American Experience (1988–…): Season 24, Episode 8 - Death and the Civil War - full transcript

[distant explosions]

NARRATOR:On the evening of May 10, 1864,

as the Civil War ground on
into its fourth straight year,

26-year-old
James Robert Montgomery,

a private in the Confederate
Signal Corps in Virginia,

wrote a letter to his father
back home

in Camden, Mississippi,

dripping blood on the paper
as he wrote

from the horrific shoulder woundhe had sustained

a few hours earlier.

READER:
Dear Father, this is
my last letter to you.



I have been struck
by a piece of shell

and my right shoulder
is horribly mangled

and I know death is inevitable.

I am very weak,
but I write to you

because I know
you would be delighted

to read a word
from your dying son.

I know death is near,

that I will die far from home
and friends of my early youth,

but I have friends here too
who are kind to me.

My friend Fairfax will write youat my request

and give you the particulars
of my death.

My grave will be marked
so that you may visit it

if you desire to do so.

It is optionary with you



whether you let my remains
rest here or in Mississippi.

I would like to rest
in the graveyard

with my dear mother
and brothers,

but it's a matter
of minor importance.

Give my love to all my friends.

My strength fails me.

My horse and my equipments
will be left for you.

Again, a long farewell to you.

May we meet in heaven.

Your dying son,
J. R. Montgomery.

NARRATOR:
James Montgomery's friend,
Fairfax,

did write soon thereafter,forwarding some of his effects,

and assuring his father that he
had been conscious to the end

and that he had died at peace
with himself and his maker.

But it was little consolation.

Though the grave
had been marked,

the family was never able
to find it

and were thus never able
to realize their fond hope

of bringing their dead son home.

READER:
The dead, the dead, the dead,

our dead,
or South or North, ours all,

our young men once so handsome
and so joyous, taken from us,

the son from the mother,
the husband from the wife,

the dear friend
from the dear friend.

And everywhere among these
countless graves.

We see, and ages yet may see,

on monuments and gravestones,
singly or in masses,

to thousands
or tens of thousands,

the significant word "Unknown."

Walt Whitman, 1865.

NARRATOR:
Nothing in the experience
of the 31 million people

living in America
on the eve of the Civil War

could have prepared Americans

for what was about to break overthem over the next four years.

It was only in part the shockingtrauma of secession itself,

as the long-festering debate
over freedom and slavery,

union and states' rights,
burst into the open

following Abraham Lincoln's
election in November 1860,

and tore the country in two.

Something else
would challenge Americans

over the next four years,something even more fundamental,

something different
from the task

of saving or dividing a nation,

ending or maintaining slavery,or winning a military conflict.

With the coming of the Civil
War, the first modern war,

the first mass war
of the modern age,

death would enter the experienceof the American people,

and the body politic
of the American nation,

as it never had before,

on a scale and in a manner noone had ever imagined possible,

and under circumstances
for which the nation

would prove completely
unprepared.

DAVID W. BLIGHT:
History is full
of brutal surprises

that we really don't see coming.

Nobody predicted Antietam.

Nobody predicted Gettysburg.

What the Civil War brought was

this terrible modern
confrontation

of a set of old 18th-
and 19th-century values

with modern warfare.

And the result, of course,
is mass slaughter

that is harder and harder
for anyone to explain

even to themselves.

NARRATOR:
The unimaginable scale
of the slaughter,

the sheer numbers of the dead,

would be all but impossible
to comprehend.

Nearly 2 1/2 percent
of the population

would die in the conflict--

an estimated 750,000 people
in all,

more than in all other
American wars combined.

Never before and never since

have so many Americans died
in any war,

by any measure or reckoning.

DREW GILPIN FAUST:Transpose the percentage of dead

that mid-19th-century America
faced into our own time--

seven million dead, if we
had the same percentage.

What would we,
as a nation today, be like

if we faced the loss

of seven million individuals?

And so it invaded
just about everyone's life

in one way or another.

NARRATOR:
The enormous tide of death
unleashed by the war

posed challenges for which
there were no ready answers

when the war began-

challenges so large,
they frequently overwhelmed

the abilities of individuals andinstitutions to respond to them.

Challenges that called forth--

slowly at first,
by fits and starts--

immense and eventually
heroic efforts

by individuals, groups
and the government,

as Americans worked to improvisenew solutions, new institutions,

new ways of coping with death
on an unimaginable scale.

Before the Civil War,

there were no national
cemeteries in America,

no provisions
for identifying the dead

or for notifying next of kin,
or for providing aid

to the suffering families
of dead veterans.

No federal relief organizations,no effective ambulance corps,

no adequate federal hospitals,

no federal provisions
for burying the dead.

No Arlington Cemetery.

No Memorial Day.

FAUST:
The United States embarkedon a new relationship with death

in a whole series of ways.

As a nation, it embarked on
a new relationship with death,

because its survival
would be assured and defined

by the deaths of so manyhundreds of thousands of people.

So it would become inseparable
from death in that sense.

In a second way,the United States would develop

a new relationship with death
in a national sense,

because of the pension system,
the reburial system,

the bureaucracy of death,

that would transform the natureof the federal government.

So it would become
a different nation--

a stronger,
more centralized nation

with more responsibilities--

partly because of taking on
these obligations

that would grow out
of Civil War death.

But then there are
all the changes

for individuals who were livingin a world of mourning and loss

in the North and in the South,

where ultimately 20%of the white men of military age

were going to die

and where everyone
had lost a loved one.

And so lives were shattered
in undefined ways,

often because so many
of the dead were unknown.

And ideas about what death was
would be changed

by the intensity and widespreadnature of this experience.

Certainly, as we think about
the obligation

of citizens to the state

and what the state owes
its citizens,

particularly with regard
to the thing that we...

in some sense,
the only thing we really own,

which is our own body
and our own mortality.

The Civil War made us rethink
that definition as a country,

and as a people.

What do governments owe
to their bodies,

to the bodies that make them up?

And that becomes a central
question in the war.

In the Civil War,
I think we come as a nation

to the insistence that
citizenship is predicated

on the willingness of people

to lay down their lives
for the state.

That's the absolute bottom line.

So I think the war casts
not just a long shadow,

but a long sense of reality
over who we are

and how we deal with, really,
those fundamental questions.

You know, everybody dies.

Our mortality is assured.

But the way we grapple with thatreality changes over time.

And the Civil War shows us
that they did change

and how they changed.

And to be alive to that change

is something that the Civil War,I think, asks us to do.

[birds singing]

THOMAS LYNCH:
I think when it comes
to the sort of essentials

for a good death,
a good funeral,

essentials are
a corpse, mourners,

somebody to broker
the changed relationship

between the living and the dead,the peace between them.

Something to say a version of,"Behold, I show you a mystery,"

and then transport,
some movement,

you know, from here to there.

We get them home again.

We get them
to the further shore.

We get them into their grave,
their tomb, their fire,

up into the tree.

We get them if we, you know,
live elsewhere,

into the side of the mountain

where the birds come
and pick the bones clean,

and we describe
the birds as holy.

It's what we do.

And humans, I mean,
we've been doing it

for 40,000 or 50,000 years.

And the routine, the fashion's,changed a little bit,

but the fundamental business
is the same:

corpse, mourners,
sacred text, transport.

We move them.

What changed about that
with the Civil War was

not only the scope of mortality,but the geographics changed.

NARRATOR:
America on the eve
of the Civil War

was a profoundly
religious place,

a place of deeply rooted

and almost universally held
assumptions and beliefs

about the meaning
of death and dying,

about the nature of God
and the afterlife,

and about what constituted
a good death

and the right way to die.

FAUST:
One of the most striking
differences

between us in the 21st century

and the inhabitants
of the 19th century

is our attitudes about death.

And death was then very much
a part of life

and seen as something

that needed to be
thought about constantly

in order to live well
and, ultimately, to die well.

This was very much a Christian
approach to dying,

and the United States

was overwhelmingly
Christian at this time.

Approximately four times
as many people

attended church every week as
voted in the election of 1860.

And you could tell
by watching how someone died

what that life before had meant

and what the eternal life beyondwas likely to be like.

And an individual who was dyingwould die at home.

This was very much a part
of Victorian culture

and defined a good death--

would be surrounded
by loved ones,

would indicate
a readiness to die,

a welcoming an embrace
of salvation

and Christian principles,

and then often last words
for the loved ones

surrounding the dying person.

And so that was the idealized
good death.

