In 1992 Mark E. Neely Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize in History for his book The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties.1 In the same year that the book came out, he published an influential article in the journal Civil War History titled “Was the Civil War a Total War?”2 His answer to that question was no. The concept of “total war” first arose as a way of describing the horrifying destruction of lives and resources in World War I and achieved even more widespread use to categorize the Armageddon of World War II. The generation of historians who experienced the latter cataclysm used this phrase to describe the American Civil War as well. That conflict cost far more American lives than World War II, even though the United States in 1861 had less than one-quarter the population of 1941, and it left large portions of the South looking like bombed-out cities of Europe and Japan.
The Civil War mobilized human and economic resources in the Confederacy and the Union on a scale unmatched by any other event in American history except perhaps World War II. For actual combat duty, the war of 1861–65 mustered a larger proportion of American manpower than that of 1941–45. And in another comparison with that global conflagration, the victorious power in the Civil War did all it could to devastate the enemy’s economy as well as the morale of its home-front population. The Civil War wiped out two-thirds of the assessed value of wealth in Confederate states, two-fifths of the South’s livestock, and more than half of its farm machinery—not to mention at least one-quarter of the Confederacy’s white men of military age. While Northern wealth increased by 50 percent from 1860 to 1870, Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent.3
Such devastation might seem to merit the description “total war.” But Neely’s article challenged that notion. He maintained that true total war—or, in the words of the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, “absolute war”—makes no distinction between taking the lives of enemy soldiers and those of enemy civilians. It is war “without any scruples or limitations,” war in which combatants give no quarter and take no prisoners. World War II approached this totality. Germany deliberately murdered millions of civilians in Europe and bombed cities in England; Allied strategic bombing killed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians; and both sides sometimes refused to take prisoners or killed them after they had surrendered. In that sense of totality, the Civil War was not a total war. Although suffering and death from disease were common among prisoners of war, and Confederates sometimes murdered captured black soldiers, there was no systematic effort to kill prisoners. And while soldiers on both sides in the Civil War pillaged civilian property and several Union commanders systematized this destruction into a policy, they did not deliberately kill civilians. “The essential aspect of any definition of total war,” wrote Neely in 1991, “asserts that it breaks down the distinction between soldiers and civilians, combatants and noncombatants, and this no one in the Civil War did systematically.”4
Neely’s article had great influence. Few historians now describe the Civil War as a total war. Perhaps Harry Stout was the last to do so, in 2006.5 In the nine years that separated the second and third editions of my textbook on the Civil War and Reconstruction, I changed my occasional use of the phrase “total war” to “hard war.”6 This terminology is now as ubiquitous as “total war” once was. It is derived from Mark Grimsley’s 1995 book The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865. Grimsley takes his title from Sherman’s quote in that letter to Henry Halleck in 1864 about making the South “feel the hard hand of war.”7
Sherman was the chief practitioner of this prescription. But his armies did not kill civilians. They did not even commit the “wanton pillage” of Southern legend. They destroyed a great deal of civilian property in their campaigns through Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. But most of this destruction, according to Neely and Grimsley, was limited to resources that supported or could support the Confederate war effort. It was a policy of “directed severity” that struck a “balance between severity and restraint” and was “discriminate and roughly proportionate to legitimate needs.” Compared with the scorched-earth policies of Philip II of Spain against the Dutch, with those of the British in Ireland in the seventeenth century, or with all armies in Germany in the Thirty Years’ War—not to mention World War II—“the restraint of Union armies in the Civil War acquires fresh salience.”8
The old total-war thesis focused on the radical transformation of the Southern socioeconomic order as well as on the destruction caused by the conflict. The Civil War liberated four million slaves and elevated them to equal citizenship with other Americans—on paper at least. It destroyed the wealth and national political power of the Southern planter class. As Mark Twain wrote in 1873, the war “uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people … and wrought so profoundly upon the national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.”9 To those who lived through this transformation, it seemed total.
Neely returned to the theme of the limited nature of destruction in the Civil War in a book published in 2007. “The American Civil War was, if anything, remarkable for its traditional restraint,” he writes. “The relative absence of atrocity from the Civil War remains to this day one of its most remarkable qualities.”10 But can one really characterize a war in which at least 620,000 soldiers—and perhaps as many as 750,000—lost their lives and billions of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed as one that was characterized by “remarkable restraint”?
