New Republic, DC
April 4 2008
The Politics of the Dead
by Steven Hahn
Post Date Wednesday, April 23, 2008
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust
(Alfred A. Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95)
The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction
By Mark E. Neely Jr.
(Harvard University Press, 277 pp., $27.95)
I.
Dreadful as the past century has been in its carnage, Americans
have–with some notable exceptions–been removed from the direct
encounters. The bloody battlefields, bombed-out cities, and teeming
detention camps lay elsewhere–indeed, almost everywhere else. And
although Americans have suffered their share of war-related
casualties, on a world scale those casualties seem to pale beside the
body counts of Europeans during their more than thirty years of
twentieth-century warfare, of Soviets and Chinese during their
internal and external struggles of more than half a century, of
Armenians at the hands of the Turks, Jews at the hands of the Nazis,
Bosnians at the hands of the Serbs, and, most recently, of different
ethnic and religious groups of Africans at the hands of each other.
The American government has learned, sometimes in fits and starts, to
"manage" the problem of its troop casualties much as early
nineteenth-century reformers learned to "manage" the punishment of
social deviants: remove them from public view and institutionalize
their recognition. As early as World War II, a major effort was made
to keep photographs of dead and wounded American soldiers out of the
media, and after televised newsreporting brought the Vietnam War
"home" each night and helped to turn the American public against it,
a dramatically different protocol was put in place for the first Gulf
war and now for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No battle footage,
bleeding soldiers, or flag-draped coffins are to be seen.
Remembrances are consigned instead to the dry print and official
wordings of interior newspaper pages, and assimilated to the formal
occasions marking collective sacrifice: Armistice Day, Memorial Day,
the Fourth of July. It was remarkable, and telling, that well- placed
commentators could regard the attacks of September 11 as heralding an
end of American "innocence."
Whatever "innocence" Americans could claim–forget, for the moment,
the many atrocities committed against Indians and people of African
descent since the time of European settlement–was surely lost much
earlier, in the 1860s, in the hills, woods, villages, and cornfields
of their own country. During those years Americans slaughtered each
other in great numbers in what we have come to call the Civil War,
and as a consequence they encountered dying and death on a scale
never attained before or since. That encounter, Drew Gilpin Faust
tells us in her moving, disturbing, suggestive, and elegant book,
would not only shock, but also transform, Americans and their nation
in ways that resonate to this day.
The storm of death and destruction unleashed by the Civil War is not
a new discovery, however much it tends to recede in our current age
of real and potential exterminisms. There were more than a million
casualties and more than six hundred thousand deaths (we will never
know the precise numbers) sustained by both sides during the Civil
War. These numbers far overshadow any other war in which Americans
have participated and roughly approximate the human costs of all
other American wars combined. Yet for all that has been written about
the Civil War, about its politics, battles, strategies, and
consequences, we know almost nothing about the problems of death that
the war forced upon North and South alike.
If for nothing else, Faust’s book would be immensely valuable for
taking us to this hallowed and wrenching ground; but there is much
more as well. This Republic of Suffering–Faust takes these words
from Frederick Law Olmsted, as he looked, aghast, over the sea of
wounded and dying Union soldiers on the Virginia Peninsula in
1862–asks us to consider how soldiers and civilians, families and
friends, military commanders and state officials confronted both the
prospects and the logistics of what was in many respects a new type
of death, and how everyone may have been changed by it. Quietly but
forcefully, Faust shows that Civil War death had a social, cultural,
and political history, and one that may have played a signal role in
creating modern American society.
That history animates what might otherwise seem a morbidly inanimate
subject, and Faust organizes her account around what she calls the
"work of death." Fittingly, her chapter titles–gerunds all–remind
us that human beings are active participants in death rather than
passive victims of it: "Dying," "Killing," "Burying," "Naming,"
"Realizing," "Believing and Doubting," "Accounting," "Numbering,"
"Surviving." And in the Civil War, the "work" proved to be as
destabilizing as it was massive.
