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Patriot Graves: American national identity and the Civil War dead

2004; Routledge; Volume: 5; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1466465042000302773

1743-7903

Susan‐Mary Grant,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Abstract The Civil War was America's defining conflict, the war that made the nation and the fulcrum for the development of American national identity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the role that the Civil War dead played in this process has only begun to be explored. Although the monuments raised to honor the dead, along with the battlefields on which they fought, attract considerable interest, the cemeteries constructed to inter them have been integrated into the landscape – literal and figurative – of the American nation so fully that the need they answered, the manner of their development, the form they took, and their longer‐term symbolic message has been relatively neglected. Yet the Civil War dead were a crucial – indeed, the crucial – component in the construction of American national identity. Although scholars interpret American attitudes toward the Civil War dead within the context of the mourning rituals of the antebellum era, the war required, and produced, a different approach to death, for which antebellum precedent had ill‐prepared Americans. Removed from its antebellum religious and societal framework, death in the Civil War acquired a new and more potent national meaning that not only validated American nationalism through warfare, but anticipated the response to fallen soldiers in future European conflicts. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Philip Morgan, Owen Dudley Edwards, Jeremy Boulton, Elizabeth Bell, and an anonymous reader for their comments, suggestions, and encouragement, and for pointing me in the direction of valuable additional material for this article. Notes Francis George Shaw to General Gillmore, 24 Aug. 1863, quoted in Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Meridian, 1991 [1990]), p.140; Francis George Shaw to Edward Pierce, 31 July 1863 and to Dr Lincoln Stone, 3 Aug. 1863, both quoted in Russell Duncan (ed.), Blue‐Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999 [1992]), p.54; for details of Shaw's burial and the response to it see both Glatthaar and Duncan (ed.) and Martin H. Blatt, Thomas J. Brown, and Donald Yacovone (eds.), Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) pp.2–3, 100–101. In fact, it was later believed that Robert Gould Shaw's body was moved to the National Cemetery at Beaufort, North Carolina, along with the dead of other regiments that took part in the attack on Fort Wagner. See Charles Cowley, 'Our National Cemeteries,' Bay State Monthly, Vol.2, No.1 (Oct. 1884), pp.58–60, especially p.59. Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp.x–xi. This is not to suggest that Civil War historians do not acknowledge the impact of the war's death rate. Of course they do. Nevertheless, there are few studies of American attitudes toward death, specifically, at this time. The two main exceptions are Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) and Drew Gilpin Faust, 'A Riddle of Death': Mortality and Meaning in the American Civil War, 34th Annual Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture (Pennsylvania: Gettysburg College, 1995) and, more recently, 'The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying,' Journal of Southern History 67 (2001), pp.3–38. Reid Mitchell also devotes a chapter to the subject in The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp.135–50. The literature on Civil War symbolism and memorializing is growing. David Blight's recent study of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) traces the history of Memorial Day, and see also Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991) and Catherine Albanese, 'Requiem for Memorial Day: Dissent in the Redeemer Nation,' American Quarterly, 26 (1974) pp.386–98. On Civil War memorials see Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Testament to Union: Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth‐Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); on the South, specifically, Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) remains the best starting point for an exploration of the Lost Cause, and more recently Robert E. Bonner has explored Confederate symbolism in Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997), p.4; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991), p.9. Anderson does specifically cite American sentiment in support of his assertion, but the example he gives is of Douglas MacArthur's 1962 speech to West Point Military Academy, 'Duty, Honor, Country,' n.2; Anthony Smith, 'Nationalism and the Historians,' International Journal of Comparative Sociology 33 (1992), pp.58–80, reprinted in Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.43; Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1983 [1977]), pp.550; George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp.45–6. Faust, A Riddle of Death, p.26; Maris A. Vinovskis, 'Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,' in Vinovskis (ed.), Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.4–9; Faust, 'Civil War Soldier,' p.4 and n.2 on the argument (proposed by James David Hacker) that Confederate deaths from disease have been underestimated; Vinovskis, 'Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War,' p.5; Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, new edition (Wiltshire: The Crowood Press, 1996), pp.19–20. The best‐known study of Civil War casualty figures is Thomas L. Livermore's Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America 1861–5 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957 [1887]). I am grateful to one of the anonymous readers for American