Neely compares the Civil War with three other nineteenth-century conflicts: the Mexican-American War, the French intervention in the Mexican civil war, and the Indian wars on the American frontier. American volunteers in the Mexican War, according to their own commander, General Winfield Scott, “committed atrocities—horrors—in Mexico. … Murder, robbery, & rape on mothers & daughters, in the presence of the tied up males of the families, have been common all along the Rio Grande.”11 American soldiers perceived Mexicans as belonging to “another race, and one with a parasitic religion,” writes Neely, and treated them accordingly. “Racial constructs help explain the unrestrained passions or the unfeeling contempt exemplified by the American volunteer in Mexico, and racial constructs likewise explain the restraint of white Civil War soldiers fighting other white soldiers.”12
But what about white Confederate soldiers fighting black Union soldiers? Neely acknowledges the atrocity at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in which Confederates murdered more than a hundred black soldiers after they had surrendered, and mentions in passing other and almost equally notorious such cases. But these were exceptions, he maintains; the norm was restrained combat between white soldiers.
“Nor was revenge a significant factor in explaining the behavior of most Civil War troops,” Neely claims, in contrast with American soldiers in Mexico, especially Texans, who were motivated by a desire for vengeance against the army that had killed Texans in cold blood at the Alamo and Goliad a decade earlier.13 To minimize the revenge motive among Civil War soldiers, however, is to ignore a great deal of evidence of just such a motive and the behavior it produced. The letters and diaries of Confederate soldiers bristled with stereotypes of the “thieving hordes of Lincoln” who were the “lowest and most contemptible race upon the face of the earth.” Southerners constructed a “Yankee race” to substitute for the “mongrel race” of Mexicans they had fought in the earlier war. One Confederate captain told his wife to teach their children “a bitter and unrelenting hatred to the Yankee race” that had “invaded our country and devastated it … [and] murdered our best citizens. … If any luckless Yank should unfortunately come into my way he need not petition for mercy. If he does I’ll give him lead.” A Missouri Confederate vowed that when the Confederate army regained his state, “vengeance will be our motto.” An officer in the Army of Northern Virginia, grandson of Benjamin Latrobe (who had helped design the Capitol and White House), directed artillery fire against Union attackers at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Afterward he rode over the battlefield and “enjoyed the sight of hundreds of dead Yankees. Saw much of the work I had done in the way of severed limbs, decapitated bodies, and mutilated remains of all kinds. Doing my soul good. Would that the whole Northern Army were as such & I had my hand in it.”14
Even if Neely is wrong about the lack of significant motives of revenge among Confederate soldiers, is he right about Union soldiers? Not for Unionists from East Tennessee or other regions in the Confederacy where savage internecine warfare took place. An Ohio captain serving with West Virginia soldiers was astonished by “this passion, this desire for revenge. … Hate rankled in their breasts.” An East Tennessee Union soldier vowed that “if I live, I will be revenged” on the Confederates occupying his homeland. “Yes I will draw their blood and mutilate their dead bodies and help send their souls to hell.”15
As for black soldiers, many went into action after the Fort Pillow massacre shouting, “Remember Fort Pillow!” “The darkies fought ferociously,” wrote Captain Charles Francis Adams Jr. after an attack by a black division at Petersburg, Virginia. “If they murder prisoners, as I hear they did … they can hardly be blamed.”16
It was not only black soldiers who exacted revenge for Fort Pillow. A white Wisconsin soldier wrote to his fiancée in May 1864 that when his regiment assaulted Confederate defenses at Resaca, Georgia, “twenty-three of the rebs surrendered but our boys asked if they remembered Fort Pillow and killed all of them. Where there is no officer with us, we take no prisoners. … We want revenge for our brother soldiers and will have it. … Some of the [rebels] say they will fight as long as there is one of them left. We tell them that is what we want. We want to kill them all off and cleanse the country.”17 The more one learns about such attitudes and incidents—and they were not the rare exceptions that Neely implies—the more one questions his assertion that “Civil War soldiers behaved differently toward the enemy” than American soldiers in Mexico.