To be sure, Americans of the antebellum decades were no strangers to
death’s ubiquity. Urbanization had increased mortality and morbidity
and decreased life expectancy, especially in the Northeast. But
having been reared in Christian traditions (the great majority were,
at this point, Protestant), they also understood death as a social
and spiritual process, as a reckoning and a transition, and so had
been tutored in an idea of the "Good Death." Theologically rooted in
what was known as the ars moriendi, or "the arts of dying," which
provided rules of conduct (how to surrender one’s soul, and resist
the devil’s temptations, and identify with Christ, and pray) since at
least the fifteenth century, the "Good Death" would later find
expression in sermons, religious tracts, and popular literature
(Dickens, Thackeray, Stowe). By the mid-nineteenth century, it had
become a feature of middle-class cultural practice more broadly, in
which witness-bearing by family members proved central. After all,
most Americans, especially middle- and upper-class Americans, died at
home.
But what would it mean for husbands, sons, and other relations to die
many miles away, without the presence of family, with no last words
to be heard or physical countenance to be observed, and with no sure
knowledge (as was increasingly the case) as to where, when, and under
what circumstances death had occurred? The burdens fell first on the
soldiers themselves, who needed to prepare as much (if not more) for
dying as for killing. And although they turned to the cultural
prescriptions of manhood, patriotism, and religion to steer them
emotionally, they also had to improvise on the ground so that some
semblance of a Good Death might be attained. Many soldiers looked for
friends and fighting mates to assume the responsibility for writing
to their next of kin, not simply to provide news of death and words
of sympathy, but also to include information about the experience of
death itself: about their awareness and acceptance, their belief in
God and their own salvation, and their final thoughts. More than a
few soldiers asked company companions to forward letters that they
had already composed in anticipation of their demise.
Improvisation also characterized the response of both the Union and
Confederate armies to the tasks of accounting for and then burying
their dead. Although some efforts were made early on to establish a
set of procedures, for the sake of public health if nothing else, the
scale of death and the uncertainties of war quickly rendered them
moot. Neither side had regular burial details or grave registration,
and until 1864 the Union did not even have a comprehensive ambulance
service. When possible, companies and regiments buried their fallen
comrades on their own and did their best to enact rituals of respect.
But as Faust writes, "practical realities" meant either that burials
had to be organized more hastily and impersonally or that "retreating
armies … had to depend on the humanity of their opponents, who
predictably gave precedence to their own casualties." While officers
generally received more privileged treatment, ordinary foot soldiers
would likely be interred individually in shallow, often unmarked
graves–that is, if their own side buried them. If left to the
handling of the enemy, they would probably be dumped with other
fallen soldiers into large pits. As a consequence, nearly half of the
Union dead and far more of the Confederate could be identified only,
as Walt Whitman would note, "by the significant word UNKNOWN." Not
until World War I would American soldiers wear "dog tags."
How, then, would families at home determine the fates and the
whereabouts of loved ones in the field? How would they struggle not
only to learn whether loved ones were alive or dead, but also to
comprehend–to "realize," as they put it in their letters and
diaries–the fact of death without its physical embodiment, its
visibility? Improvisation, together with enormous energy, was
required here as well. Sources of "official" information–reports of
field commanders, casualty lists in newspapers–were few, and they
were often unreliable or inadequate. "You may have heard before you
read this that I was killed or wounded," one New York soldier,
anticipating Mark Twain’s famous quip, could write his sister after
the Battle of the Wilderness, "but allow me to contradict the
report."
Hospital nurses and visitors, Whitman best known among them, tried to
notify kin of soldiers’ fates, and an entrepreneurial cohort of paid
agents emerged in the Union and the Confederacy offering to find
missing soldiers for a fee. But family members often had to take
matters into their own hands, running personal advertisements
or–like Whitman initially did in search of his brother George–
traveling to hospitals and battlefields in desperate hope of news. By
the middle of the war, the United States Sanitary Commission began to
organize the work of information collection and dissemination, not to
mention of handling the dead, for those in the North–a harbinger of
death’s bureaucratic and state- building manifestations. Yet for all
this, as Faust poignantly observes, it was quite possible for an
individual soldier to be "entirely lost–a circumstance many
civilians found difficult to fathom."
