This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [65]
The commitment to individual rights that emerged as such an important principle of the northern cause made attention to particular soldiers’ fates and identities inescapable; honoring the dead became inseparable from respecting the living. But the strongest impetus for these changes was the anguish of wives, parents, siblings, and children who found undocumented, unconfirmed, and unrecognized loss intolerable. The Civil War took place in a newly and self-consciously humanitarian age. “The world is more easily moved by the spectacle of human misery than it ever has been,” wrote a northern relief worker, explaining why “the Christian public either in this or any other country” would not allow soldiers to suffer as they had “in all previous wars.” This was an age in which family ties were celebrated and sentimentalized, an age that believed, moreover, that it possessed the agency and responsibility, as well as the scientific expertise, to mitigate suffering.48
But the dimensions of Civil War loss did not yield to small-scale, individual intervention or even to entrepreneurial improvisations, and Americans turned to the emerging philanthropic bureaucracies of the Sanitary and Christian commissions and ultimately to enhanced state power and responsibility. As Union victory became all but certain in the winter and early spring of 1864–65, the demands of the unnamed dead grew more pressing. At war’s end, the United States would embark on a program of identification and reburial that redefined the nation’s obligation to its fallen, as well as the meaning of both names and bodies as enduring repositories of the human self.
CHAPTER 5
REALIZING
Civilians and the Work of Mourning
“more trying than to face the battle’s rage”
REUBEN ALLEN PIERSON
War victimized civilians as well as soldiers, and uncounted numbers of noncombatants perished as a direct result of the conflict. The war’s circumstances created a variety of ways for ordinary Americans to die: from violence that extended beyond soldiers and battles, from diseases that spread beyond military camps, from hardships and shortages that enveloped a broad swath of the American—and especially the southern—population. It was, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, a “people’s contest,” and the people suffered its cruelties.1
Civil War engagements respected no rigid delineation between home and battlefront but raged across farms and settlements, into Gettysburg’s peach orchard and Sharpsburg’s cornfield, as well as into countless churches and dwellings. At First Bull Run, Judith Henry, a bedridden eighty-five-year-old widow, was killed by an artillery shell. Twenty-year-old Jenny Wade of Gettysburg died from a rifle bullet that passed through her front door as she worked dough to make bread for wounded soldiers. Young Alvah Shuford, who lived near Antietam, died while playing with a shell he found on the field; another boy perished the same way after Gettysburg. An estimated twenty women were killed by artillery fire during the 1863 siege of Vicksburg, but one observer noted that citizens actually suffered much more from “scarcity of provisions than from the abundance of shells.” Civilians died when Union gunboats fired on Natchez and Baton Rouge, when Union troops besieged Petersburg, when Yankees and Confederates struggled over the Shenandoah Valley—even in hand-to-hand combat in the streets of Martinsburg. In Richmond more than forty women working in an ordnance factory were killed in an explosion in 1863, and another fifteen died in similar circumstances in Jackson, Mississippi. Sherman’s March targeted property rather than persons, but civilians died nonetheless, like the eighty-year-old man driving his mule who was shot when he refused to stop at a Union colonel’s order. “That was