Neely is on firmer ground in his contrast of the Civil War with the “unrestrained ferocity and destructiveness” of warfare against Indians. In a chapter on the Sand Creek massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians by white Colorado militia in 1864, Neely correctly concludes that even in the savage guerrilla conflict in Missouri, soldiers and guerrillas did not cross “the barriers to slaughter of women and children perpetrated at Sand Creek”—and, for that matter, on other occasions. By comparison, Civil War soldiers perhaps did show considerable restraint.18
The same may be true with respect to a comparison with the thirty-five thousand French soldiers whom Emperor Napoleon III sent to Mexico to install Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as emperor of that strife-torn country in 1864. These soldiers carried out Maximilian’s “Black Decree” of execution of any captured Mexican soldiers who had fought against his rule. Thousands of them were in fact “killed in cold blood by French and imperial forces,” writes Neely. Even the “record of the U.S. army in Mexico in 1846–1848” did not “come close in brutality to the record of the French and imperialists in Mexico twenty years later.”19
What did come close in brutality, if not in scope, to the French and Mexican case was guerrilla warfare in the Civil War, especially in Missouri. That state experienced a civil war within the Civil War, a war of neighbor against neighbor, an armed conflict along the Kansas border that went back to 1854 and had never really stopped, ugly, vicious, no-holds-barred bushwhacking that came close to total war.
Bands of Confederate guerrillas led by the notorious William Clarke Quantrill, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and other pathological killers, including such desperadoes as the James and Younger brothers, murdered and burned out Missouri Unionists. Kansas “Jayhawkers” and Union militia retaliated in kind. In contrapuntal disharmony the guerrillas and Jayhawkers plundered and pillaged their way across the state, taking no prisoners, killing in cold blood, terrorizing the civilian population, and leaving large parts of Missouri a scorched earth. In August 1863 Quantrill’s band rode into Lawrence, Kansas, and killed all the adult males they found there—more than 150 in all. A year later Bloody Bill Anderson’s gang took twenty-four unarmed Union soldiers traveling home on furlough from a train, shot them in the head, then turned on a posse of pursuing militia and slaughtered 127 of them, including the wounded and captured.20
Neely acknowledges the barbarity of guerrilla and counterguerrilla warfare in Missouri. “But such savage tactics were an exception,” he maintains. “Missouri was itself an exception.”21 He gives virtually no attention to guerrilla warfare elsewhere in Confederate and border states, which was almost as savage as in Missouri. In East Tennessee it was “war at every door,” as the title of a book about that region describes it, an “uncivil war,” according to the title of another.22 Neely dismisses the irregular warfare in these places as “sideshows” to the real war of conventional armies facing each other on battlefields like Shiloh and Antietam and Gettysburg and Chickamauga and Spotsylvania. But much recent scholarship argues otherwise. “Confederate irregular forces were intended to be an adjunct to the conventional field armies,” writes one historian. They “developed into a powerful tool for the Confederate war effort” and forced the Union army to develop “an extensive counterinsurgency program wherever it faced Confederate unconventional forces.”23
By 1864 the Union response to both conventional and irregular Confederate warfare included the “hard war” destruction of Confederate resources practiced by Sherman’s army in Georgia and South Carolina and by General Philip H. Sheridan’s army in its Shenandoah Valley campaign. In his report on the march through Georgia, Sherman estimated the damage “at $100,000,000; at least $20,000,000 of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder was simple waste and destruction.” The devastation in South Carolina was far greater, for Union soldiers considered that state the fount of secession. “The whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina,” wrote Sherman. “I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.” The Union chief of staff, General Henry W. Halleck, had written Sherman that if he captured Charleston, “I hope that by some accident the place may be destroyed, and if a little salt should be sown upon its site it may prevent the growth of future crops of nullification and secession.”24
Sherman’s army did not get to Charleston, but Confederate troops themselves burned much of that city when they evacuated it. Union soldiers burned plenty of other places in South Carolina, including the town of Barnwell, which they renamed “Burnwell.” The Pennsylvania soldiers in Sherman’s army felt a grim sense of satisfaction in retaliating for the burning of Chambersburg in their state by Confederate cavalry.