II.
Most of the soldiers who died during the Civil War succumbed to
disease rather than to battle wounds. Still, the body counts (killed
and wounded) after battles and campaigns seem staggering and ever
escalating: 3,600 at the First Bull Run, 20,000 at Shiloh, 30,000
during the Seven Days, 23,000 at Antietam, as many as 51,000 at
Gettysburg, almost 70,000 during the Virginia campaigns in the spring
of 1864. Greater firepower and accuracy, chiefly through the advent
of muzzle-loading rifles, help to explain the new lethality of
battle; so, too, do the intimacy and ferocity of the battlefields,
where soldiers fought and shot their way through woods, thickets, and
scrub at relatively close range. The overwhelming majority of those
killed or wounded (more than 90 percent, Faust tells us) were hit by
mini-balls, some shot from the rifles of sharpshooters who gained
reputations as cold-blooded murderers. Although many soldiers
struggled with the necessity of killing–this was part of the "work"
of death, too, demanding, as Orestes Brownson put it, "the harder
courage" and posing a number of cultural problems (and there is some
evidence of soldiers failing to discharge their weapons), "vengeance
came to play an ever more important role, joining principles of duty
and self-defense in legitimating violence."
"Especially in the heat of combat," Faust writes, soldiers "could
seem almost possessed by the urge to kill." Small wonder that
historians have used the terms "brutal," "cruel," "merciless," and
"ruthless" to characterize the Civil War. But was it really that bad?
This is the question Mark E. Neely Jr. asks us to ponder in his
interesting yet rather tendentious book. Neely believes that
historians, almost without exception, have taken the war out of
historical context and sensationalized its human costs, effectively
equating battle tolls with the nature of the fighting. Without
denying or making light of the casualties and suffering inflicted by
civil warfare, he is nonetheless impressed by the relative restraint
exercised on both sides: more specifically, by the reluctance of
Union and Confederate soldiers and their commanders to engage in
wanton destruction or commit atrocities.
To make his case, Neely compares the character of the fighting during
the Civil War with other military engagements of the time, while also
taking us to episodes during the war itself when the prospects for
ruthlessness and brutality seemed most auspicious. He begins with the
Mexican-American War, which has been attracting much-needed scholarly
attention these days, and shows that American soldiers, especially
the volunteers, engaged in such widespread and heinous depredations
that their own officers bitterly denounced them. "Our militia &
volunteers," General Winfield Scott told the secretary of war in
early 1847, "have committed atrocities–horrors–in Mexico,
sufficient to make Heaven weep, & make every American of Christian
morals blush for his country. Murder, robbery, & rape on mothers &
daughters, in the presence of the tied up males of the family, have
been common all along the Rio Grande."
A decade and a half later, overlapping in part the Civil War itself,
Mexico was rent by yet another political and military struggle, this
one provoked by a French invasion and the installation (with the aid
of Mexican conservatives) of the Archduke Maximilian as emperor. In
an effort to consolidate his power and to weaken the liberal
opposition, Maximilian issued a "Black Decree," promising execution
to anyone forming or supporting armed bands or groups "without legal
authority, whether or not they proclaim a political pretext." The
decree effectively codified practices that were already in use, which
had led to brutal and summary punishments and provoked retaliations
in kind. As many as five thousand Mexican prisoners may have been
shot under the emperor’s order. But while few Americans had come to
think any better of Mexico and Mexicans since the late 1840s, they
seemed to have developed little taste for guerrilla war and regarded
the Black Decree (if they learned of it) as an infamous measure.