Nineteenth Century History for drawing the Taiping Rebellion to my attention. As Griffith points out, the Civil War has been seen, by military historians and others, as in some ways a precursor of the First World War in the ways it was fought and in the new, modern weaponry that was used (Griffith, Battle Tactics, pp.20–21), and see also his study of Battle Tactics of the Western Front (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp.204–7. For just one example, see Richard E. Beringer et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986): 'Long siege lines, like those around Petersburg, reappeared in future wars and characterized almost all operations on the western front in World War I' (pp.332–3). The Civil War is not, however, commonly linked to the First World War in terms of the development of either national identity or the rise of the cult of the dead. Griffith, Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, p.20. Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, p.ix; Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, pp.36–7; Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, p.339; David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp.179–80; Laderman, The Sacred Remains, pp.66–7. Stanley French, 'The Cemetery as Cultural Institution: The Establishment of Mount Auburn and the "Rural Cemetery" Movement,' American Quarterly 26 (1974), pp.37–59, quotation p.38. Mount Auburn was not the first rural cemetery. That was Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, which dated to 1796, but Mount Auburn was the more famous and the more ambitious, and its reputation – both at the time and since – eclipsed that of Grove Street Cemetery. For a valuable introduction to early‐nineteenth century attitudes toward cemeteries, see Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), ch.2, 'Gettysburg and the Culture of Death,' esp. pp.63–9. On Mary Moody Emerson specifically, see Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, p.168; and for a more general discussion of both Ralph Waldo Emerson's and his aunt's perspectives on death, see Carlos Baker, Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), pp.11, 17–22 and Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, pp.72–3; Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, pp.168–71; Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, pp.41–2; Levi Lincoln and Charles Fraser quoted in French, 'The Cemetery as Cultural Institution,' pp.48–9, and French quotation, p.49. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, p.181; Francis and Theresa Pulszky, White, Red, Black: Sketches of Society in America (1853) quoted in French, 'The Cemetery as Cultural Institution,' p.51; Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, p.185. David Cannadine also sees similarities between the 'status consciousness' of American Rural Cemeteries and their equivalents in the U.K. at least (Highgate in London and Undercliffe in Bradford). David Cannadine, 'War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,' in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa Publications, 1981) pp.187–242, esp. p.192. Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), p.40, and Schurz and Clay quotations pp.40–41; Cannadine, 'War and Death,' pp.191, 195–6; Sherman quoted in Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1987), p.211; A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War (1966) and Mosley quoted in Cannadine, 'War and Death,' p.196; 2nd Michigan recruit quoted in James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.30. Edward Steere, 'Genesis of American Graves Registration, 1861–1870,' Military Affairs, 12 (1948), pp.149–61, extract from General Orders No.75 (11 Sept. 1861) and quotation p.151; from General Order No.33 (3 Apr. 1862), p.153; letter of Corporal Samuel J. English to his mother, 24/6 July 1861, in Robert Hunt Rhodes (ed.), All For the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes (1985. Paperback Reprint. New York: Random House, 1991), p.26; Steere, 'Genesis of American Graves Registration,' p.150; Robert E. Cray, Jr., 'Commemorating the Prison Ship Dead: Revolutionary Memory and the Politics of Sepulture in the Early Republic, 1776–1808,' William and Mary Quarterly 56 (1999), pp.565–90, quotation p.568. Susan‐Mary Grant, 'For God and Country: Why Men Joined Up for the US Civil War,' History Today 50 (July 2000), pp.21–7, figures p.22; Steere, 'Genesis of American Graves Registration,' p.151; Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary argues that the Federal Government 'understood the symbolic importance of burial rites' at the outset of the war, but does not pursue the point. See To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp.100–101; Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and The Americans (New York: Vintage Books, 1993 [1991]), pp.247–8; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was searching for his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had been shot through the throat at Antietam. He described his search in an article published later that year, 'My Hunt After "The Captain," ' Atlantic Monthly 10 (Dec. 1862), pp.738–64, quotation p.743. For another example of a civilian searching for a relative on the battlefield, see Belle Z. Spencer, 'From a Soldier's Wife,' Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol.26 (Oct. 1864), pp.622–9, which recounts the author's search for her husband in the aftermath of Shiloh; New York Times review of Matthew Brady's Broadway exhibition, 'The Dead of Antietam,' Times, 20 Oct. 1862; Laderman, The Sacred Remains, p.98. Reports of the dead lying unburied on the field can be found in many soldiers' letters from the war. For one example see Rhodes, Diary, pp.57, 73, and also Eric T. Dean, Shook Over Hell: Post‐Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard University Press, 1999 [1997]), pp.66–8; Daniel Holt quoted in Faust, 'A Riddle of Death,' p.16; Rhodes, Diary, 23 Mar. 1862, p.52; anonymous northerner quoted in Royster, The Destructive War, p.248. See also Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and their Experiences (New York: Touchstone Books, 1989 [1988]), pp.62–4. Rhodes, Diary, 30 Sept. 1862, pp.75–6; Stannard notes that hundreds of patents for new kinds of metal coffins were taken out between 1850 and 1880. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death, p.188. The dates indicate that this was in part a response to the rising demand for cadavers by medical schools, and the fear of mutilation of the body after death by exhumation and dissection, rather than a specific response to the Civil War. On this subject see Laderman, The Sacred Remains, pp.73–85, 112–13 and esp. fig.2, and for a detailed description of burial practices on the battlefield see pp.101–10; Dr Thomas Holmes' figures and price and F.A. Hutton quotation and following, Faust, A Riddle of Death, p.14. To place costs in some perspective, Jessica Mitford gives $10.00 as the cost of embalming in 1880. Embalming was more widespread by that time, so costs overall would have decreased; nevertheless, $100 was a considerable sum in the 1860s. Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (Greenwich, Conn.: Crest, 1964 [1963]), p.52. Steere, 'Genesis of American Graves Registration,' pp.151–2; US Statutes at Large, 37th Congress, Session II (17 July 1862) p.596, accessed on 10 June 2004 at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi‐bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=012/llsl012.db&recNum=627. The 14 original national cemeteries established in 1862 were: Alexandria (Virginia), Annapolis (Maryland), Antietam (Maryland), Camp Butler (Illinois), Cypress Hills (New York), Danville (Kentucky), Fort Leavenworth (Kansas), Fort Scott (Kansas), Keokuk (Iowa), Loudon Park (Maryland), Mill Springs (Kentucky), New Albany (Indiana), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) and the Soldiers' Home, Washington DC; Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, pp.41–4. 'National Cemeteries,' Harper's New Monthly Magazine 33 (Aug. 1866), pp.310–22, quotations pp.310–11, 312; New York Times, 4, 15 Nov. 1863; Aceldama, the 'field of blood,' a field near ancient Jerusalem purchased for a cemetery with the blood‐money received by Judas (Matt 27: 8; Acts 1:19): perhaps not the most auspicious image to invoke for the burial of the Union dead. On the haphazard nature of burial during the Revolutionary War, for example, see Cray, 'Commemorating the Prison Ship Dead,' pp.571–2; Edward Steere, 'Early Growth of the National Cemetery System,' Quartermaster Review (March–April 1953) accessed on 10 June 2004 at http://www.qmfound.com/early_growth_of_the_national_cemetery_system.htm; Arlington, the home of Robert E. Lee, had been in Union hands since the start of the war, and was officially purchased by the government in 1864, after which Meigs formally proposed to the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, that it be designated a national cemetery for the burial of those whose families could not afford the expense of transporting them home. Meigs was uncertain as to how permanent the site would be, hence his decision to render the house unfit for human habitation by burying the dead as close to it as possible; Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, pp.263–4; 'National Cemeteries,' p.316; Faust, A Riddle of Death, p.18. Five military cemeteries were established on battlefield sites during the war: Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Stones River in the West, Antietam and Gettysburg in the East. Steere, 'Evolution of the National Cemetery System 1865–1880,' Quartermaster Review (May/June 1953) accessed on 10 June 2004 at http://www.qmfound.com/evolution_of_the_national_ cemetery_system_1865_1880.htm; Philip Bigler, In Honored Glory: Arlington National Cemetery: The Final Post (Arlington, Va.: Vandamere Press, 1992 [1987]), p.34. Steere, 'Early Growth of the National Cemetery System' New York Times, 30 Jan. 1868. R.E. Fenton in the New York Times, 18 Dec. 1867; Times, 30 Jan. 1868. Philip Morgan, 'Of Worms and War: 1380–1558,' in Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (eds.), Death in England: An Illustrated History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000 [1999]), pp.119–46, quotation p.123; 'National Cemeteries,' p.321. Extract from the report of Captain James M. Moore and quotation from letter of M.C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, 16 June 1864, in War of the Rebellion; Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901) Series 3, Vol.4, Part 1, pp.902–4; Laderman, The Sacred Remains, pp.97–8. Steere, 'Genesis of American Graves Registration,' pp.160–61 (Dana quotatin p.160, Steer quotation, p.161); Steere, 'Evolution of the National Cemetery System,' p.6; New York Times, 10 July 1865; for a detailed description of the federal reinterment program see Faust, A Riddle of Death, pp.16–17. Faust, A Riddle of Death, p.18; Sarah Tarlow, 'Romancing the Stones: The Graveyard Boom of the Later 18th Century,' quoted in K.D.M. Snell, 'Gravestones, Belonging and Local Attachment in England, 1700–2000,' Past & Present 179 (2003), p.179; Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, pp.27–8. Laderman, The Sacred Remains, p.101; Ann Douglas, 'Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States,' in David E. Stannard (ed.), Death in America (Pennsylvania: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), pp.49–68; Faust, A Riddle of Death, pp.21–5; On Gettysburg, and the parallels between it and the rural cemetery, see Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp.63–5, 99–102. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, pp.7, 32–3; General Howard quoted in the New York Times, 6 July 1865.