SCHANTZ:
From the 1820s on
up until the Civil War begins

there was this great evangelicalawakening, North and South,

going across the country

and, with that,
a kind of totally redefined,

more corporeal vision
of heaven--

that all of our bodies
will be reconstituted,

and we'll have a big family
reunion in heaven,

and we'll recognize each other

and be able to basically
pick up where we left off.

What you have is a universe
that is telling people,

"This is how it's going to be.

"You will see everyone
that you know.

"And, in fact, you'll live
in a purified body,

"and it will be whole.

"It probably
will never get dark.

There may not be oceans
to separate us."

I mean, it's the ultimate
victory.

Your body will
come together again,

no matter what's done to it.

And you have a generation
of people who have been taught

and understand that my husband,my brother, my son,

will be whole with me.

And it's only a matter of time.

[cannon fire, explosions]

NARRATOR:
It began as a lark,

almost as a relief for many
if not most Americans,

as a welcome bursting
of the floodgates

after decades of rising
sectional mistrust,

tension and animosity.

GEORGE F. WILL:
The soldiers went off to war
expecting this would be quick.

The Southerners thought,

"We have a cavalier tradition,
we have a martial tradition.

"We'll bloody their nose and
they'll think better of this.

"And they'll say, 'Letthe erring sisters go in peace,'

and we'll divide the country."

The North thought, "Well,
we'll just see about that.

"We're in the North,
we're more industrial,

we'll march off
and settle this."

SCHANTZ:If you've got Lincoln recruitingsoldiers for 90 days,

that tells you, in part,

what people are thinking
of the duration of the war

that this will be fairly quick.

And so I think the expectationsfor casualties,

based on anything Americans
had experienced before,

would have just been
infinitesimal.

NARRATOR:For three months, the fledglingarmies parried and feinted,

marched and countermarched,
skirmished and regrouped.

By mid-June, the combined
death toll stood at just 20.

And then came summer

and the first intimation
of what was to come,

at the battle of Bull Run,

or Manassas,
as the Confederates called it.

On July 21, two enormous armies,nearly 60,000 men in all,

blundered into each other
on a field of battle

just 30 miles
from Washington, D.C.,

in the lush Virginia farmland

outside the tiny town
of Manassas Junction.

The day ended in a shocking
and ignominious Union defeat

and bloody rout--

one that stunned soldiers,
officers, politicians

and the public on both sides

when the casualty figures
came in.

900 men in all had been killed
and 2,700 wounded--

nearly half the battlefield
deaths

of the entire two-year-longMexican War-- in just 12 hours.

Three months after Fort Sumter,

hopes of a brief
and all but bloodless war

had begun to fade away.

[cannon fire, explosions]

WILL:
It wasn't, I suppose, until
Shiloh in the spring of '62

that both sides began to realize

that massed armies
clashing like this

were going to be not decisive
in any one battle,

that it was going to be
a war of attrition,

a war of railroads,
of manufacturing--

a modern war, in other words,

a war of societies
against one another.

That the North would have
a great advantage,

but it would be an advantage
brought to bear slowly

and manifested incrementally

and lubricated at every step
of the way by blood.

FAUST:
Part of the death toll is theresult of a military undertaking

that engages such a large
percentage of the population.

2.1 million Northerners
were mobilized,

about 880,000 Southerners.

And it's also one in which
there are ways to kill people

that are newly developed,

so the technology enables
a level of killing.

Weapons with much
greater range--

rifled muskets, which have
a greatly enhanced range

over the smooth-bore
predecessors.

J. DAVID HACKER:
It is a perfect storm
in that regard.

The war has the misfortune
of being fought at a time

when military tactics,
military strategy,

was a step behind technology,

and of being fought

about ten years before
we really have

a proper understanding
of what causes disease--

how to prevent disease
from breaking out

and how to treat
what diseases we have.

And as a result,

you bring all these men infrom these isolated communities,

they suffer massive outbreaks
of camp diseases,

and two out of three, roughly,

of Civil War deaths
are occurring

in camps as a result of disease.

NARRATOR:
What struck most people

exposed to the horror of the newbattlefield conditions

was the almost complete
lack of preparation

for the bloody tide
of death flooding off them.

No one seemed to be in charge.

SCHANTZ:
There's no systematic
infrastructure

for gathering the dead,

for helping to identify them,
for getting them home.

There's no infrastructure

for handling tens of thousands
of maimed and dead soldiers.

And so, you know, after Shiloh,

bodies are just laying around
on the field,

and wild hogs are running out.

FAUST:
I think it would have been
inconceivable to people

that they would have needed
the scale of intervention

that they should have had.

And as the numbers
consistently increased

over the first years of the war,each battle surprised people

because it was more than they
ever thought was possible.

And so they were always
one assumption behind

as they thought about death.

NARRATOR:
From the start,
in the North and the South,

individuals and volunteer
organizations stepped in

to try to fill the void.

In June 1861, a women's group
in New York City

persuaded Abraham Lincoln
to authorize the creation

of a private relief agency,
the U.S. Sanitary Commission,

a volunteer group intended
to help organize relief

for the Union wounded and dead.

Raising funds through private
and community donations

and staffed in large part byvolunteers, many of them women,

it would soon prove invaluable,

as would other voluntary
organizations,

like the U.S. Christian
Commission.

As the number of dead
and wounded soldiers

coming into Washington

swelled across the first year
of the war,

a 39-year-old clerk
in the U.S. Patent Office

named Clara Barton

saw first-hand how ill-preparedthe Army Medical Department was

and lobbied the War Department

to let her bring her own medicalsupplies to the battlefields.

Outfitting her own wagon
with bandages

and all the supplies
she could gather,

Barton headed out to thegrimmest battlefields of the war

as it relentlessly escalated
over the next year and a half.

In the spring of 1862,
Frederick Law Olmsted,

the designer of Central Park

and now director of the U.S.
Sanitary Commission,

came south to oversee relief
efforts following Shiloh

and the bloody battles
on the Virginia Peninsula.

He was shocked by the inadequacyof the provisions

made by the U.S. government

and watched silently as
shiploads and trainloads

of dead and wounded men
were unloaded at the wharf.

READER:
They arrived,
dead and alive together,

in the same close boxcar, many
with awful wounds festering.

In this republic of suffering,

individuals do not often becomevery strongly marked

in one's mind.

NARRATOR:
The systems in place
in the Confederacy

were even more rudimentary.

Volunteer, church

and state-based
charitable organizations

rose up in the South, too.

But hampered from the start
by fewer resources,

Southerners would soon be
even more overwhelmed

than their Northern counterpartsby the logistical challenges

of grappling with
so many dead soldiers.

[cannon fire, explosions]

NARRATOR:
Blown apart
by canister or shell,

shot through the head
or lungs or guts,

bleeding to death in theno-man's-land between the lines

or succumbing to typhoid fever
or dysentery

in a filthy army hospital

or enemy prison campa thousand miles away from home,

the brutal circumstances
and great distances of the war

shook to the core
deeply-held beliefs

about the nature of the gooddeath and the right way to die.

Where sermons and religious
tracts provided lessons

about life's appropriate end,

the battlefields and hastilyimprovised hospitals of the war

provided materialfor a different sort of lesson,

one on how not to die:
suddenly, violently,

with little or no time
to prepare for the end,

far from home, often alone,

with no last words to impart
or a familiar face to look on,

unsurrounded by family
or friends,

uncomforted by mothers,
sisters and wives.

Anguished at the prospect
of dying far from home

and determined not to die alone,

soldiers worked to provide
themselves with surrogates

for the good death--

making pacts with tent mates
and fellow soldiers

to convey to their families

what had happened to them
in their final hours,

writing letters,
crafting last words

and sending them home
through friends and comrades.

FAUST:
What I find so striking is
the kinds of improvisation

that soldiers and the civiliansaround them in the battlefront--

nurses, doctors, others--

brought to try to bringthe realities of the good death,

even in these almost
impossible situations.

One of the most striking
of these improvisations

is the reports of soldiers
on battlefields

who surrounded themselves with
pictures of their loved ones.

Photography had just become
a force in American life,

and so soldiers could have
these little photographs,

often in cases,

that they would take with them
of their family members.

And so the idea of a soldier

creating his domestic deathbed
on a battlefield

by putting all these pictures
around himself

is just heart-wrenching.

NARRATOR:It was often complete strangers

who would take upon themselves
the mundane but essential

and intensely personal work
of death.

READER:
Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

Dear Madam.