Even the bloody massacre of Cheyennes and Arapahos at the hands of
Colorado volunteers at Sand Creek in 1864, only a "particularly
egregious" example of what had come to be accepted in conflicts with
Indians, brought rebukes and condemnations from both Congress and the
press. Neely’s point in all this is to suggest that by the time of
the Civil War notions of civilized conduct in warfare had been
embraced in official circles; that Civil War generals rarely had to
describe their own soldiers–including volunteers–as Winfield Scott
in Mexico had to describe his own troops; that Lincoln never took the
opportunity to move against Confederates in the way that Maximilian
moved against the liberal forces in Mexico (he offered them amnesty
instead); and that some Americans "now realized … that time-honored
cruelties indulged in fighting ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’ were hardly
acceptable to humanity."
Indeed, while all the materials, experiences, methods, languages, and
justifications for "total war" were readily available for Yankees and
Confederates alike, Neely insists that they were generally rejected.
When, for example, Confederate General Sterling Price rode with his
bedraggled troops into Missouri in 1864, he might have expected a
taste of the medicine that the grisly fighting between Union soldiers
and pro-Confederate guerrillas had produced there: murders,
executions, and other atrocities that led Jefferson Davis to complain
of the "savage ferocity" of the enemy. Instead Price’s raid saw "the
return of traditional combat situations." "Union generals fought
Confederate generals one way and guerrillas another," Neely observes,
arguing against the notion that the brutality of guerrilla warfare in
Missouri set the larger direction for "total war."
Around the same time, Union General Philip Sheridan began a campaign
in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia that has been likened in its
brutality to General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea
through Georgia. Aiming to destroy the valley as a "breadbasket" for
the Confederacy, Sheridan is supposed to have scorched it. But Neely
finds much exaggeration and myth-making in the accounts of Sheridan’s
campaign. Sheridan, it appears, looked chiefly to eliminate the
valley’s agricultural surplus, not its basic subsistence; and he
ordered that farm dwellings be spared unless the inhabitants were
guerrillas, in which case all restraint was to be relaxed. The
distinction between "civilized" warfare and "savage" warfare was
again in play, and the dynamic of "total war" consequently contained.
Yet what would happen if either side learned of significant
atrocities committed against its soldiers? Would the "limits of
destruction" then be traversed? News of the shocking treatment of
Union prisoners at the infamous Andersonville prison camp, where
almost 13,000 eventually perished, created just such a situation.
Calls for retaliation reverberated across the North, and especially
in the halls of Congress. "Now sir," an Indiana Republican thundered,
"if this is to be a war of extermination, let not the extermination
be all upon one side." In the end, however, the retaliatory impulse
failed to generate action. Opposition came, as might be expected,
from northern Democrats and conservative Republicans who were eager
to repair the divisions of Civil War- era America. More surprisingly,
it came also from Radical Republicans such as Charles Sumner–not to
mention from Lincoln himself, who, according to Neely, never really
believed in retaliation. Only the superintendent of Andersonville,
Henry Wirz, suffered punishment; he was hanged in November, 1865.
Retaliations and atrocities against soldiers in uniform did occur,
but the targets were mostly African Americans who had enlisted in the
Union Army. The Battle of Fort Pillow, in which scores of black
soldiers who had surrendered to the Confederates were summarily
executed, is only the most notorious of many examples. And although
Neely does not give much attention to this, it supports his
overarching conclusion that "racial belief" and "racial identity"
were the most important factors in limiting the war’s
destructiveness. When white soldiers faced each other, they seemed to
observe the rules of "civilized" war- making; when they faced the
racial "other," whether black, Mexican, or Indian, no rules applied.
III.
What are we to make of Neely’s claims? And how can all the historians
who have come to regard the Civil War as "brutal," "cruel,"
"ruthless," and "merciless" have been so mistaken? Neely is at his
most challenging when he suggests how casualty figures can be
misleading, especially in comparative perspective. After all, the
620,000 who died during the Civil War (that is the widely accepted
figure) were, theoretically, soldiers of two countries, not one. The
Union dead totaled only 360,000; the Confederate dead only 260,000.
