• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7710 0

his valor rewarded with this grisly obligation, as units were sometimes assigned to burial duty in response to some military infraction or shortcoming. S. M. Whistler of the 130th Pennsylvania ruefully reported that three days after the Battle of Antietam his regiment, “by reason of having incurred the displeasure of its brigade commander, was honored in the appointment as undertaker-in-chief” for a “particular part of the field.” In a gesture that was at once practical and punitive, officers often ordered prisoners of war to bury their own dead. A Confederate officer, for example, after an engagement later in the war, seemed to take satisfaction from the discomfort of Union prisoners “assigned to bury their neglected dead. The sight of their unburied comrades rotting in the woods & fields revolted them.”11

“Antietam. Bodies of Confederate Dead Gathered for Burial.” Photograph by Alexander Gardner. Library of Congress.

Origen Bingham of the 137th Pennsylvania was comparatively rested after the Battle of Antietam because his regiment had been held in reserve. But then he and his men found themselves confronting “the most disagreeable duty that could have been assigned to us; tongue cannot describe the horible sight.” The soldiers had been killed on Wednesday, September 17; the 137th arrived on the field on Sunday. Although Union corpses had already been interred, probably by their own units and comrades, hundreds of Confederates remained. Bingham secured permission from the provost marshal’s office to buy liquor for his men because he believed they would be able to carry out their orders only if they were drunk. These were hardly conditions that encouraged respectful treatment of the deceased, and indeed ribald jokes and inebriated revelry abounded. Another burial party, overwhelmed by the number of bodies, tried a different means of making its task manageable. A squad of exhausted Union soldiers threw fifty-eight Confederates down the well of a local farmer who had unwisely abandoned his premises.12

The Battle of Gettysburg the following summer presented an even greater challenge, for the fighting stretched over three days, delaying attention to the dead as military demands on the living continued unabated. By July 4, an estimated six million pounds of human and animal carcasses lay strewn across the field in the summer heat, and a town of 2,400 grappled with 22,000 wounded who remained alive but in desperate condition. One Union medical officer, who was assuming responsibility for burying those he could not save, reported that he lacked even basic tools: “I had not a shovel or a pick…I was compelled to send a foraging party to the farmhouses, who, after a day’s labor, procured two shovels and an ax.” So many bodies lay unburied that a surgeon described the atmosphere as almost intolerable. Residents of the surrounding area complained of a “stench” that persisted from the time of the battle in July until the coming of frost in October. A young boy remembered that everyone “went about with a bottle of pennyroyal or peppermint oil” to counteract the smell.13

Responsibility for the dead usually fell to the victor, for it was his army that held the field. Early in the war soldiers expressed outrage when the defeated abandoned their comrades without providing for their burial. “No set of heathens in the world was ever guilty of such acts,” a Georgia soldier proclaimed after First Bull Run in July 1861. “They never did come back to bury the first one of their dead.” This was a scruple abandoned as rapidly as the bodies themselves. “I cannot delay to pick up the debris of the battlefield,” Union major general Meade baldly declared after his army’s costly success at Gettysburg in July 1863. When two of his comrades were shot down trying to retrieve the body of their colonel near Winchester in 1862, Confederate Theodore Fogel explained to his parents, “I knew it was not right to expose myself in that way. Colonel Holmes was dead, and it was not right for us to risk our lives simply to get his body off the field.” The needs