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By Root 7716 0

as the federal government assumed new responsibility for the war dead. In 1862, in response to logistical problems presented by the growing number of bodies, the U.S. Congress passed a measure giving the president power to purchase grounds “and cause them to be securely enclosed, to be used as a national cemetery for the soldiers who shall die in the service of the country.” Without any appropriation or formal policy with which to implement this legislative action, the War Department established cemeteries as emergency circumstance demanded—chiefly near concentrations of military hospitals where many dead required burial. But under the terms of this measure, five cemeteries of a rather different character were created in the course of the war. These were burial grounds for the dead of a particular battle, usually established when a lull in active operations made such an undertaking possible. Three of these cemeteries, Chattanooga, Stones River, and Knoxville, were created by Union generals, and two, Antietam and Gettysburg, by joint actions of northern states whose citizens had participated in the battles. In each case the purpose of the effort extended well beyond simply meeting the need for disposing of the dead. These cemeteries were intended to memorialize the slain and celebrate the nation’s fallen heroes. Gettysburg represented a particularly important turning point. The large numbers of casualties in that bloody battle were obviously an important factor in generating action, but it is not insignificant that the carnage had occurred in the North, in a town that had not had the opportunity to grow accustomed to the horrors of the constant warfare that had battered Virginia for two long years. Gettysburg made the dead—and the problem they represented—starkly visible to northern citizens, so many of whom flocked to the small Pennsylvania town in the aftermath of battle. Perhaps even more critical was the fact that the North had resources with which to respond, resources not available to the hard-pressed Confederacy.56

The impetus for the Gettysburg cemetery arose from a meeting of state agents in the weeks after the battle. With financial assistance from Union states that had lost men in the engagement, David Wills, a Gettysburg lawyer, arranged to purchase seventeen acres adjoining an existing graveyard. In October contracts were let for the reburial of Union soldiers in the new ground at a rate of $1.59 for each body. In November Lincoln journeyed to help dedicate the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery. This ceremony and the address that historian Garry Wills has argued “remade America” signaled the beginning of a new significance for the dead in public life. Perhaps the very configuration of the cemetery can explain the force behind this transformation. The cemetery at Gettysburg was arranged so that every grave was of equal importance; William Saunders’s design, like Lincoln’s speech, affirmed that every dead soldier mattered equally regardless of rank or station. This was a dramatic departure from the privileging of rank and station that prevailed in the treatment of the war dead and different even from the policies of the Chattanooga cemetery that would be created later in the year.57

The establishment of the Gettysburg cemetery marked the beginning of significant shifts in attitude and policy produced by the nation’s confrontation with Civil War slaughter. Chaplain H. Clay Trumbull wrote of “new lessons” imposed by the necessities of war, as Americans North and South endured and even practiced ways of handling the dead that would previously have seemed unthinkable. Not only did these actions dishonor the slain by treating them more like animals than humans; they diminished the living, who found themselves abandoning commitments and principles that had helped to define their essential selves. Out of the horror of Civil War burials, there grew, even in the midst of the conflict itself, a variety of efforts to resist these unwanted transformations, to establish different sorts of “lessons” as the product of the nation