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By Root 7719 0

Embalmers were frequently accused of extortionate and dubious practices, and they were disturbing, too, in their intimacy with the dead. A Yankee reporter revealingly described his encounter with an embalmer who was following Union troops toward Richmond during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. “He was a sedate, grave person, and when I saw him, standing over the nude…corpse, he reminded me of the implacable vulture…His battery and tube were pulsing like ones heart and lungs, and the subject was being drained at the neck…‘If you could only make him breathe, Professor,’ said an officer standing by. The dry skin of the embalmer broke into chalky dimples, and he grinned very much as a corpse might do: ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘then there would be money made.’” Public discomfort with embalmers appeared most often in regard to this issue of money and the unsettling commodification of the dead that their business represented. In an expression of dismay at the war’s emerging market of death, a Yankee newspaperman reported—and, one suspects, at least partly invented—a conversation with an especially ambitious and frank embalmer: “‘I would be glad to prepare private soldiers. They were wuth a five dollar bill apiece. But, Lord bless you, a colonel pays a hundred, and a brigadier-general two hundred. There’s lots of them now, and I have cut the acquaintance of everything below a major. I might,’ he added, ‘as a great favor, do a captain, but he must pay a major’s price. I insist upon that! Such windfalls don’t come every day. There won’t be another such killing for a century.’” Making a killing seemed to be in every sense the work at hand.54

The U.S. Army was deluged with anguished protests from families of dead soldiers who believed they had been cheated by embalmers operating near the battlefront. An officer at City Point, Virginia, protested to Inspector James A. Hardie in 1864 that “scarcely a week passes that I do not receive complaints against one or another of these embalmers…[They] are regarded by the medical department of the army generally as an unmitigated nuisance…the whole system as practised here is one of pretension, swindling, and extortion.” In 1863 a case was lodged against Hutton & Williams, “EMBALMERS OF THE DEAD” in Washington. Hutton was imprisoned and the company’s records were seized. The suit alleged that the pair regularly recovered and embalmed soldiers without permission and then demanded payment from grieving families, threatening to disinter or refuse to return the bodies if their conditions were not met.

“Embalming Surgeon at Work on Soldier’s Body.” Library of Congress.

In the fall of 1864 Timothy Dwight of New York pursued a grievance with Secretary of War Stanton against Dr. Richard Burr, a prominent Washington embalmer, claiming that Burr was guilty of extortion for preying upon him in his distress after “the loss of a most excellent Boy.” Burr defended his fee of one hundred dollars to the provost marshal, saying his employees had risked their lives recovering the body from near the picket line and then carrying it several hundred yards under fire. He had then disinfected the body “by means of my embalming fluid and charcoal” and enclosed it in a zinc coffin, sealed it, and shipped it—clearly warranting, he insisted, his charges. On January 9, 1865, General Ulysses Grant responded to the chorus of grievances by withdrawing all embalmers’ permits and ordering them beyond the lines. The distances separating the dead and their loved ones nevertheless continued to encourage embalming, in spite of great uneasiness about the practice and widespread hostility toward its practitioners.55

“Dr. Bunnell’s Embalming Establishment in the Field (Army of the James).” Library of Congress.

Embalming was expensive. So were refrigerated cases; so too were trips to battlefields to recover kin. Richer Americans had resources to invest in managing and resisting death that their poorer countrymen and-women lacked. All but taken for granted through much of the war, this differential treatment began to be challenged