Death in the Civil War

Death and Dying in the Civil War

The Civil War created an entirely new community of suffering. Over 620,000 men perished, roughly 2% of the population. Approximately one in four civil war soldiers never returned home. With that, virtually every American had lost a loved one. The sheer amount of death in the Civil War led to many changes in American society that had a lasting impact on nearly all members of the population.

The Civil War posed a challenge to society as there was an insurmountable amount of casualties that made merely disposing of the bodies near impossible. The body was of great importance to people before they had died and those mourning the loss, described as the repository of the human identity in that it represented the intrinsic selfhood and individuality of the human and incarnated the eternal life of the human as well (62).  At the beginning of the war, Union hospitals established dead houses which stored decaying bodies while preparing them for proper burial. However, as the war escalated deaths became uncountable and more attention was given to those still living, with services towards the dead described as “As far as possible…when practicable” (65). Winners of battles were expected to care for the opponents’ deceased, and mass graves were dug, sometimes even so shallow that corpses would reappear following rain. However, some soldiers were fortunate to receive a “decent” burial, where they were protected from laying directly in the dirt by being lain on knapsacks, with an identifiable headstone made of a piece of wood with their name carved by a jackknife (76).

Part of a decent burial was the prelude to it. The Ars Moriendi is the art of dying—the traditional way to give ones soul up gladfully and willfully, and how the dead and those mourning them should act (6). This idea was created by Jeremy Taylor in the 1600s but remained popular through the Civil War, but did differ substantially from the original process such that Taylor’s ars moriendi was an example of Protestant triumph, and in the Civil War era, ars moriendi was a universally recognized practice that allowed people of all denominations to find a common ground in a time of turmoil. Civil war soldiers aimed to have a good death because it was a finalization of their life lived on earth, and provided their loved ones with reassurance that they had lived long enough to embrace God. Because the family did play a significant role in ars moriendi, soldiers would set up surrogate proxies to help their families if they should pass in war (10). The civil war provided the mourning with surrogate family members to aid them in their grievances, with fellow comrades offering lamenting words of comfort describing how holy their lost comrade was.

Another significant part of the ars moriendi was the dying’s last words. The nurses and doctors who witnessed the dyings last words, or treated their illnesses, would send home detailed letters to the family describing them in a positive light. The doctors would write home vivid descriptions in an attempt to link battlefield to the home, and heal some of the damages the war had caused. Doctors would coach the dying through the rituals of ars moriendi, providing instructions on how to proceed through the good death. Some soldiers would even go so far as to place the entire responsibility of the last words on the doctors themselves, as they believed the doctors should know the true ars moriendi more than they (16).

Many problems arose in burying the massive amounts of the dead, including a shortage of coffins. At the beginning of the war, a coffinless burial was unthinkable, but as the death toll rose, a burial with a prayer said at all was fortunate. Officers did receive special treatment, particularly Confederate offices, and their bodies were generally returned home to family even by their opponents(77). In contrast, Union officers were “explicitly dishonored” with their bodies being “interred to a trench” (79). Lesser ranked soldiers were “thrown into a cellar where they might be devoured by dogs and rats” (80). This created conflict as some soldiers were unhappy with the disparity in treatment—one man whose brother was a deceased officer watched a casket be given to someone of higher rank without question, while another man said “they get honor and a casket while you get nothing but a hole in the ground” (80).

Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Vintage Civil War Library. 2009.