As you in all probability

have not heard of the death
of your husband

and as I was a witness
to his death,

I consider it my duty
to write to you

although I am a stranger to you.

He died happy, and I certainlythink that he is now better off.

A few minutes before he breathed
his last, he sang,

"Jesus can make a dying bed
as soft as downy pillows are"

and said he would have likedto have seen you before he died.

He said that the Lord's will
be done

and for you to meet him
in heaven.

He died as I wish to die and asI believe all persons wish to.

READER:
Mr. William K. Rash.

Your son R. A. Rash is no more.

The grim monster death
has ravaged him.

But one consolation: he died inthe full discharge of his duty

in the defense
of his home and country.

LYNCH:What the Civil War showed us is

the obligation of the living
to care for the dead,

to do their best
to get them home,

or at least to embody them
in some way,

so they do not fall
off the earth.

The implements
and the possessions

and the family Bibles

and the made-up stories
about pre-death salvations,

and the letters written home

by surgeons who amputated limbsbefore the death occurred.

These types of kindnesses,
this is like Humanity 101--

we do this for one another.

Because somehow we see
in ourselves the possibility

this could happen
to one of ours,

and we'd want this kindness
done to us.

And the kindness is not that
we resurrect the dead.

The kindness is that we bear
the bad news home.

NARRATOR:
On battlefields where death
could come

with terrifying suddenness,

many soldiers wrote home in thehours before the fighting began

to share what might prove
to be their last words

with family members in advance.

READER:
I wish you to have
my last words and thoughts.

Remember me as one who always
showed his worst side

and who was perhaps
better than he seemed.

I shall hope to survive
and meet you again.

But it may not be so,
and so I have expressed myself

in the possible view
of a fatal result.

READER:Molly, I have often thought if Ihave to die on the battlefield,

if some kind friend would just
lay my Bible under my head

and your likeness on my breast

with the golden curls
of hair in it,

that it would be enough.

This is the last you may ever
hear from me.

I have time to tell you I died
like a man.

NARRATOR:
On rare occasions, soldiers
found themselves in a position

to communicate
with faraway loved ones

at the very moment
of death itself.

READER:
September 17, 1862.

Near Sharpsburg.

On the field.

Dear Mother, it is a misty,
moisty morning.

We are engaging the enemy

and are drawn up
in support of Hooker,

who is now banging away
most briskly.

I write in the saddle
to send you my love

and to say that I am
very well so far.

Dearest mother, I am wounded
so as to be helpless.

Goodbye, if so it must be.

I think I die in victory.

Dearest love to father
and all my dear brothers.

Our troops have left the part
of the field where I lay.

Mother, yours, Wilder.

All is well with those
that have faith.

NARRATOR:
It was not only men
on the field of battle

who faced death
in great numbers,

under horrific conditions,
far from home.

From the moment
hostilities began,

fugitive slaves began fleeing
plantations and farms

in the South by the thousands,

streaming north across the Unionlines in great numbers,

braving death at the hands
of armed Home Guards,

who scoured the woods
and swamps,

hunting down fugitives
with shotguns.

Hoping to find freedom,

the tens of thousands of men,
women and children

who crowded into the teeming
Union "contraband" camps

instead faced nightmarish
conditions,

inadequate food and shelter,

and life-threatening illnesses
and epidemics.

BLIGHT:
They were essentially
America's first version

of large refugee camps.

And some of them became
disease-ridden death traps.

We have plenty of accounts nowof people dying, like ten a day,

20 a day in some of these
contraband camps.

The young and the old.

People who had trekked
hundreds of miles sometimes

to get to these
contraband camps.

Freedom sometimes meant dyingof disease in a refugee station

somewhere
in the Mississippi Valley

or somewhere on the rim
of Tennessee

or outside Washington, D.C.

NARRATOR:
Slavery itself had placed
African Americans

on a level of intimacy
with death

few white Americans
could comprehend.

READER:
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,burned to death, lied to death,

kicked and cuffed to death,
and grieved to death,

a whole nation of people

would be the greatest ignoranceunder the sun.

VINCENT BROWN:
It's a crushing and terrible
burden to bear

to actually have to, you know,
live your life

through the will
and desires of another.

You can be killed
at the whim of a master.

You can be beaten summarily,

and there's nothing to stop
a master from doing that.

For African Americans,
they're used to, every day,

kind of understanding
that they have, you know,

no rights of citizenship,
certainly,

but almost don't have
the full rights of personhood

in the slave societies
of the South.

And so there's a kind
of civil death there

that they're suffering
all along.

If it's not death,
it's less than full life.

And there were slaves who wouldthink death would be preferable

to life under those conditions.

NARRATOR:
As the death tolls mounted

and the number
of fugitive slaves

crowding the contraband camps
grew larger,

abolitionist leaders
like Henry Highland Garnet

and Frederick Douglass urged
the Lincoln administration

to take the boldest possible
actions to free the slaves

and to end the long-standing
federal prohibition

barring black men from fightingand dying in the U.S. Army,

offering a distinctively
African-American understanding

of the difference between
a bad death and a good one.

A bad death was death
experienced

under the crushing weight
of slavery.

A good death was death
experienced by free men,

battling to end evil
in the world.

READER:
September 5, 1862.

Day before yesterday, we marchedover the battle ground.

All of our men had been buried,

but the Yankees lay
just as they were killed.

I never saw such a scene before.

It must have been
nearly a thousand.

Our wagon actually ran over
the dead bodies in the road.

I don't suppose the dead Yankeesof that fight

will ever be buried.

It will be an awful job to thosewho do it, if it is ever done.

FAUST:
One of the most stunning
realizations

I've ever had as a historian
is how much change there was

in the sense of responsibility
towards the dead

in the course of the very shortperiod of the Civil War.

At the beginning of the war,
there was no sense

that the federal government
had a responsibility

towards the bodies of soldiers
lost in service to the state,

and the Confederate government

did not have that sense
of responsibility, either.

There was no returning of bodies

or sense that bodies
needed to be identified

or that there needed to be
communication with families

about what had happened
to their loved ones.

NARRATOR:
When the war began, commanding
officers in both armies

had been issued cursory generalorders, making them responsible,

insofar as circumstances
permitted,

for the "decent interment"
of the fallen.

But as the war escalated,

the existing resources
were quickly overwhelmed,

and as late as September 1862,

the Union Army still had
no regular burial details,

no grave registration units,
no adequate ambulance corps

to remove the dead and dying
from the field of battle.

Soldiers on both sidesworried deeply, and with reason,

about what would happen
to their remains.

"I have a horror," one soldier
from South Carolina wrote,

"of being thrown out
in a neglected place

or being trampled on as I have
seen a number of graves here."

READER:
It is dreadful to contemplate

being killed
on the field of battle

without a kind hand to hide
one's remains

from the eye of the world or thegnawing of animals and buzzards.

READER:They dig holes and pile them inlike dead cattle

and have teams
to draw them together,

like picking up pumpkins.

It is dreadful to see the poor
soldier just thrown in a ditch

and covered over
without any box.

This is not
how we bury folks at home.

[cannon fire, explosions]

NARRATOR:Even in a very brutal conflict,Antietam stood out.

Soldiers on both sides fought
with a kind of madness,

a super-adrenalized fury,

heedless of the normal instinctsof self-preservation.

Clara Barton arrived around noon

as the bloodshed raged
on the northern edge

of a massive cornfield,one of the worst killing places.

She watched silently

as surgeons hastily dressed
mortal wounds with corn husks,

handed over the wagonload
of medical supplies

she had spent much
of the past year gathering,

then did what she could

to help scores of hideously
wounded and dying men,

supplying lanternsfor the surgeons from her wagon

when the sun went down
and the battle ended.

The casualties had been
staggering.

READER:
The dead were almost
wholly unburied,

and the stench arising from it

was such as to breed
a pestilence.

Stretched along, in one straightline, ready for interment,

at least a thousand blackened
bloated corpses,

with blood and gas protruding
from every orifice

and maggots holdinghigh carnival over their heads.

NARRATOR:
Five days after the battle
of Antietam,

hundreds of Confederate corpsesstill lay rotting on the field.

Origen Bingham,
of the 137th Pennsylvania,

was assigned with his regiment
to bury the neglected dead.

It was, he said,

"The most disagreeable duty thatcould have been assigned to us.

Tongue cannot describe
the horrible sight."

To steel his troops
to the hideous work,

Bingham secured permission

from the provost marshal's
office

to buy liquor for his men.