In neither case did they equal the 407,000 American soldiers who died
during World War II. What is more, the death toll during the Crimean
War in 1853-1856 has been placed at 640,000, most of it coming during
a two-year period, surpassing the deaths in the Union and Confederacy
combined over a period of four years. Drew Faust might say that
620,000 dead in America during the 1860s would be equivalent to
5,500,000 dead in America today; and Neely might respond that Faust’s
reasoning typifies the sensationalizing disposition among historians.
Let us grant for a moment that historians have been disposed to
"sensationalize" Civil War casualties (though I am not sure what is
to be gained by this, since the readership for histories of this war
has always been robust), and that we ought to interrogate our
assumptions about the war’s destructiveness. Where does this leave
us? The Civil War witnessed a remarkable and unprecedented
mobilization of resources on each side. Between half and
three-quarters of all men of military age served at some point during
the conflict. (There was a higher proportion in the Confederacy than
in the Union, but impressive in either case.) The federal
government’s authority and capacity expanded dramatically, and a
Confederate state was created from scratch, with remarkable results.
Thousands of slaves were impressed to work on Confederate
fortifications and in Confederate war industries. Both the Union and
the Confederacy enacted military conscription, printed currency,
imposed taxes, and centralized power. And the Union embraced the
unconditional surrender of the Confederacy as its war goal. The Civil
War, in other words, assumed many of the features of "total war,"
even if it was, in effect, a set of domestic rebellions or
insurrections.
What makes the Civil War–the War of the Rebellion, as it was known
at the time, at least in the North–interesting is its political
character and the political transformations it brought into being.
And these Neely appears to ignore in his effort to confound the
conventional wisdom. Neely might regard the massacre of black troops
at Fort Pillow as a racist sidebar to the main, and relatively
restrained, action. But in truth Fort Pillow captures far more of the
central dynamic of the conflict. The war, let us remember, was
provoked by a rebellion of Southern slaveholders against the
authority of the federal government. The Lincoln administration
regarded the rebellion as a treasonous act that it aimed to suppress
militarily, and never officially recognized the Confederacy’s
existence (nor did any other nation). The slaveholders’ rebellion and
the Union invasion of the South in turn provoked a rebellion of
growing numbers of slaves, who fled from their plantations and farms,
headed to Union lines in the expectation of finding freedom, and
signed up to fight their owners as soon as the Lincoln administration
allowed them to do so.
The Confederates did not take the slaves’ actions lightly. They
considered black soldiers to be slaves in rebellion and ordered that,
if captured, they be treated as such: re-enslaved or executed by the
authorities of the states to which they belonged. General Nathan
Bedford Forrest, the Confederate commander at Fort Pillow (and later
one of the organizers of the Ku Klux Klan), simply short-circuited
the process. "It was understood among us," one Confederate soldier
wrote in 1864 from North Carolina, "that we take no negro prisoners."
By the end of the war, black soldiers composed about 10 percent of
the Union Army, and in some departments close to half of it. In this,
as in so many other areas of meaning, African Americans seemed to
have understood better than their white counterparts the social
transformations that the wartime struggles portended, and the need to
debilitate if not to destroy the enemy. The intensity of their
military engagements captured a political essence of the war, and
foreshadowed the bloody encounters of the postwar period.
At all events, it would appear to matter less whether the body counts
were as uniquely high as we have thought them to be, or whether the
fighting was quite as ruthless as we had imagined, than that
Americans, white and black, fought to the death over the future of
slavery and, by extension, the future of their country. The "limits
of destruction" may in fact have been most consequential not on the
fields of war but on the fields of peace, when the federal government
exercised restraint and refused to punish Confederate leaders and
their supporters as traitors deserved to be.
Although she devotes relatively few pages to it, Faust does not
regard the butchering of black troops as marginal to the Civil War
fighting or as merely a product of racism. She sees enslavement–its
experience, requirements, and political logic–at the very center.
