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also be marked, like one at Antietam, with a simple wooden sign indicating “80 rebels buried here.” Customarily, northern and southern soldiers were interred separately; a Union colonel expressed outrage when he discovered an instance of military hospitals burying the dead indiscriminately, with no “distinction between the graves of our Brave men who have died for our cause, and the grave of the worthless invaders of our soil. This,” he proclaimed, “is all wrong.” He could only think this had been the fault of the “Undertaker who cares only to get his money for covering their heads with earth.” Separate sections of the hospital cemetery should be selected “and the bodies kept separate,” he insisted.17

Weary soldiers took advantage of natural trenches and existing declivities. After Second Bull Run eighty-five dead were laid beside a ridge created by a railroad excavation and then “covered by the levelling of the embankment over them as the most expeditious manner of burial.” James Eldred Phillips of Virginia described burying the dead in the spring 1863 campaign by placing men “down in deep gulleys on either side of the road and the dirt was dug from the side to cover them over.” But spring storms followed, and Phillips learned, “after getting some distance down the road,” that “heavy rainfall had washed up all of the men that were buried in the gulley…and carried them down toward Fredericksburg.”18

Haste and carelessness frequently yielded graves so shallow that bodies and skeletons reappeared, as rain and wind eroded the soil sheltering the dead and hogs rooted around battlefields in search of human remains. For men buried on the field, coffins were out of the question; a blanket was the most a man could hope for as a shroud. As a northern relief worker reported about burials in Virginia in 1864, “None have been buried in coffins since the campaign commenced.” At war’s outset, many Americans would have designated the coffin as the basic marker of the “decency” that distinguished human from animal interment, and they would have agreed with John J. Hardin, an Indiana volunteer, who found it “dreadful…to see the poor soldier just thrown in a ditch an covered over without any box.”19

“A Burial Trench at Gettysburg.” Photograph by Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Library of Congress.

Burials like these dehumanized the dead and appalled many of the living. A Union chaplain observed that in pit burials bodies were “covered over much the same as farmers cover potatoes and roots to preserve them from the frost of winter; with this exception, however: the vegetables really get more tender care…Circumstances prevent such tenderness from being extended to the fallen hero.” Frequently corpses were quite literally naked—or clad only in underwear, which still permitted a distinction between Yankee and Confederate corpses, for northerners customarily wore wool and southerners cotton. Soldiers desperate for clothing robbed the dead with little feeling of propriety or remorse, and thieves and scavengers appeared on battlefields immediately after the end of hostilities. At the end of the Battle of Franklin in 1864 needy Confederate soldiers even stripped the bodies of their own generals, six of whom lay dead on the field. Captured at Spotsylvania, Union surgeon Daniel Holt recognized a friend among the two hundred dead Yankees “stretched out before a trench half full of water into which they were to be thrown at the convenience of their captor. Entirely naked.”20

“Rebel Soldiers After Battle ‘Peeling’ (i.e. Stripping ) the Fallen Union Soldiers.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 13, 1864.

Soldiers worried that the piles of dead might include those still living, unable to speak or let their presence be known or “extricate themselves from their former comrades.” William Gore of New York related the frightening experience of a fellow soldier in Virginia who described a “narrow escape from the grave” already dug, when a nurse happened to intervene and indicate she would arrange to have his body sent home to friends. While