One federal burial party
found another way

to make the work go faster

and simply threw 58 dead
Confederate soldiers

down a local farmer's well.

WILL:
September 17, 1862
is to this day

the bloodiest day in Americanhistory: the battle of Antietam.

A few days after that battle,

some men in civilian clothes
carrying strange devices

picked their way throughthe fields covered with bodies,

taking pictures.

They were from Matthew Brady's
Manhattan studio.

Their work two months later
became an exhibit in New York

called "The Dead of Antietam."

And suddenly, the relationship
of the front in a war

to the home front
changed forever.

FAUST:
The civilians of the North are
just astonished and horrified.

And one reviewer says,
"It's as if dead bodies

were dumped in the middle
of the street."

SCHANTZ:
Five days after Antietam,
Lincoln is out

with a preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation,

and the war publicly begins
to shift in its purpose.

And then we get "The Deadof Antietam," the Brady exhibit,

which begins to give a kind
of palpable physical shape

to those bodies who havesacrificed to free other bodies.

So both of those things
begin to get definition

by the end of 1862--
both emancipation

and how we're going to deal
with death in the war.

NARRATOR:
Antietam had been farfrom a clear-cut Union victory,

but Union forces
had not given ground.

They had ended Lee's invasion
of the north,

at least for the time being.

And despite
the enormous carnage,

the bloody battle
had given Abraham Lincoln

the victory he needed

and the additional
military incentive

to make public his intention
to emancipate the slaves

in states under rebellion,
effective three months later.

On January 1, 1863, the
Proclamation went into effect.

Almost immediately,

tens of thousands of free blacksfrom the North

and fugitive slaves
from across the South

rushed to join the Union Army.

Eager to fight, and if need be
die, in the cause of freedom

and of saving a union now openlycommitted to emancipation--

at least in part--

the new black recruits
would be paid less

than their white counterparts,

routinely assigned
the most menial

and least desirable tasks--

including workon the horrific burial details--

and when finally allowed
to fight,

often given the most
dangerous assignments.

Of the 180,000 black Americans

who would eventually serve
in the Union Army,

one in five would perish.

FAUST:
For African-American soldiers
in the Union Army,

death had a very different
meaning and reality

from their comrades-in-arms,
white Union soldiers,

because African-Americans
were much more at risk

in the sense that white
Southerners, Confederates,

saw them as, essentially,
slaves engaged in an uprising,

rather than as soldiers
who should be treated

with certain respect

under the understanding of whata prisoner of war represented.

BROWN:
African-American soldiers

can't expect any quarter
from Confederates.

They've known this
from their lives as slaves.

They've known that
if they rise up

that the reaction
will be so extreme

as to force them
not to contemplate it again.

NARRATOR:
Unlike their white Northern
counterparts,

black soldiers
were routinely killed

rather than being taken
prisoners,

and atrocities were common,

most notoriously at the Battle
of Fort Pillow in 1864,

when nearly two-thirds

of the approximately
300 black soldiers present

were killed after having
surrendered

and their bodies thrown
into the Wichita River.

BLIGHT:
Back at the front, men--soldiers on the line, officers,

civilians who followed the army,
and eventually families

who went looking
for their dead loved ones--

see the carnage of war,

the dismembering of bodies
and the loss of bodies,

the loss of identities
altogether.

Could you even find Johnny

if you went to the front
to find him?

Very often the answer was no.

And even if you did find him,
he might be in a mass grave.

Could you get him reinterred?

People were confronted now withnot only the death of youth,

the death of loved ones,

but death in faraway places,

death without a story
wrapped around it.

Death without knowing,
"How did this happen?"

READER:If I could have got to our child

and spoken loving
and encouraging words to him,

and held his dear hand in mine,

and received his last breath...

But it was not so to be.

Well, neither the Confederate
States of America

or the federal government
really had a system

of personnel records
when the war began.

Statistics were collected,

but the emphasis wasn't
on the individual soldier.

And there was no systematic
attempt to collect who died,

to notify survivors.

So people went missing; people
went buried unidentified.

The missing in action disappear,and never followed completely.

NARRATOR:
Every great battle
sent civilian populations

on a mad quest for information.

With no official responsibilityon either side

for notifying next of kin,
newspapers north and south

published long lists
of the casualties

after every major engagement,

gleaned from official
military reports.

Families and friends anxiously
pored over them,

hoping against hope
not to see a familiar name.

READER:
I do feel anxious
to see the papers

and get the list of casualties
from Company K.

And yet I dread to see it.

FAUST:
Then there was the problem of,

"Are you sure
your loved one's dead?

Has he been correctly
identified?"

Because there were not
formal processes of dog tags,

there were not adequate
processes of notification.

Those were informal as well.

NARRATOR:
The casualty lists

were frustratingly inaccurate
and incomplete.

Sons or brothers listed as
"slightly wounded"

often turned out to be dead.

Husbands reported as "killed inaction" later appeared unharmed.

FAUST:
People were so eager for signs

about the deaths
of their absent loved ones--

what they were denied
by not having them at home.

When you were in New York state

and you were told that your sonor husband had died in Virginia,

how could you be sure?

You wanted that body home,
because you wanted to bury it,

because you wanted to see
yourself and know yourself.

That meant that bodies
had to be shipped.

How do you ship bodies
in the 19th century,

and how do you deal with
the fact that bodies putrefy?

So embalming becomes
a very important force

that it hadn't been in the yearsbefore the Civil War.

And there are also other
kinds of technologies,

such as refrigeratedtransportation cases for bodies,

that are devised and become muchmore common during this period.

NARRATOR:
In the fall of 1862,

the U.S. Sanitary Commission
created a Hospital Directory

to meet the growing demand
for information

about the wounded and the dead.

They were soon inundated
by inquiries

from anxious families across theNorth, desperately seeking news.

READER:
Will you please to inform me
at your earliest convenience

whether my son, Joseph H.
Hampton, is alive or dead?

If alive and wounded,
please be so kind as to state

what his wounds are and where
he lies and if cared for.

And if dead, oh, pray let meknow it and relieve my anxiety.

READER:
It is now four weeks

since we received a letter
from my dear father

and heard that he was very sick,

and we have not heard
a word since.

My mother is almost crazy

because she cannot hear
from my dear father.

I wonder if anyone there
would please be so kind

as to write
a few lines back again

whether my father
is dead or alive.

If we cannot pay you,
the Lord will.

NARRATOR:
Civilian volunteers
like Katherine Wormeley,

who worked for the U.S.
Sanitary Commission,

did everything they could
to close the gap

between dead and dying soldiersand their next of kin.

READER:
So many nameless men come down
to us, speechless and dying,

that now we write the names
and regiments of the bad cases

and fasten them
to their clothing,

so that if they are speechless
when they reach other hands,

they may not die like dogsand be buried in nameless graves

and remain forever missing
to their friends.

FAUST:
About half of the 750,000
estimated dead

were never identified.

So that meant that there were

hundreds of thousands
of Americans, North and South,

who never had the certainty
of seeing a body,

of knowing the story
of how their loved one died,

of whether that person suffered,

whether that person wasconscious at the time of death,

whether that person hada lingering spell in a hospital,

whether that person has a grave.

And so for some of them,
at least,

there was a sense that the lovedone might walk in the door.

And they would write about it,

knowing that was
a kind of magical thinking--

that the person had,
certainly, to be dead,

if he hadn't been heard from
for five years, a decade.

And yet, there was an inability

to really emotionally
resolve that loss.

LYNCH:The notion that the dead are notonly gone but disappeared...

gone we can take-- we have
a religious context for that.

But what we ask for is a
sufficient remnant to say,

"We consign;
we choose the oblivion;

"we take them
to the further shore

and turn them back over
to whomever's in charge here."

And so, to me, the connection
between the dead at Gettysburg

and the dead in tsunamis

and the dead
at the World Trade Center

is that we couldn't get
their bodies back,

to let them go at our own pace,

into oblivions that
we define and choose.

It's the only way
we seem to be able

to exact some comfort for us.

NARRATOR:
Even under the best
of circumstances,

when the body was foundand identified and brought home,

the death of a loved one
was the beginning

of a long and agonizing journey

that for many Americans
lasted a lifetime.

In March 1863,

Dr. Henry Bowditch
of Boston, Massachusetts,

received a terse telegram
from a cousin

serving in the Union Army
with his only son, Nathaniel.

The news struck him "like a
dagger in my heart," he said.

