers; now it had an obligation to those who had served. Citizenship represented a contract in which the state and the individual both assumed certain rights and duties, for which either could be called to account.
Clara Barton embraced these principles in her insistence that the work of naming the dead be regarded as a governmental responsibility. Late in 1865 she had explained her position in a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton seeking federal support in the search for missing men. “The true patriot,” she declared,
willingly loses his life for his country—these poor men have lost not only their lives, but the very record of their death. Common humanity would plead that an effort be made to restore their identity…As call after call for “three hundred thousand more” fell upon their stricken homes, the wife released her husband and the mother sent forth her son, and they were nobly given to their country for its necessities: it might take and use them as the bonded officer uses the property given into his hands; it might if needs be use up or lose them and they would submit without complaint, but never…has wife or mother agreed that for the destruction of her treasures no account should be rendered her. I hold these men in the light of Government property unaccounted