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By Root 7703 0

in Washington, however, a friend who met him brought the news that Nathaniel was dead. Bowditch, a prominent physician who had himself volunteered his medical services in Virginia the preceding fall, was taken by train and wagon to the camp of the First Massachusetts Cavalry, where he was reunited with his dead son. There he was able to gain some comfort by hearing from Nat’s fellow officers “beautiful things” about his courage and his profession of faith and hope as he died. Yet he still found himself almost incapacitated by the shock of Nat’s death. “I scarcely know what to think or do,” he wrote his wife. “I seem almost stunned by the news.” Eventually Nathaniel Bowditch’s embalmed body was shipped home and buried beneath a stone likeness of his saber in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery.42

Even those of privilege and position faced challenges as they sought to retrieve and honor their dead. Henry Bowditch, already distressed by the lack of ambulances and more general provision for the wounded in the Union army, now saw the direct results of this lack of system in the death of his son, who had lain unattended on the field. His son’s death, he recognized, gave him “greater moral influence” to pursue his cause. The state, he insisted in a pamphlet published in the fall of 1863, had an obligation to its soldiers. “If any government under Heaven ought to be paternal, the United States authority, deriving, as it does, all its powers from the people, should surely be such, and should dispense that power, in full streams of benignant mercy upon its soldiers.” Bowditch’s arguments not only contributed to the establishment of a comprehensive ambulance system by the following year but articulated a logic of obligation that applied not just to the wounded but also to the dead.43

Stanley Abbott’s brother left home under circumstances very like Bowditch’s, after being notified by a telegram that Stanley had been wounded in the chest at Gettysburg. Although the message insisted, “Doctor says not mortal,” Abbott died the next day. His brother arrived promptly enough to find his grave easily. Procuring a coffin was more difficult, however, for thousands of other parents, wives, and siblings were searching for them as well. After five days he at last succeeded and shipped his brother home, one of an estimated fifteen hundred Yankee bodies privately expressed to relatives after Gettysburg, even though the commanding Union officer ultimately felt compelled to prohibit disinterments in the heat of August and September in deference to the “health of the…community.”44

Confederate officers were often retrieved and escorted home by slaves who had accompanied them into service. More than six thousand blacks traveled with Lee’s army into Pennsylvania in 1863, and Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, who had himself brought two slaves with him from the South, described the scene at the end of the battle: “Negro servants hunting for their masters were a feature of the landscape that night.” Elijah, property of Colonel Isaac Avery, was determined to bring his body back to North Carolina, but in the chaos of Lee’s retreat he managed to get the corpse only as far as Maryland, where it was buried. Peter, who belonged to General James Johnston Pettigrew, and Joe, owned by General William Dorsey Pender, were more successful; both accompanied their masters’ remains home to the South after their deaths in the Gettysburg campaign.45

The Adams Express Company and its Confederate counterpart, the Southern Express, did a booming business during the war, establishing careful and elaborate regulations for the safe and sanitary transport of bodies. At the beginning of the conflict many bodies were shipped in wooden coffins, but weather and delays created situations that led Adams to require metal caskets. Joseph Jeffries was one of dozens of entrepreneurs who flocked to Gettysburg after the battle to sell their services in retrieving and shipping bodies. He advertised “METALLIC COFFINS…Warranted Air-Tight” that would not only meet shipping requirements but could