READER:
Potomac Creek, March 18, 1863.

Nat shot in jaw.

Wound in abdomen.

Dangerous.

Come at once.

FAUST:
So Henry Bowditch got
on a train to go to Washington

telling himself that Nathaniel
had been wounded,

and picking up along the way

newspapers
and other distractions

that he thought an injured man
might find amusing

while he recovered.

When Bowditch got off the trainin Washington,

he was met and told
that Nathaniel had died.

And Henry said he was stunned.

He had not dared
to let himself think that

that would be
what he would learn.

NARRATOR:
On receiving the news
of his son's death,

Bowditch said
he "fairly broke down."

He was escorted by train
and wagon

to the camp of the First
Massachusetts Cavalry

and taken to the tent
where his son's body lay.

READER:
I scarcely know
what to think or do.

I seem almost stunned
by the news.

My whole nature yearns to see
and hear him once again.

God has been very kind to me
all my life long,

and I have an abiding faith
that this blow

is only a disguised blessing.

Nevertheless, at times,
I feel crushed.

FAUST:
He talks about not wanting toshow emotion in front of others,

and yet, soon it's clear
that he is out of control.

He cannot control this grief,

and the depth of it
just overwhelms him.

He finds himself
bursting into tears;

he thinks he's been made like awoman or a child, in some ways,

as he confronts
this welter of emotion.

NARRATOR:
Desperate to find some way

to keep his dead son's memory
alive

and some tangible means
of perpetuating his presence,

he had Nathaniel's body embalmed

and brought home
to Massachusetts

and buried him beneath an exactstone likeness of his saber

in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

But he felt the need to do more.

FAUST:
Nathaniel died
on the battlefield

in a way that Henry Bowditch
believed was not necessary

if an adequate ambulance servicehad existed.

So Henry Bowditch begins
to become

an avid writer and advocate

for an ambulance service
in the Union Army.

NARRATOR:
Hoping his status
as a grieving parent

would lend weight
to his arguments,

Bowditch published "A Brief Pleafor an Ambulance System

for the Army
of the United States."

In it, he argued
that the government

had a wider obligation
to the soldiers

it asked to fight and die
in its name.

READER:
If any government under Heaven
ought to be paternal,

the United States authority,

deriving, as it does,all its powers from the people,

should surely be such,and should dispense that power,

in full streams of benignant
mercy, upon its soldiers.

FAUST:
Well, Gettysburg,
it's in the North,

so it brings the North
into the war

in a way that it hadn't been.

Many people in the North
could escape

the direct effects of the war

in a way not much of the South
was able to do.

So, in a sense, Gettysburg makesit a national war

in its impact
on civilian societies.

It's the scale
of that battle also.

7,000 dead.

22,000 wounded being cared forin a town that had about, what?

2,400 inhabitants.

How could they take care of
these dead and wounded?

NARRATOR:
As Robert E. Lee

and the badly battered Army
of Northern Virginia

retreated southward
from Pennsylvania,

ending the second and final
Confederate invasion

of the North,

7,000 slain men
and 3,000 dead horses

lay strewn across the field
in the summer heat.

In three days, Union
and Confederate forces

had suffered almost
as many casualties

as in all previous American warscombined.

Once again, the work of buryingthousands upon thousands of dead

fell to the Union forces
who held

the devastated battleground,

and to the stunned citizens
of Gettysburg itself,

who were implored to help
the beleaguered Union soldiers

overwhelmed by the magnitude
of the task before them.

The mass burials proceeded
in the summer heat.

Confederates were buried
in trenches

containing 150 or more men,
the decomposing bodies

often hurled rather
than laid to rest.

Sometimes
the rotting bodies ruptured,

compelling burial parties
to work elsewhere

until the stench had dissipated.

Two soldiers from Maine
received permission

to return to the torn
and shattered field

and search for any sign
of a close friend

they had last seen
on the third day of battle.

READER:
We found him face down,
and with many others,

the flesh eaten, in that
hot climate, by maggots,

but not so bad but
that we could recognize him.

When we went to bury him,all we could find to dig a grave

was an old hoe
in a small building.

The bottom of the grave was
covered with empty knapsacks.

We laid in our beloved brother

and covered him
with another knapsack

and over all put as much earth
as we could find.

We found a piece
of hardwood box cover

and cut his name on it
with a jackknife

and nailed it to the tree
at the head of his grave.

FAUST:
The battle in July,

and people were still putting
peppermint oil on their faces

when frost comes in the fall,
because the stench

of the dead bodies
is still in the air.

Some months after the battle

that miasma of death
and loss and decay

is hanging over that town.

How could people live through
that and not be transformed?

NARRATOR:
Something new in
the American experience

would now begin to arise
from the fields of Gettysburg

as in the days, weeks and monthsfollowing the battle

the tiny Pennsylvania town
now became the setting

for one of the greatest
collective efforts

to honor the dead in the historyof the republic.

Though no formal policy
or appropriation

for burying the dead would
emerge during the war itself,

the year before, Congress had
passed measures

giving the president
and the War Department

the power to purchase land
near battlefields

as circumstance and public
health concerns dictated--

often adjacent to theoverflowing military hospitals.

But the burial ground that now
began to take shape

south of Gettysburg-- one offive federal military cemeteries

created during the war for the
dead of a particular battle--

would go far beyond
the practical needs

of disposing of dead bodies.

Not long after the battle,
with financial help

from every state in the Union

that had lost men
in the engagement,

a local lawyer named David Willsoversaw the purchase

of 17 acres in the town,
which were soon taken over

by the federal government.

In October, contracts were let

for the reburial of Union
soldiers on the new ground,

at the rate of $1.59
for each body.

One month later,
in November 1863,

a host of dignitaries
from Boston, Philadelphia

and Washington, including
President Lincoln himself,

journeyed to Gettysburg
to dedicate

the new Soldiers' National
Cemetery there.

Lincoln's brief
but soaring remarks,

like the new burial
ground itself,

with its rows
of identical graves

radiating symmetrically
and democratically

around the cemetery's central
focus, marked a seismic shift

in governmental attitude
and policy towards the dead--

one that said that the dead

were no longer simply
the responsibility

of their families;
that they and their loss

and their meaning
belonged to the nation.

BLIGHT:
The Gettysburg Address

is a statement about finding
the redemption in the dead.

But we need to remember that
in that cemetery that day

half those coffins weren't
even buried yet.

Graves were still open.

This was a place of death,
mass death,

where Lincoln tried to craft
this statement of,

"So, what does it mean?"

It is a kind
of elegiac statement

that if this war has purpose,

if all these dead have died
for something meaningful,

then it means we are going
to redefine this country.

In effect, the
Gettysburg Address is saying,

"The first republic
just died here.

"It's being buried
in those graves.

"We together now
have to rebuild it.

"We have to remake it.

We have to win this war first
and then remake it."

READER:
Four score and seven years ago

our fathers brought forth on
this continent a new nation,

conceived in liberty and
dedicated to the proposition

that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged
in a great civil war,

testing whether that nation,

or any nation so conceived and
so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great
battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate
a portion of that field

as a final resting place forthose who here gave their lives

that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and
proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we cannotdedicate, we cannot consecrate,

we cannot hallow this ground.

The brave men, living and dead,who struggled here,

have consecrated it

far above our poor power
to add or detract.

The world will little note norlong remember what we say here,

but it can never forget
what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather,to be dedicated here

to the unfinished work
which they who fought here

have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us
to be here dedicated

to the great task
remaining before us--

that from these honored dead
we take increased devotion

to that cause
for which they gave

the last full measure
of devotion,

that we here highly resolve
that these dead

shall not have died in vain,
that this nation, under God,

shall have a new birth
of freedom,

and that government of the
people, by the people,

for the people, shall not perishfrom the earth.

BROWN:
If you imagine

that there's a continuing
relationship

between the living and the dead,

that even though
we're doing the acting,

the dead continue to be
in our thoughts,

and there's almost a kind
of dialogue

between the living and the deadthat continues,

in some sense,
that dialogue requires

that we make them speak.

We make them mean something.

We make them carry forward.

We make them enter conversations
that they had no part of.

We make them do political work
that they didn't do,

or couldn't do, themselves.

And I think that's one
of the things

that's going on in
the Gettysburg Address,

is the dead are being harnessed.

They're being conscripted to
a national political project

that's going to carry forward
in some other way.