Neely briefly acknowledges the destructiveness of Sherman’s march through Georgia, but insists that “it provided a notable exception to the rule of the Civil War in regard to the private property of the enemy.”25 He barely mentions the march through South Carolina, but presumably would describe it as another exception. By the time Neely gets to Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, to which he devotes an entire chapter, he apparently senses that the reader has grown skeptical of the claim that all of these exceptions prove the rule of “remarkable restraint.” Instead, Neely seeks to minimize the extent of devastation in the Shenandoah Valley. He neglects to cite Sheridan’s own report of October 7, 1864. “I have destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements,” Sheridan wrote, and “over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over 4,000 head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep.” This was just the beginning. By the time he was done, wrote Sheridan, “the Valley, from Winchester up to Staunton, ninety-two miles, will have but little in it for man or beast.”26
Neely does quote reports by other Union officers, in which he somehow finds evidence that the destruction was not so bad after all. The valley, wrote one, “has been left in such a condition as to barely leave subsistence for the inhabitants.” Another noted that “nothing is left where we have been but corn and not much of that. Barns and mills are destroyed. Hay and grain has been given to the flames.” The point here, writes Neely, is that Union soldiers did leave enough corn for “the subsistence of the inhabitants.” How they were to grind it when all the mills were burned is not made clear.27
Neely’s final chapter addresses the question of casualty figures in the Civil War. He does not challenge the data that at least 620,000 soldiers died in the war. (The new estimate of 750,000 deaths, based on careful statistical analysis of census data, was not yet available when Neely wrote.)28 Rather, he questions the interpretation of these data. The figure of 620,000 dead amounted to 2 percent of the American population in 1861. If 2 percent of Americans were to die in a war fought today, the number of American war dead would be more than 6 million. The new figure of 750,000 deaths would increase the relative toll for today to almost 7.5 million. This startling toll—whether 6 million or 7.5 million—might call into question the conclusion that the Civil War was “remarkable for its traditional restraint.” So these figures must somehow be sanitized. The figure of 620,000 “lumps the dead from both sides together and calls them all ‘Americans,’ ” Neely points out. “Such a mixing of opponents is rarely done in studying other American wars. … If we consider the Civil War casualties one ‘country’ at a time, then the 360,000 Union dead do not equal even the 407,000 Americans killed in World War II,” and “the 260,000 Confederate dead constitute but 64 percent of the 407,000 Americans killed in World War II.”29
This argument is more than a little misleading. The 360,000 Union war dead were 1.6 percent of the population of Union states. An equivalent American death toll in World War II would have been 2.1 million and would today be 4.9 million. The 260,000 Southern dead constituted 2.9 percent of the Confederate population (including slaves), which would translate into 3.9 million of the 1940s population and 8.8 million today. (These figures would be higher if the new estimate of Civil War dead is correct.) If we disaggregate the Union and Confederate tolls, as Neely wants us to do, the proportionate casualty rate for the Union is almost as large as when they are lumped together, and the Confederate rate is far greater—and each is several times more catastrophic than for any other war, including World War II. These figures demonstrate the opposite of what Neely wants them to prove.
The same is true of the numbers game Neely plays with a comparison of the American Civil War and the Crimean War of a few years earlier, between 1854 and 1856. The death toll for all nations involved in that conflict was 640,000, which slightly exceeded the most conservative estimate for the American Civil War, as Neely notes. What he does not tell the reader, however, is that the combined population of the four principal nations that fought the Crimean War (Russia versus Turkey, Britain, and France) was about 130 million, four times the 32 million in the Union and Confederacy. In the Crimean War, fewer than 10 percent of soldier deaths occurred in combat; the rest were caused by disease and exposure. By contrast, 35 percent of soldier deaths in the Civil War resulted from combat wounds. On a per capita basis, combat mortality in the Civil War was at least fifteen times greater than in the Crimean War. This reality underscores the irony of Neely’s statement that “the true significance of the Civil War casualty figures is quite the opposite of what has been asserted routinely about them in the past.”30 In fact, what has been “asserted routinely” is exactly right, and its “true significance” undermines much of Neely’s argument.
Although death on the massive scale of the Civil War was a new experience for Americans, they were no strangers to death on a more personal and individual level. Life expectancy at birth was forty years, largely because of an infant and child mortality rate nearly ten times greater than today. Most parents had buried at least one child; few young people reached adulthood without the loss of siblings or cousins. Many husbands grieved for wives who died in childbirth. Fearful epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and other diseases periodically carried off thousands in the antebellum era. The scourge of “consumption”—tuberculosis—blighted the existence of many in middle age as well as those who had managed to live beyond it.
The ever-present reality or prospect of death created what the historian Mark Schantz calls a “culture of death” to help Americans cope with that reality. No best-selling novel was complete without deathbed scenes that were often deeply sentimental and accompanied by assurances that Christian redemption would transport the departed to heaven. The death of Little Eva in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the most famous example of this genre.
