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“the principles which led to our great struggle,” principles, in his words, like states’ rights and opposition to “Radicalism” and to racial “amalgamation.” The living, he noted, confronted a compelling and unavoidable question: “Did these men die in vain?” Honor to the dead required the continuing defense of Confederate principles, which had been “defeated, not necessarily lost.” Only vindication of the original purposes of the conflict could ensure the meaning of so many men’s sacrifice. The Confederacy would not live on as a nation, but its dead would in some sense become its corporeal and corporate representation, not only a symbol of what once was but a summons to what must be.

Neither northern nor southern participants in the commemoration and reburial movement were “simply…mourners for the dead.” Instead, they became in a very real sense the instruments of the dead’s immortality. Gathered together in mass cemeteries with graves marshaled in ranks like soldiers on the field of battle, the dead became a living reality, a force in their very presence and visibility. They were also, paradoxically, a force in their anonymity. The postwar burial movements in both North and South made it possible for many bereaved families to identify kin and to visit or ornament graves, as did the Palmers of South Carolina or the many petitioners whom Whitman and Moore were able to assist. These reunions of the living with their dead were, of course, about ending anonymity, restoring names, and marking them on stones and monuments for posterity. But the lack of individuality of the Civil War dead had its powerful significance as well. Civil War cemeteries—both national and Confederate—were unlike any graveyards that Americans had ever seen. These were not clusters of family tombstones in churchyards, nor garden cemeteries symbolizing the reunion of man with nature. Instead the Civil War cemetery contained ordered row after row of humble identical markers, hundreds of thousands of men, known and unknown, who represented not so much the sorrow or particularity of a lost loved one as the enormous and all but unfathomable cost of the war.63

Ranks of soldier dead. “Confederate Cemetery of Vicksburg.” Photo by David Butow, 1997.

The establishment of national and Confederate cemeteries created the Civil War Dead as a category, as a collective that represented something more and something different from the many thousands of individual deaths that it comprised. It also separated the Dead from the memories of living individuals mourning their own very particular losses. The Civil War Dead became both powerful and immortal, no longer individual men but instead a force that would shape American public life for at least a century to come. The reburial movement created a constituency of the slain, insistent in both its existence and its silence, men whose very absence from American life made them a presence that could not be ignored.

CHAPTER 8

NUMBERING

“How Many? How Many?”

“What imagination can reach the fearful aggregate of woe?”

HARPER’S WEEKLY, MAY 24, 1862

As Americans like Edmund Whitman and James Moore and Clara Barton and Mary Dogan and Mrs. William McFarland worked to name and bury the fallen, they counted: 13,363 at Andersonville, with 12,912 identified; 6,718 at Poplar Grove, with 2,139 identified; 2,935 Confederates from Gettysburg reinterred at Hollywood; 303,536 Union soldiers buried in national cemeteries. In face of the inadequacy of words, counting seemed a way to grasp the magnitude of sorrow, to transcend individual bereavement in order to grapple with the larger meaning of loss for society and nation. Counting helped shift focus from individual to total, from death to the Dead.

“How many homes have been made desolate,” a young South Carolina woman had demanded in 1863, seeking not just a count of the dead but an accounting for death’s impact. “How many Mothers and Sisters and Wives have been made to mourn since this war has been sent upon us [?] Numbers on top of numbers and we are not yet through.” When