SCHANTZ:
What the war does is take
notions of immortality

that had been previously locatedin heaven, in some afterworld--

you know, you'll be
reconstituted--

and shift that sort of eternal
frame to the state.

And that your eternity,
your lasting contribution,

will be to the body politic
and to the nation now.

That this new birth of freedom
in America

is based on the sacrifice,
and literally the martyrdom,

of American troops.

That those deaths are
redemptive.

And they serve
a theological purpose,

but now they serve a political
and civic end, too.

They are literally
rebuilding, remaking,

reconstituting the American
civic order.

FAUST:
The words of
the Gettysburg Address

defined the nation as the
product of these deaths.

When we think about what
the Civil War means to us,

it's in no small part
because of that linking,

explicitly by Lincoln,
of our national identity

with those who gave their lives.

"From these honored dead."

The arithmetic of war is set upby what happens at Gettysburg.

Once the Confederate Army
had been weakened

the way it was after Gettysburg,that sets the stage

for the very bloody battles
of the spring of 1864,

for the wilderness and beyond,
and the kinds of losses

that Grant knew
he could afford to take

because the Confederate Army
had been so wounded.

And so the work of death
was the work of the nation

in the spring of 1864.

65,000 men over a period
of six weeks or so.

NARRATOR:
In the spring of 1864,

thanks in large part to Henry
Bowditch's tireless efforts,

the United States government

finally established an ambulancesystem to coordinate

the orderly evacuation and
treatment of the casualties

from the battlefield, just intime to receive the massive tide

of dead and wounded men
that now began to flood

off the battlefields
of Virginia,

as what would prove to be the
bloodiest year of the war

got underway.

BLIGHT:
Nearly half the casualties
of the Civil War

were still yet
to come after 1863.

Easy to forget that.

What 1864 brought was
a period of many, many months

when the sheer scale
of the carnage

was bringing casualties
on a scale now

that all across the North causeda kind of war weariness,

a kind of questioning ofpurpose, that risked everything.

So it's still possible that this
scale of death and suffering

could itself have been
the tipping point

of victory or defeat
in this war.

Because the South,
the Confederacy,

doesn't have to conquer
the North.

They just have to fight
long enough to survive

and make the North quit.

So this is not just a war
of attrition.

It's a war of human morale.

And that's what's at stake
in 1864--

how much more could they be
asked to send their sons?

NARRATOR:The staggering levels of carnage

that would wash over the countryin the spring and summer of 1864

would test the beliefs of
Americans North and South

more severely than ever before.

FAUST:
For many white Southern women,

by the mid to later point
of the war,

death had become
the central reality.

Because the sacrifices they werebeing asked to make

had overwhelmed in their minds
the other kinds of purposes.

And it was very hard for them
to understand,

"Why are we continuing this,"
for many of them,

"when I'm losing everything
that matters most to me?"

READER:
South Carolina.

How many homes have
been made desolate?

How many mothers and sisters
and wives

have been made to mourn sincethis war has been sent upon us?

Numbers on top of numbers.

And we are not yet through.

BROWN:
Once confronted with death
on this scale,

you know, the idea
of a good death,

of a kind of happy afterlife,
seems silly.

There must be people who have
a hard time imagining death

as anything but the physical
fact of death--

the dislocation, the alienation,the rotting, the stench.

And those are people who can't
make comforting narratives

out of what's happened.

LYNCH:
When death is done
in such a horrific way

as in the Civil War,
it shakes a culture

at its sort
of fundamental basis,

and we have to create new ways
to think about it.

I think in many ways that
the age of our disbelief

began sometime
around the Civil War.

BLIGHT:
The scale of death
and destruction in 1864

nearly overwhelmed that sense
of purpose

we heard from Lincoln
at Gettysburg.

Millions of Northerners
were not really willing

to follow that anymore
by July, August of 1864.

And there was a point
in August of '64

when it seems pretty clear
Lincoln himself

believed he was not going
to get reelected.

And of course everything
was at stake,

including emancipation
at that point.

But once it became clear

that Confederate defeat
was now likely--

and that becomes clear
by September

because of the fall of Atlanta

and because
of Sheridan's success

in the Shenandoah Valley--

into September of '64, there's
an awareness across the North

that despite the scale of all
this horror and loss,

that there's now some kind
of end in sight.

READER:
Our country was dark
with sorrowing women.

The regiments came home, but themourners went about the streets,

where the drawn faces of
bereaved wife, mother, sister

and widowed girl showed
piteously everywhere.

The helpless, outnumbering,
unconsulted women;

they whom war trampled down,
without a choice or protest;

the patient, limited,
domestic women,

who thought little,
but loved much,

and loving, had lost all.

BLIGHT:
The South, we have
to acknowledge,

is a society of ruin.

The destruction of the Southerneconomy in 1865 and 1866

is unlike anything any Americansever experienced

at any other time, at least
on our own home soil.

The writers from Northern
newspapers and magazines

who went South after the war
end up observing open coffins

laying all over the place
at cemeteries.

They end up seeing old men
and former slaves

going around collecting bones

because they could get a dollarfor so many pounds of bones

off battlefields.

Those are the bones of men who
died without a name, a place.

They were never sent back
to their families.

This is what people would see ifthey went to those battlefields

in 1865 and 1866, and for thatmatter for many years afterward.

FAUST:
It's not really
until the war is over

that the dead are attended to.

Only when the military
exigencies are finished

can people really turn their
attention to the dead.

NARRATOR:
At the end of the war,

despite federal efforts at
Gettysburg and elsewhere,

no official policy north
or south existed

for locating, identifying,
reburying and honoring

the hundreds of thousands of men

who had died
in the four-year conflict,

or for comforting
the even vaster army

of widows and orphans
left in its wake.

Tens of thousands of soldiers
lay unburied,

their bones littering
battlefields across the South.

Still more had been hastily
interred where they fell,

far from family and home.

Hundreds of thousands
remained unidentified,

their losses unaccounted for.

Something had to be done.

In the spring of 1865,
Clara Barton,

who had done everything
she could

to help wounded and dying
soldiers and their families

during the war, established
the Missing Soldiers Office

in Washington, D.C., to serve
as a clearing house

for tens of thousands
of families

desperate to track down
information of any kind

about their missing
family member.

FAUST:
She started gathering
and publishing lists

of the names of the missing,
urging individuals to respond

if they had any informationabout the fate of those people.

And in the course
of the next few years

she provided information
about some 22,000 soldiers

who otherwise would have
remained completely unknown.

NARRATOR:
Clara Barton herself

helped lead an expedition
to Georgia in July 1865,

responding to information
smuggled north

by a former prisoner at the
notorious Confederate prison

at Andersonville.

FAUST:
Dorence Atwater had been
imprisoned in Andersonville

for much of the war.

And his assignment in the camp

had been to keep a record
of those who were buried.

But he had also kept a secret
list of his own,

so that not only could a list
of the dead be comprised,

but also their graves
could be identified

and their bodies identified,
as well.

And so based on that list some13,600 graves were established,

and 12,900 of them were
identified.

NARRATOR:
The reburial effort at
Andersonville was a triumph.

But the challenges it posed
dwindled

in comparison to those
of locating, identifying

and assuring proper burial

for hundreds of thousands
of dead soldiers scattered

across a theater of war thatstretched for a thousand miles.

In October 1865,
Clara Barton pleaded the case

for formal, coordinated
governmental action

and accounting of the dead.

READER:
The true patriot

willingly loses his life
for his country.

These poor men have lost
not only their lives,

but the very record
of their death.

Common humanity would plead

that an effort be made to
restore their identity.

The wife released her husband,

and the mother sent forth
her son,

and they were nobly given
to their country

for its necessities.

But never has wife
or mother agreed

that for the destruction
of her treasures

no account should
be rendered her.

I hold these men in the light
of government property

unaccounted for.

NARRATOR:
The accounting
that would soon begin

would transform forever the
nature of American government.

In the fall of 1865,

Quartermaster General
Montgomery Meigs

issued a new general order.

It called on officers to providean exhaustive survey

of all the graves and battle
cemeteries

containing Union soldiers,
including a judgment

as to whether bodies should be
left in place or reinterred,

prompted in part by officialfears of rising Southern animus

against the federal military
occupation of the South.

FAUST:
Meigs, who had lost a son
in the war,

began to worry that not only wasthere a problem

that there were a lot
of soldiers whose graves

had not been found,

but that there was an urgency
to this,

because the increasingly
virulent

post-Confederate sentiment mightlead to the destruction

of some of these graves.

