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By Root 7789 0

This equation cast the nation in debt in ways that would be transformative, for executing its obligations to the dead and their mourners required a vast expansion of the federal budget and bureaucracy and a reconceptualization of the government’s role. National cemeteries, pensions, and records that preserved names and identities involved a dramatically new understanding of the relationship of the citizen and the state. Edmund Whitman had observed with pride after his years living among the dead that the reinterment program represented a national commitment to a “sentiment.” In acknowledging that decent burial and identifiable graves warranted such effort and expense, the United States affirmed its belief in values that extended beyond the merely material and instrumental. Soldiers were not, as Melville articulated and so many Americans feared, “operatives,” simply cogs in a machinery of increasingly industrialized warfare. Citizens were selves—bodies and names that lived beyond their own deaths, individuals who were the literal lifeblood of the nation.7

Without agendas, without politics, the Dead became what their survivors chose to make them. For a time they served as the repository of continuing hostility between North and South, but by the end of the century the Dead had become the vehicle for a unifying national project of memorialization. Civil War death and the Civil War Dead belonged to the whole nation. The Dead became the focus of an imagined national community for the reunited states, a constituency all could willingly serve—“the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead—or South or North, ours all (all, all, all, finally dear to me),” Walt Whitman chanted.8

In 1898 President William McKinley announced to the South, in a much-heralded speech in Atlanta, that “the time has now come in the evolution of sentiment and feeling under the providence of God, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers.” The sons and grandsons of “these heroic dead” had in the preceding year risked their lives in a new American war; the brave Confederates should be officially honored alongside their Union counterparts.9

To Frederick Douglass’s despair, the reasons for which men had died had been all but subsumed by the fact of their deaths. “Death has no power to change moral qualities,” he insisted in a Decoration Day speech in 1883. “Whatever else I may forget,” the aging abolitionist declared, “I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.” But many even of those who had fought felt otherwise. “The brave respect the brave. The brave / Respect the dead,” Ambrose Bierce wrote in a poem chiding one “Who in a Memorial Day oration protested bitterly against decorating the graves of Confederate dead.”

Remember how the flood of years

Has rolled across the erring slain;

Remember, too, the cleansing rain

Of widows’ and of orphans’ tears.

The dead are dead—let that alone:

And though with equal hand we strew

The blooms on saint and sinner too,

Yet God will know to choose his own.

The wretch, whate’er his life and lot,

Who does not love the harmless dead

With all his heart and all his head—

May God forgive him, I shall not.10

And Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who had as a young soldier facing death so resolutely rejected the solace of Christianity, came to embrace war’s sacrifice as the one foundation for truth. His “Soldier’s Faith” speech, delivered on Memorial Day 1895, became emblematic of the elegiac view of the war that hailed death as an end in itself. “I do not know the meaning of the universe,” Holmes baldly declared. “But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds,” he had found one certainty: “that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.” The