This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [47]
Embalming attracted attention early in the war when the body of Union colonel Elmer Ellsworth, killed in Alexandria, Virginia, on May 24, 1861, by a Confederate sympathizer, was preserved. Ellsworth had been a law clerk in Lincoln’s Springfield office, and the press, in this moment before casualties became commonplace, detailed every aspect of his death, from his heroic sacrifice of life, to the honoring of his body in state in the White House, to his lifelike corpse. His embalmer, Thomas Holmes, became the best-known practitioner of the war, setting up an establishment in Washington, D.C., where he embalmed more than four thousand soldiers at a price of one hundred dollars each. The war made him a wealthy man.50
Neither the Union nor the Confederate government routinely provided for embalming deceased soldiers. Surgeons would sometimes offer this service to prominent individuals who died in army hospitals, and the undertakers contracted by the federal government to assist with disposal of the dead might do embalming for a fee charged to grieving families or comrades. In a spirit of benevolent paternalism, Union officers sometimes arranged for special care of the bodies of their men. For example, a captain left directions with a nurse at a hospital of the Army of the Potomac, “TO THE EMBALMER AT FALMOUTH STATION: You will please embalm the body of Elijah Clifford, a private of my company. Do it properly and well, and as soon as it is done send me word, and I will pay your bill at once. I do not want this body expensively embalmed, but well done, as I shall send it to Philadelphia.” For a private, “well done” was seemingly good enough.51
Embalming remained much rarer in the Confederacy than in the North, no doubt because the invaded South was compelled to focus more directly on survival than on elaborate treatments of the dead. But embalmers advertised throughout the war in the Richmond press, announcing their readiness to perform “disinfections” and directing potential customers to newly opened field offices on the sites of recent battles. Dr. William MacClure promised “persons at a distance” that “bodies of the dead” would be “Disinterred, Disinfected, and sent home” from “any place within the Confederacy.” While the southern funeral industry remained far less developed and embalming far less common than in the North well into the twentieth century, the oldest funeral home in the South, G. A. Diuguid and Sons in Lynchburg, Virginia, handled 1,251 soldiers in 1862, including both Union and Confederates embalmed and sent home for burial.52
Business card for undertaker Lewis Ernde, Hagerstown, Maryland. The Library Company of Philadelphia.
The Virginia battlefields provided a booming business for undertakers of both North and South, and Washington, D.C., included three embalmers in its 1863 City Directory. Dr. F. A. Hutton of 451 Pennsylvania Avenue took a full page to advertise his services. “Bodies Embalmed by us NEVER TURN BLACK! But retain their natural color and appearance…so as to admit of contemplation of the person Embalmed, with the countenance of one asleep.” Embalming promised to transform death into slumber. Like MacClure, Hutton pledged “particular attention paid to obtaining bodies of those who have fallen on the Battle Field.” Embalmers advertised both themselves and the process by exhibiting preserved bodies—often unknown dead simply collected from the field and embalmed—as Thomas Holmes did on undertakers’ premises in downtown Washington, in Georgetown, and in Alexandria. Happily, no record survives of an unsuspecting mother or wife coming upon her lost loved one displayed in a store window.53
For all its increase in popularity, embalming provoked ambivalence and suspicion.