NARRATOR:Dispatching Captain James Mooreto survey cemeteries in the East

and Chaplain William Earnshaw
in the West,

Meigs assigned a 53-year-old
chief quartermaster

named Edmund Burke Whitman

to locate the graves
of Union soldiers

scattered across a wide areaof Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia,

Mississippi and Alabama.

Able, diligent
and compassionate,

a former schoolteacher
and longtime abolitionist,

Whitman threw himself
into the assignment

with extraordinary conviction
and determination.

Convinced, he wrote,

that "a knowledge and a record
of every grave"

must be "in the possession
of some living person,"

he composed and distributed
a remarkable circular

seeking information
from witnesses

who could help him locate
and identify the dead.

The response was overwhelming.

FAUST:
He was inundated with letters

from veterans who'd returned
to their homes in the North,

from families who had received
letters from loved ones

describing cemeteries, from
Sanitary Commission officers

who had spent idle time in theaftermath of a battle, perhaps.

There had been thousands
of record-keepers

who, without knowing why they
were keeping the records,

or who would ever be the
recipient of this information,

had collected information on
these bodies during the war,

and on these men, a lot
of it very specific,

so that Edmund Whitman
could follow

quite explicit directions:
"Four miles out of Vicksburg,

"in the apple orchard,
under the fourth tree,

"in the third row
lies my brother,

as his comrade told me
when he was shot."

READER:On the left side of the railroadgoing towards Atlanta,

about a mile off
along a small creek,

near the breastworks of
the rebels by a big tree,

lies Isaac Weightman
of the 29th Pennsylvania.

The grave is marked by a piece
of cracker box

marked with a lead pencil.

His body was buried
in only his trousers.

Any information will be
a great solace to his mother,

who has given three sons
and three sons-in-law

to the armies of our country.

NARRATOR:Determined to find and identify

as many of the bodies
that littered the South

as humanly possible,

Whitman and his small team
of clerks and soldiers

set out on a clear, cold,
windy day in March 1866.

"The entire country,"
Whitman wrote,

"over which the war
has extended its ravages,

composes one vast
charnel house of the dead."

His team worked its way south

across the scarred and torn
battlefields of Tennessee.

At Shiloh, they found
human bones

scattered in "large quantities,"he said, and foraging hogs

that the locals refused to eat

because they had been
living off the dead.

They discovered
1,874 Union bodies,

succeeded in identifying 620
of them, and moved on.

Farther south, the Union dead

seemed to be in even more
distressing circumstances.

Between Natchez and Vicksburg,

they found "immense numbers"
of bodies, he wrote.

Whitman estimated
as many as 40,000,

buried in river embankments,
in woods, in canebrakes,

some never buried at all.

FAUST:
They weren't just
on a battlefield.

They weren't in a cemetery.

They were in every byway
and lane

and along every road
where the armies marched,

and in backyards of houses
where, perhaps,

they'd been cared for.

When he came to a battlefield,he would set his assistants out

like a skirmish line, to just
walk the entire acreage

of where fighting
had taken place.

NARRATOR:
Whitman's journey, he said,

produced "a daily deepening
in my own mind"

of the importance of the federalobligation to the dead,

as he witnessed the total
neglect or wanton desecration

of Union graves
by a Southern population

whose "hatred of the dead,"
he wrote, seems even to exceed

their earlier abhorrence
of the living."

Union corpses were
routinely discovered

thrown naked
and face down in pits.

One body was found
lying left to rot

with a pitchfork
still impaled in its back.

Frequently rebuffed
in his search for information

by hostile Southern whites,
he turned increasingly

to black Southerners for help.

"Most all the information
gained," he reported,

"was from Negroes,
who, as I was told,

pay more attention to suchmatters than the white people."

Behind the African
Colored Church

near Bowling Green, Kentucky,
Whitman and his team

found 1,134 well-tended graves,

sheltering both black
and white Union soldiers.

The black carpenter who helped
lead them to the site

had made coffins

and helped to bury many
of the Union dead himself.

If it was freemen and
individual black civilians

who proved critical
to Whitman's efforts

to locate corpses and graves,
it was almost invariably

units of the U.S. colored troops

who were assigned the hard
and disagreeable work

of burial and reburial, and
of locating and identifying

the graves described in
the thousands of letters

he had received.

FAUST:
So ultimately, he and his team
of assistants,

U.S. colored troops, located
more than 100,000 bodies

over that section of the South.

And he emphatically made
the case

for the need for safe, protectedgraves for the Union veterans

and became an advocate
for a national commitment

to try to rebury all those
bodies in national cemeteries.

NARRATOR:
In the summer of 1866,

as the reburial movement gainedsupport in Congress,

Edmund Whitman began laying
plans for commencing

"the general work
of disinterment"

when cooler weather
came in the fall.

When his superiors
expressed concern

about the scope and cost of theeffort, Whitman held his ground,

arguing that the federal
government stood

in loco parentis
to the Union dead,

and insisting "the work be welland thoroughly done,

with a true conception of its
magnitude and significance."

Work on the massive federal
undertaking had already begun

when in February 1867, Congresspassed formal legislation

to establish and protect a vastsystem of national cemeteries

and authorized funds
to support it.

FAUST:
This was a governmental
engagement

of a level so uncharacteristic

of what the federal government
had been and done

in the years before the war

that it represented
a transformation

in our understanding
of what is a nation state.

To bury the dead
is to say something

to the citizens of the nation
about a relationship

that had not been
acknowledged before,

and that we now take
so much for granted

that it seems inconceivable

that there could be military
activities like the Civil War

without a basic expectation thatthe government was responsible

for those lost in battle.

The United States spends some
hundred million dollars a year

trying to recover people who
are missing and presumed dead

from World War II, Korea
and Vietnam to this day.

That's something that didn't
happen before the Civil War.

That didn't happen
before this great effort

to recover the Union dead onthe part of the national state.

There is no more sacred
obligation, I don't think,

that the United States
of America has

than to those who have borne theburden and sacrificed so much.

Not just the military members,
but it's also

the family members, because theytoo have sacrificed so much.

The Civil War is the foundationfor this.

When I am at a graveside
at a funeral

and I engage a family who's
lost a son or a daughter

or a brother or a sister,
I always say

that I promise you, we will
never forget.

I want them to know that
that sacrifice was meaningful

and will never be forgotten.

We should never forget as
a country those who served

and those who've sacrificed

and ultimately those who've paidthe ultimate sacrifice.

NARRATOR:The National Reburial Initiative

was arguably the largest
and most elaborate

government program undertaken
in the nearly 100-year history

of the republic.

Edmund Whitman himself
put it most simply.

"Such a consecration of a
nation's power and resources

to a sentiment," he wrote, "theworld has never witnessed."

When the reinterment program wascompleted in 1871,

303,536 Union soldiers
had been buried

in 74 national cemeteries, andthe War Department had expended

$4,000,306.26 on the effort
to gather the dead--

the equivalent today
of nearly $75 million.

54% of the dead
had been identified

as a result of careful attentionto the bodies

and their original graves.

140,000 of the Union soldiersrecovered were never identified

and were interred in graves
marked simply "unknown."

Some 30,000 of the dead
were black soldiers--

African-American men who had
fought and died

in what was
for them definitively

a war against slavery,
and who had themselves

buried so many
of the Union dead.

Only a third were
identified by name.

Most were buried in areas
designated "colored"

on the maps for the new
national cemeteries--

segregated in death as in life,and an indication

that the Civil War was but
the first battle

in a much longer struggle.

BLIGHT:
The federal government is,
through the course of the war,

forced, and ultimately is
willing, to give rights

to the Civil War dead,
Union dead.

But the Confederate dead,
even after reunification

or the readmission to the Union,were never part of this process.

NARRATOR:Though some Northern politicianshad urged magnanimity

in the name of decency
for the Southern dead,

they were far outweighed bythose who deemed it unimaginable

that soldiers who had tried
to destroy the Union

should be accorded
the same respect

as those who had saved it.

But in the impoverished andembittered postwar white South,

where virtually every household
had lost a husband, father,

brother or son, it did not
pass unnoticed

that $4 million in public funds

was being expended exclusively
on dead Northerners.

In 1866, when Congress
first proposed

establishing a national cemeterysystem for the Union dead only,

it provoked outrage
in the South.

Northerners were wrong,

the editor of the Richmond
Examinerthundered,

to think the Confederate any
less a hero because he failed.