Poetry seemed even more obsessed with the poignancy of death. “Gathering momentum after the publication of William Cullen Bryant’s classic work ‘Thanatopsis’ in 1821,” writes Schantz, “the subject of death became the coin of the realm in the antebellum poetic imagination.” Emily Dickinson “accorded death a prominent place” in hundreds of her poems, including the opening lines in one of her most famous: “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me.” The cemetery movement that followed the successful model of Mount Auburn Cemetery outside of Boston turned traditional graveyards into beautifully landscaped parks where mourners and visitors could contemplate the bliss of eternity. If modern America is, as many critics have noted, “a death-denying culture” that tries to hide the inconvenient fact of dying, according to Schantz, “nineteenth-century America was a death-embracing culture.”31
Drew Gilpin Faust would not go that far, although in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), she does contrast the preoccupation of antebellum Americans with death to our discomfort with the subject today. But while Schantz believes that “antebellum Americans could face death with resignation and even joy because they carried in their hearts and heads a comforting and compelling vision of eternal life,”32 Faust portrays death, however frequent, as a heart-wrenching experience for both the dying and their surviving loved ones. If there was a “culture of death,” it consisted of rituals to cushion the numbing shock of loss. Faust labels the most important ritual “the concept of the Good Death.” Such a death occurred at home in bed surrounded by family and friends who provided every comfort during the last hours of life. The dying person spoke last words assuring everyone that she or he was ready to depart in peace and to meet again in the afterlife where the strife and hardships of earthly toil were unknown. “By the 1860s,” Faust writes, “many elements of the Good Death” had been largely “separated from their explicitly theological roots.” Assumptions about “the way to die” had “spread beyond formal religion to become part of more general systems of belief held across the nation about life’s meaning and life’s appropriate end.”33
While the differences between these two books on the same subject are sometimes distinct and sometimes subtle, together they offer a richer understanding of the impact on American society of widespread death during the Civil War than either does alone. One difference concerns the theme expressed by Schantz’s title, Awaiting the Heavenly Country. His most important chapter analyzes the central tenet of the American culture of death: a widespread belief that “a heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty awaited them beyond the grave.” For many Americans this resurrection would include bodies as well as souls; they would literally be able to recognize and be recognized by their friends and relatives in the next world. “That those who fought the Civil War marched off to battle with robust notions of the literal bodily restoration planted firmly in their cultural universe,” writes Schantz, “is a matter of deep significance.” He does not mean to suggest that soldiers deliberately courted a martyr’s death and immediate ascension to heaven as, for example, a Muslim suicide bomber is said to do. Rather, the literal belief in eternal life “may help to explain how and why Americans on all sides were able to endure such grisly conflict.”34
Schantz is onto something important here. In my own research on the beliefs and motivations of Civil War soldiers, I have also encountered the conviction that “religion is what makes brave soldiers.” A Mississippi private said that “Christians make the best soldiers, as they would not fear the consequences after death as others would.” Some soldiers expressed sentiments that come close to justifying Schantz’s assertion that Americans could face death with resignation and even joy. An Illinois cavalryman wrote to his wife that death was merely “the destruction of a gross, material body. … A soldier’s death is not a fate to be avoided, but rather almost to be gloried in,” while a Georgia officer found “something solemn, mysterious, sublime at the thought of entering into eternity.”35
Faust also discusses the belief in salvation as a factor in nerving soldiers to face death with equanimity and as a source of comfort to their families. She cites the funeral sermon for a Massachusetts officer killed at Petersburg, in which the clergyman defined death as “the middle point between two lives.” But she seems inclined at times to view this conviction as the equivalent of grasping at straws—or, to change the metaphor, of whistling past the graveyard. Instead of a deeply held belief, it was for many soldiers and their families, she writes, the product of “distress and desire” to make tolerable the intolerable prospect of death. She also suggests the provocative idea that the vision of death as the middle point between two lives was a nineteenth-century version of a death-denying culture.36
The same Christian theology that offered the solace of salvation also included the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” “How can a soldier be a Christian?” asked an Indiana officer whose regiment saw a great deal of action. “Read all Christ’s teaching, and then tell me whether one engaged in maiming and butchering men … can be saved under the Gospel.” He had not resolved this question when he was killed at the Battle of Resaca in May 1864.37 Faust discovered that many Civil War soldiers found it harder to learn to kill than to face the possibility of death. Although few soldiers had read Saint Augustine or Hugo Grotius on the theory of “just war,” they eventually developed their own version of this doctrine as applied to “Yankee vandals” or “Rebel traitors.” A variety of beliefs helped soldiers overcome the sixth commandment, among them ideas of duty and self-defense (kill or be killed), a desire for revenge against a demonized enemy who had killed their comrades, the murderous hatred of Confederate soldiers toward black Union soldiers, and the latter’s retaliation for the massacres of captured black soldiers. Veteran soldiers became hardened to death. They were, in Faust’s words, “never quite the same again after seeing fields of slaughtered bodies destroyed by men just like themselves.”38
Both Schantz and Faust maintain that however omnipresent death had been before 1861, the Civil War experience was unique, whether the total number of soldier deaths was 620,000 or the new estimate of 750,000. And these figures do not include the unknown (and unknowable) number of Southern civilian deaths indirectly caused by the ravages of disease, exposure, malnutrition, and other inevitable disruptions of a war that was fought mostly in the South and destroyed much of the Southern infrastructure.
