There was no plan for the dead during the American Civil War. Mass graves or
leaving them where they fell would only go so far. Discover the heartbreaking
fate of the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, and the journey to bring them home.
Of all the wars in which the United States has taken part, the American
Civil War was by far the bloodiest. Over just four years from 1861 to 1865,
hundreds of thousands of lives were lost. The official estimate was that about 620,000
soldiers died on both sides combined. But the reality may have been far worse.
A more recent analysis of historic records published in the journal Civil War History
indicates that many more soldiers perished, with an estimated death toll of 750,000 more likely and
perhaps as many as 850,000 total. The confusion is due largely to haphazard record keeping amid
the chaos of war. In a single day of fighting at Antietam, some 23,000 soldiers were killed.
"We've had the devil's own day, haven't we."
But that wasn't even one of the worst battles of the Civil War.
That very dubious honor goes to the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863,
which saw the deaths of an estimated 51,000 over a mere three days.
The sudden deaths of masses of soldiers on Civil War battlefields was overwhelming both
emotionally and logistically. In an era before telecommunications or even electricity, how were
officials supposed to coordinate the removal of the dead? The truth is that many simply didn't.
Though hastily assembled groups of soldiers and civilians stepped in to manage the task,
it rarely happened efficiently. Observers of the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam noted that it
took more than a week for the first of the dead to be buried. With no dedicated burial personnel,
no ambulance service, and no military policy for identification of the deceased, confusion reigned.
"Both armies at Antietam performed the somber final ritual of all great battles:
tending to the dead and dying."
At Antietam, some of the fallen were collected and buried in mass graves,
while others were left in the open indefinitely. This was more likely if the dead were from the
opposing army. A year or more later, troops moving back over battlefields in places
like Bull Run or Chancellorsville found them littered with skeletons. But little
was left to signify whether the deceased fought for the Union or the Confederacy.
For those people who did take it upon themselves to bury the dead, it was impossible to give each
body an individual grave. Soldiers might go to the extra effort if they knew the
deceased or if there were ample time. But with so many remains and often sweltering
weather that encouraged decomposition, mass graves were the only real answer.
Witnesses to mass grave burials explained that soldiers would typically dig long trenches and
carry or drag bodies to the hole, sometimes placing them head-to-foot to save space.
As for grave markers, some survived to delineate a burial spot. Others disintegrated or were never
put there in the first place. This left some mass graves forgotten for well over a century. Metal
detectorist Kevin Ambrose helped uncover a Civil War-era grave in Centreville, Virginia. A full
excavation began in 1994, revealing the remains of six Union soldiers who'd been lying there
for well over a century. All six were identified and returned to their hometowns to be reburied.
During the Civil War era, there was no common identification carried by soldiers,
unlike the standard-issue metal dog tags worn in later conflicts. Motivated people might go
through a soldier's pockets to look for something that might offer up a name, but that was hardly a
given. That, plus inconsistent record keeping, meant that the living were sometimes listed as
dead, and vice versa. The use of mass graves further complicated things, as few on burial
detail took the time to do more than place a marker estimating the number of the bodies
buried. By some estimates, more than half of the dead were never connected to a name at all.
Perhaps most heartbreaking of all was the sight of families wandering battlefields, looking for
a familiar face amongst the dead. For much of the war, Union General Ulysses S. Grant allowed
civilians to move through battlefields so long as they didn't get in the way of the military.
Modern archaeologists also struggled to identify the dead after the fact. The six
Union soldiers buried near Centreville, Virginia uncovered in the mid-1990s had
been placed in coffins in their uniforms. But they didn't carry any identification,
and researchers had to use historic documents and forensic analysis of the remains to connect
them with lost soldiers from the 1st Massachusetts Infantry. At the time,
DNA analysis was still difficult to access and highly expensive.
Families of Civil War soldiers sometimes found themselves in terrible limbo. Some
got word of their loved one's fate, though it wasn't guaranteed and
letters sometimes arrived long after a soldier's death. That's because,
in the same way that there was no official or organized way of identifying remains,
there was no procedure for notifying families. Some dying soldiers managed to write their own
letters home, or fellow service members might take it upon themselves to contact a fallen comrade's
family. But not everyone was so lucky, as the many anonymous battlefield graves make painfully clear.
However, not everyone was so overwhelmed or careless that identifications couldn't be
made. Shortly after the war, famed nurse Clara Barton set up the Missing Soldiers Office,
which helped to identify over 20,000 men. Barton used her own money to keep the enterprise going,
answering thousands of inquiries and poring over records with a small team. The office also managed
to publicize a regular "Roll of Missing Men" that put thousands of names of disappeared soldiers
onto posters and in newspapers across the country. Ex-inmates of prison camps also proved invaluable
to Barton's effort, which helped families gain closure and benefit from the deceased's pension.
Though many soldiers' remains were buried with little hope of later identification,
towards the end of the war, the new art of embalming offered an alternative. Before this,
funerals and burials were rushed affairs, even if there wasn't a war going on. Though mourning
and remembrance continued after a grave was closed, families had to bury the remains of
loved ones before decomposition made itself too obvious. But what to do about someone who died on
a battlefield far from home? Families who learned of a loved one's death sometimes requested that
their remains be shipped home, but the lack of refrigeration made this a gruesome affair.