"If the Confederate soldier,"
he wrote,

"does not fall into the categoryof the nation's dead,

"he is ours, and shame be to us

if we do not care
for his ashes."

FAUST:
It is a cause taken up by
the white women of the South,

who say that they are
the mourners.

They were the ones who brought
Christ down from the cross.

Mourning and the care
of the dead

has been their responsibility
throughout time.

And they will be the leaders
in this effort to,

as a private matter,
find and rebury the dead.

NARRATOR:
On May 3, 1866, a group
of Richmond women

responded to the Examiner'scall

and gathered to found the
Hollywood Memorial Association

of the Ladies of Richmond.

Thousands of men lay
in neglected graves

in Hollywood Cemetery,
and in its counterpart

on the eastern edge
of the city, Oakwood.

Tens of thousands more
lay scattered

on the many battlefields

that surrounded the former
Confederate capital.

Raising money through
private donations,

the women of the Hollywood
Memorial Association

set to work organizing therepair, remounding and returfing

of 11,000 graves dug at
Hollywood during the war.

And, with the help of farmers

from battle sites on the
outskirts of the city,

arranged for the transfer
of hundreds of bodies

to new graves in Richmond.

FAUST:
Organizations,
ladies' associations,

emerge in cities and townsacross the Southern countryside,

to raise funds and to establish
movements to do essentially

what Whitman and others
were doing in the North,

which is scour the countryside

and try to identify where
the dead are located,

and then bury them
in decent graves.

They had a hard time
identifying the dead,

because they didn't have

as widespread
a communication function

as the Northern government did.

But they reburied tens
of thousands of dead

across the South, in
installations large and small.

It's quite extraordinary
to think

about what they were able to dojust as a private effort.

NARRATOR:
In the 1870s,

a coalition of ladies'
associations across the South

set out to bring home

the thousands of dead
Southern soldiers

that lay neglected
in Northern soil,

especially those left
behind at Gettysburg

following Lee's retreat.

Far beyond the secure confines
of the federal cemetery

Abraham Lincoln had dedicated
during the war,

the rebel corpses had
been rudely thrown

into shallow mass graves,

many to be later plundered
and desecrated

by Northerners filled
with hatred for the South.

Between 1872 and 1873

the Ladies' Hollywood Memorial
Association of Richmond

arranged to have

2,935 Confederate remains
from Gettysburg

exhumed and shipped South
for proper burial in Richmond.

READER:They will no longer sleep alone.

Their isolated repose
has been interrupted

by the gentle hands
of their countrywomen

who have tenderly removed them
from alien graves

and brought them hither
for admission

to the communion
of kindred dead.

They have come home at last.

And we, their brethren,
their comrades,

bone of their bone and flesh
of their flesh,

are met with one accord

to welcome them
to their native soil.

Shoulder to shoulder they stood.

Now let them lie side by side.

Confederates in life,

confederates let them be
in death.

BLIGHT:
This was bitter stuff,

trying to return the dead
to the South.

I'm not sure anyone even knows
the exact numbers

of Confederate dead reinterred
back in Southern soil.

But it no doubt left one layer
of the bitterness

in Southern memory
particularly for women.

FAUST:
The speeches make it explicit

that this is about
more than just mourning.

It's about sustaining the ideals

for which
the Confederacy fought,

about bringing people together
to lament the loss of the war,

but not the loss of the cause.

And so it is an engine
for moving forward

a kind
of neo-Confederate sentiment

that thrives on the resentment
of being excluded

from the Northern support
for reburial,

and on the community that growsup around the Confederate dead.

BROWN:
It's worth going back
and remembering

the South didn't fight a war

over the respectful treatment
of the dead.

They fought a war to create a
Confederate States of America

that would be a slave society
in perpetuity.

That was their war aim.

Would that have gone away
if the defeated South

had been treated differently
by the Union?

I don't know.

I know that's not why
they went into the war,

and that's not the cause
that was lost.

The cause that was lost was
slavery in perpetuity.

And I go back to Frederick
Douglass's 1883 speech,

where he says, "A lot of thingshave been forgotten.

"But what I can never forget

"is the difference between thosewho fought a war for slavery

and those who fought a war
for liberty."

NARRATOR:
Because the end had come
in the spring,

as the first buds
began to swell,

it was natural from the start
that the honoring of the dead

involved decorating graves
with fresh spring flowers.

In the years following the war,Decoration Day rituals

sprang up across the South,

on different days
in different places.

On May 10, the anniversary of
Stonewall Jackson's death.

On April 26, the day of the
final Confederate surrender.

On June 3, Jefferson Davis's
birthday.

Northerners chose
a spring day, too,

for formal commemoration
of the dead,

an observance made official
in the spring of 1868,

when General John Logan,

the Commander-in-Chief of the
Grand Army of the Republic,

officially set aside
the 30th of May

"for decorating the graves
of comrades who died

in defense of their country."

Decoration Day, or Memorial Dayas it is now called,

is still observed in many placesin the South on a different day

than the official national
holiday established in 1868.

BLIGHT:Memorial Day was really founded

at the end of the Civil War
around the problem

of what to do emotionally
and logistically

with the masses of dead.

But the first major
formal practice

of what we've come to call
Memorial Day

was in Charleston, South
Carolina, on May 1, 1865.

Charleston, of course,
seedbed of secession,

held out to the bitter end.

It wasn't evacuated
by Confederate forces

until February of 1865.

But when the Confederates
evacuated

and the Union Army moved in,

pretty much the white populationof Charleston left.

And the people who were left
were the freed people.

In the midst of these ruins,

the black folks of Charleston
got themselves organized.

They planned various
little commemorations

and celebrations.

The biggest celebration,
though, that they planned

was at the Planters' Race
Course, the horse track.

In the last year of the war,

the Confederates converted
this racecourse

into a prison
for Union soldiers.

And about 260 Union soldiers
died of disease and exposure

in the infield,
in this open-air prison,

and were buried in a mass grave

behind the grandstand
of the racetrack.

And the black folks reinterred
all the dead in proper graves.

They named nearly none of thembecause there were no dog tags.

And they built around it
a huge fence, whitewashed it,

and they built an archway
into the compound.

And over the archway they
painted the inscription,

"Martyrs of the Racecourse."

And then on May 1
when they had this completed,

they held a parade
on the racetrack,

estimated at about 10,000 people

by newspaper correspondents whowitnessed it and covered it.

It was led off by about 3,000
black children

carrying armloads of flowers
and, we're told,

singing "John Brown's Body."

Then followed by black women
and black men,

and then by contingents of Unioninfantry, black and white.

They all paraded
around the racetrack.

Five black preachers read
from scripture.

A children's choir sang
"America the Beautiful,"

"The Star-Spangled Banner,"

and, quote-unquote,
"several spirituals."

And they dedicated the cemeteryof these Union dead.

And then they broke up

and went into the infield
of the racetrack

and did what most of us do
on Memorial Day--

they held picnics.

And that is one of,
if not the most important,

origin of what we have come
to know as Memorial Day.

READER:
Pensive, on her dead gazing,

I heard the Mother of All,

Desperate, on the torn bodies,

on the forms covering
the battle-fields gazing;

As the last gun ceased,

but the scent of the
powder-smoke linger'd,

As she call'd to her earth
with mournful voice

while she stalk'd:

Absorb them well, O my earth,
she cried--

I charge you lose not my sons!

Lose not an atom.

All you essences
of soil and growth

My dead absorb--

my young men's beautiful bodiesabsorb--

and their precious, precious,
precious blood;

Which holding in trust for me,

faithfully back again give me,
many a year hence;

In unseen essence and odor
of surface and grass.

Exhale me them centuries hence--breathe me their breath.

O years and graves!

O air and soil!

O my dead, an aroma sweet!

Exhale them perennial, sweet
death, years, centuries hence.

Walt Whitman, 1865.

NARRATOR:
The generation of Americans

that survived the Civil War
lived the rest of their lives

haunted by its terrible toll.

Henry Bowditch would spend
the rest of his life

trying to hold on
to his dead son, Nathaniel.

To console himself, he compiledfour large memorial volumes

and scrapbooks--
a "collation," he said,

"of the letters and
journals illustrative

of his dear young life."

"The labor," he said,
"was a sweet one.

It took me out of myself."

From a ring given Nat
by his fiancée,

together with a cavalry button

cut from his son's
bloodstained vest,

he fashioned an amulet that
he attached to his watch.

"There," he said, "I trust theywill remain until I die."

Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.