Whether or not Americans possessed a “culture of death” in 1861, they were unprepared for mortality on this scale. Faust portrays the shock of death in the war as a matter of quality as well as quantity. A Good Death was impossible for soldiers shot through the head or lungs or guts and dying in agony in no-man’s-land between the lines far from home, or suffering from typhoid fever or dysentery in an army hospital hundreds of miles from loved ones and buried unceremoniously in an often anonymous grave. “Sudden death represented a profound threat to fundamental assumptions about the correct way to die,” Faust points out. “One of the Civil War’s greatest horrors was that it denied so many soldiers” the chance for a Good Death “by killing them suddenly, obliterating them on the battlefield and depriving them of the chance for the life-defining deathbed experience.”39
Soldiers and civilians did what they could to create a semblance of the Good Death. Some soldiers wrote anticipatory letters home before going into battle or while lying dangerously wounded or ill. These letters substituted for last words at home. They assured loved ones of a readiness to die and to meet them in the next world. Chaplains and hospital nurses sometimes wrote such letters for the dying.
Neither the Union nor Confederate army had an official procedure for notifying next of kin of soldier deaths. This task fell to company officers or chaplains or army buddies, but the process was hit or miss. Mothers or wives or fathers at home often endured weeks of harrowing uncertainty about the fate of their son or husband, who might have been reported in the newspaper casualty lists as “dangerously wounded” or “missing.” In many cases that uncertainty lasted forever. Neither army provided soldiers with identity tags. More than half of the soldiers who died in the war were buried in graves—sometimes mass graves—without identification.
Walking through the Civil War section of a National or Confederate cemetery today and reading all of the stones marked “Unknown” gives one only a faint idea of the pain suffered by families who never saw the body of their soldier son or husband, never had an opportunity to say good-bye, never could visit his grave. “Death without dignity, without decency, without identity imperiled the meaning of the life that preceded it,” writes Faust. “Americans had not just lost the dead; they had lost their own lives as they had understood them before the war.”40
Efforts to counter this dismal fate made some progress during the war, especially in the North. The U.S. Sanitary Commission, the Christian Commission, and other private organizations worked with the army to identify deceased soldiers, notify their families, and in some cases to arrange for their shipment home, where families could have at least the comfort of burial in local cemeteries and markers to honor their sacrifice. The practice of embalming, rare in the United States before the Civil War, expanded greatly during the war and laid the foundations for a funeral “industry” after it. Embalming and coffins for shipment of bodies were expensive, however, and those whose remains received this treatment were mostly officers. But not entirely; of the 5,100 Union soldiers killed or mortally wounded at Gettysburg, an estimated 1,500 were interred or reinterred in their hometown cemeteries. Gettysburg, of course, was closer to Northern communities than any other major battlefield.
The rest of the Union dead at Gettysburg were buried in the soldiers’ cemetery there, which provided a model for the government’s principal effort to honor the memories of those who gave their lives for the republic and to provide at least some closure and comfort for their families. Although the Northern states whose men had fought at Gettysburg took the initiative in establishing that cemetery, the national government assumed responsibility for its maintenance and became the owner of the eventual total of seventy-four national military cemeteries (including Gettysburg) that were the final resting place for 303,536 Union war dead (and thousands of veterans of later wars as well).