Black soldiers, Faust argues, approached the prospects of violence
very differently than did most white Americans, not only because of
their sense of the war’s righteousness but also because of their
collective suffering under slavery. As one African American at the
time explained, "To suppose that slavery, the accursed thing, could
be abolished peacefully and laid aside innocently, after having
plundered cradles, separated husbands and wives, parents and
children; and after having starved to death, worked to death, whipped
to death, run to death … and grieved to death … would be the
greatest ignorance under the sun." African Americans never imagined
that the slavery question could be settled amicably. Most of them
relished the opportunity to take up arms against their masters. And
as black soldiers learned that the Confederates would give them no
quarter, and as they suffered more and more brutality, they
necessarily fought with even greater ferocity. "There is," one
northern observer reported, "death to the rebel in every black mans
[sic] eyes."
Yet just as the black experience of Civil War fighting encapsulated
the social direction that the war was taking, so too did the black
experience with Civil War death. African Americans risked their lives
on many more fronts than did white Yankees or Rebels. They took
flight from plantations in the face of double-barreled shotguns, and
they could be hunted down in the woods and the swamps by armed Home
Guards. They entered Union lines and contraband camps–men, women,
and children among them–in the many hundreds, and lived in
conditions that bred life-threatening illnesses. Those who enlisted
in the Union Army died in dramatic numbers, overwhelmingly of
disease. Of the 180,000 who served at some point in the war, one in
five would perish.
Among the riskiest activities in which black soldiers engaged was
retrieving and burying the Union war dead. When the war ended, they
were heavily involved not only in the army of occupation that began
to "reconstruct" the former Confederate South, but also in a massive
reburial program that the federal government undertook. That program,
Faust remarks, like Reconstruction more broadly, "represented an
extraordinary departure" and "an indication of the very different
sort of nation that had emerged as a result of civil war."
Although This Republic of Suffering would seem to be focused chiefly
on wartime death, many of its most arresting and brilliantly
conceived interventions illuminate the ways in which the Civil War
dead reshaped the consciousness, the practices, and the structures of
postwar America. With great insight and subtlety, Faust demonstrates
how mass death raised profound spiritual and intellectual questions
for many Americans, the pursuit of which led in a number of
directions: to serious doubts about God’s benevolence and agency; to
new ideas of the relation of heaven and earth; to crises of belief
that pointed, in the writings of Emily Dickinson, Ambrose Bierce, and
Herman Melville, to modernist disillusionment; and, especially among
defeated white southerners, to religious and political energies that
simultaneously anticipated the emergence of the Bible Belt and
promoted the Cult of the Lost Cause.
Most striking, perhaps, was the process of state-building that the
work of Civil War death advanced. Well before the Confederate
surrender, Congress and the War Department provided for the
establishment of national cemeteries, the most famous at Gettysburg,
where, in a departure from custom, every grave was of equal status
regardless of military rank or social station. Thereafter, responding
to news of the desecration of Union graves and bodies and to a
growing demand for action, the federal government created additional
cemeteries and, even more importantly, assumed responsibility for
those who died in its service. After four years and more than $4
million in expenditures, the bodies of 303,536 Union soldiers had
been gathered and reburied in seventy-four national cemeteries–an
extraordinary effort at the time, and one that deepened a sense of
the new citizenship that the Fourteenth Amendment had etched into the
Constitution.
Of the federal burial grounds that Civil War death brought into
being, one in particular seemed to capture especially well the great
transformations of the era. It covered not a battleground but rather
the estate of the family of Robert E. Lee, the southern slaveholder
and federal officer turned Confederate general, who had been driven
out shortly after hostilities had commenced. For a time the estate
served as Union Army headquarters, then as a contraband camp and a
freedmen’s village. Finally it became a national cemetery,
consecrating a newly sovereign nation-state on a landscape where
slaveholding sovereigns once claimed to rule, and taking the name of
the estate itself: Arlington. But there as elsewhere, black soldiers
were laid to rest in a separate and segregated section, testimony
both to their role in remaking America and to the distance the
country had yet to travel to fulfill its ideals.
Steven Hahn is the author of A Nation Under Our Feet (Harvard
University Press). His new book, The Political Worlds of Slavery and
Freedom, will be published next year.
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