The answer was a fringe practice: embalming. Like so many other practices around death and dying
in the Civil War, however, preserving corpses was a haphazard and quasi-professional process.
Early attempts involved replacing bodily fluids with arsenic and mercury solutions.
Despite the less than consistent results, enough people asked for embalming that
the government began requiring licenses for embalmers. Perhaps a welcome change,
as earlier, less-accomplished embalmers rather ghoulishly set up shop alongside
battlefields and even encouraged soldiers to pay for the process ahead of their deaths.
Even though death is said to be the great leveler, the remains of Civil War soldiers were
often treated differently based on race and class. Given that embalming bodies and transporting them
home was an expensive proposition, it was often reserved for fallen officers with more money.
Officers' remains were more likely to come home embalmed and in caskets.
"The business of death, the preservation of bodies,
turns undertakers into overnight millionaires."
The lower-class dead were typically found in graves dug closer to where
they fell. Some Union officers' remains were even put to rest
in the garden of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's wife.
Race still divided Black and white soldiers, even after death. When they were buried in cemeteries,
Black troops were typically consigned to segregated sections, even at Arlington
National Cemetery. On the battlefield, burials didn't always play out this way,
though. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the white commander of a Black regiment,
was buried in a mass grave with his troops after they were killed during a July 18,
1863 attack. Confederates meant it as an insult, but Shaw's abolitionist family considered it an
honor and requested that his remains stay where they had been originally buried. Segregated
burials continued until President Harry S. Truman ordered the integration of the military in 1948.
Though photography had been around for decades by the time of the Civil War,
war photographers were still a new sight.
"Antietam looms large in American memory because it was the first
major battle to be thoroughly documented by photography."
The equipment was bulky and complex. Yet photographers like Alexander Gardner,
Timothy H. O'Sullivan, and Mathew Brady took their darkroom wagons to battlefields anyway,
intent on documenting the horrors of war in a way sketches and reports never could,
while also gaining fame and commercial success.
Gardner, in particular, was complicated. After gaining attention for his photographs of the
aftermath of Antietam, Gardner made his way to document the human wreckage of Gettysburg. Once
there, he took a photo he later said was of a fallen Confederate sniper on a rocky outcrop,
naming it "Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter." It was accompanied by dramatic text written by
Gardner that pointed out details such as the blanket where the rebel had laid down to die.
But Gardner was almost certainly lying.
"It looks like the realistic and gruesome aftermath of a firefight.
But, in reality, it's as posed as your favorite selfie."
On the battlefield, Gardner had probably taken the remains of a Confederate infantryman he'd
photographed and moved it to that picturesque outcrop, according to historian William
Frassanito's analysis in Gettysburg: A Journey in Time. The finishing touch was a rifle
Gardner used as a regular prop, and which almost certainly would not have been used by a sniper.
As the growing number of dead presented a stark reminder of the costs of war,
it became increasingly obvious that some sort of change was needed. For many,
it was unacceptable that so many of the dead lost their lives with no honor
given to their names. Of course, this was easier to accomplish once the war was over.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Virginia's
Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. That fall, Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs ordered
soldiers to begin searching out Union graves to identify and protect the resting places of the
dead. It turned into a six-year effort that included the reburial of more than 300,000
Union soldiers, though little more than half were identified. Nameless or not,
many of the dead were bound for one of 74 new national cemeteries established by the federal
government. It was just as well for those who had been buried in former Confederate territory, as
many in the South were not prepared to respect the graves of the Yankees, whom many still opposed.
Today, Arlington National Cemetery is a peaceful,
solemn place. But it was once a sprawling estate belonging to Mary Anna Custis Lee,
wife of Confederate commander Robert E. Lee. The Union seized it at the beginning of the
war, though the Lee family continued fighting for its return for many years.
Few on the Union side were sympathetic to the Lees, however.
"This is a Union facility for Union soldiers."
Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs thought it was only right that Lee should
lose the property, and perhaps his life, too. No one went so far as to execute Lee
or any other top Confederates, but Montgomery Meigs saw to it that Arlington would serve a
more useful purpose than hosting high-class soirées or well-mannered strolls about the
grounds. Part of the estate became home to an estimated 1,500 formerly enslaved people,
who constructed homes, schools, and churches in what became known
as Freedmen's Village. Another plot was set aside for military burials,
with the first interment in May 1864. Later that year, Meigs proposed that the area become
a 200-acre national military cemetery. It was officially designated as such on June 15, 1864.
The Union and postwar governments weren't especially interested in caring for the
Confederate dead. During the war, at least one Union officer complained when
he learned that remains from both sides were being buried together.
"To you, he's a victim. To me, a cold-blooded killer."
After the war, the massive reburial effort conducted by the federal government only
extended to Union soldiers. If Confederate dead were honored,
it was only by civilians who organized and paid for the effort themselves. These civilian groups,
largely comprised of white women, were known as the Ladies Memorial Association. In addition to
arranging for the recovery and reinterment of thousands of dead soldiers, they also engaged
in postwar memorialization and mythmaking that honored the "lost cause" of the Confederacy with
monuments and the organization of Confederate Memorial Day, an occasion that continues to
be observed by certain private citizens and even public figures into the 21st century.