As early as 1862 the U.S. Congress enacted legislation authorizing the president to purchase land “to be used as a national cemetery for the soldiers who shall die in the service of the country.” Three such cemeteries in addition to Gettysburg were established during the war. But the greatest effort to find, identify, and reinter Union soldiers took place during the half-dozen years after the war, with generous appropriations authorized by the National Cemeteries Act of 1867. This undertaking was virtually unprecedented; except for “Republican Athens,” noted a Northern journalist in 1866, “no people or nation had ever designated a burial place for the common soldier.”41
This postwar program did something to atone for the government’s haphazard record-keeping and treatment of the dead during the war’s early years. Even though nearly half of those 303,536 Union soldiers in national cemeteries remained unknown, the re-interment program identified tens of thousands and gave comfort, Faust writes, to many families even of the unknown who could believe that their loved ones had been buried with dignity and marked with a stone—key elements in the ideal of a Good Death. “Such a consecration of a nation’s power and resources to a sentiment,” wrote the army officer principally responsible for the reinterment project, “the world has never witnessed.” Faust agrees. “The reburial program represented an extraordinary departure for the federal government,” she maintains, “an indication of the very different sort of nation that had emerged as a result of civil war.” It “would have been unimaginable before the war created its legions of dead, a constituency of the slain and their mourners, who would change the very definition of the nation and its obligations.”42
What of the Confederate war dead and their constituency of mourners? The United States obviously could not honor those soldiers who fought against their country. During the war many Confederate dead were buried in local cemeteries near where they fell—Oakwood and Hollywood Cemeteries in Richmond, Blanford Cemetery in Petersburg, and others around the South. But scores of thousands remained in unmarked graves from Pennsylvania to Louisiana. Southern women formed Confederate Ladies Memorial Associations after the war to locate battlefield and hospital burial sites and reinter the remains of Southern soldiers in marked graves at Confederate cemeteries, whose memorials and monuments matched those in national military cemeteries.
These Civil War cemeteries, writes Faust, “were unlike any graveyards that Americans had ever seen.” They “were not clusters of family tombstones in churchyards, nor garden cemeteries symbolizing the reunion of man with nature.” Rather they “contained ordered row after row of humble identical markers, hundreds of thousands of men, known and unknown, who represented not so much the sorrow or particularity of a lost loved one as the enormous and all but unfathomable cost of the war.”43
Many of the Union war dead not buried in national cemeteries and Southern soldiers not interred in designated Confederate burial grounds were placed in civilian cemeteries or family graveyards, often with elaborate tombstones that honored their sacrifices. Schantz’s Awaiting the Heavenly Country analyzes the funerary art that was an important part of the American culture of death. One of the most popular Currier and Ives lithographs in that era was The Soldier’s Grave, which showed a female mourner weeping next to a large gravestone commemorating “a brave and gallant soldier and a true patriot.” These lithographs “created imaginary soldier’s graves for those tens of thousands of Union troops who died many miles from their homes,” Schantz writes. “In creating funerals for the mind and for the spirit,” the lithographs “sustained Americans as they confronted loss of life on a mass scale.”44
For both Schantz and Faust, this loss of life and the cultural institutions Americans constructed to cope with it are the most enduring legacy of the Civil War. The “horribly luminous” reality of 620,000 war dead, writes Schantz, “worked profound transformations on American society.” For Faust, “death created the modern American union.” The dying and killing “transformed society, culture, and politics in what became a broader republic of shared suffering.” The “meaning of the war had come to inhere in its cost. … The Civil War Dead became both powerful and immortal, no longer individual men but instead a force that would shape American public life for at least a century to come.”45
My discomfort with this conclusion does not stem solely from its apparent morbidity. Surely the legacy of the Civil War went beyond its cost in human lives. Both authors acknowledge that the war preserved the United States as one nation and, in Faust’s words, “launched it on a trajectory of economic expansion and world influence.” It also “ended slavery and helped to define the meanings of freedom, citizenship, and equality.” But somehow these achievements seem to pale before the real “texture of the experience, its warp and woof … the presence of death.”46
In my view, however, the meaning of the war inhered at least as much in its results as in its cost. Faust makes a strong case that the creation of national cemeteries with their constituency of mourners and the slain changed “the very definition of the nation and its obligations.”47 But I think that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which defined freedom, citizenship, and equal rights, were even more nationalizing and transformative. Despite the war’s “harvest of death,” three times more soldiers survived than died. Their veterans’ reunions well into the twentieth century commemorated the sacrifices of comrades who had given their lives in the war, to be sure, but they also celebrated the achievements of the living. In neither respect, it seems clear, can this war that “wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character,” as Mark Twain expressed it, be best understood in terms of its “remarkable restraint.”