This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [40]
In their efforts to find and honor comrades amid the bodies of thousands, soldiers demonstrated their resistance to the war’s casual erasure of the meaning of individual human life. As a Connecticut chaplain revealingly explained,
Coffined and coffinless dead side by side. The former were likely officers. “Burial of Federal Dead. Fredericksburg, 1864.” Photograph by Timothy H. O’Sullivan. Library of Congress.
To say that two thousand or twenty thousand men are killed in a great battle, or that a thousand of the dead are buried in one great trench, produces only a vague impression on the mind at the fullest. There is too much in this to be truly personal to you. But to know one man who is shot down by your side, and to aid in burying him, while his comrades stand with you above his open grave, is a more real matter to you than the larger piece of astounding information.24
Soldiers paid homage to their dead comrades out of respect for the slain men, endeavoring to reclaim the individual and what Harper’s had called “its…selfhood” from the impersonal and overwhelming carnage. But they also did it for themselves: to reassert their own commitment to the sanctity of human life and the integrity of the human self. They were reaffirming the larger purposes of their own existence and survival and hoping that if they were killed others would similarly honor them.
But some individuals inevitably seemed to matter more than others. Officers received privileged treatment on the field—at the hands of the enemy, who customarily returned their bodies, as well as from their own men. In 1864 J. W. McClure of South Carolina described to his wife a practice common throughout the war: a flag of truce used for the exchange of “bodies of prominent officers” who had been killed and left in enemy hands. By contrast, when Robert Gould Shaw died leading his black troops in an assault on Fort Wagner in 1863, Confederates explicitly dishonored him and his abolitionist commitments by refusing to surrender his body and interring it in a trench with his black soldiers.25
Both Union and Confederates provided their own dead officers with privileged treatment. In Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, where men were brought from surrounding battlefields throughout the war, the informal practice of burying officers together and apart from their men soon led to the establishment of an officially separate Officers’ Section. After the Battle of Cedar Mountain in 1862 most of the Federal dead lay unburied for days, although the bodies of their officers were packed in charcoal and sent to Washington, where they were to be placed in metallic coffins and shipped to their homes across the North. Confederate Charles Kerrison described a similar differentiation in treatment according to rank when he attempted to retrieve the body of his brother Edwin, a private killed in the spring of 1864. When one of four officers for whom metallic coffins had been provided proved lost, Kerrison hoped he might appropriate the surplus casket for Edwin. But he seemingly never questioned that a higher-ranking soldier should have been provided a coffin while his brother had none. A Texas soldier was less accepting. “The officers get the honor,” he wrote, “you get nothing. They get a monument, you get a hole in the ground and no coffin.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, searching for his son in the bloody aftermath of Antietam, took these contrasts for granted: “The slain of higher condition, ‘embalmed’ and iron cased, were sliding off the railways to their far homes;