Read Online Those Who Have Borne the Battle by James Wright - Free Book Online Page A

From every point of the compass out of the countless graves,

In wafted clouds, in myriads large, or squads of twos or threes
or single ones they come,
And silently gather round me. 28
    Drew Gilpin Faust’s book The Republic of Suffering provides an essential introduction to the ways in which American society coped with slaughter during the Civil War. I would summarize that society did not do very well. The army had no provisions in place at the outset of the war to handle war dead or even to record fully their names and inform survivors. Despite all of the advances in democratizing the narrative of war, officers still received special preference in the business of death and burial.
    In the battle of Antietam in Maryland on September 16, 1862, there were 23,000 casualties, with more than 3,500 dead on the battlefield. This remains the single bloodiest day in American military history. A week later a surgeon on the field observed of that place, “The dead were almost wholly unburied, and the stench arising from it was such as to breed a pestilence.” 29 Oliver Wendell Holmes came down from Massachusetts to search for his missing son and observed the privileges of rank: “The slain of higher condition, ‘embalmed’ and iron cased, were sliding off the railways to their far homes; the dead of the rank and file were being gathered up and committed hastily to the earth.” 30 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. survived to fight in other battles.
    During the Revolution, Americans had learned the difficulty of simultaneously fighting wars and honoring warriors, of grieving loss even as celebrating victory—and even of recording and burying in the midst of continuing war. These lessons were underlined during the Civil War. It was hard to be poetic when surrounded by death—especially anonymous death. Eulogies and memorials could not precede the fundamental task of burying. And the steady grind of war, of fighting or of positioning, of simply stealing sleep—these often delayed the act of gathering the dead. Sometimes Union and Confederate armies would stop their warring and mutually allow all to bring in their dead comrades. This was a time-honored tradition. Homer wrote of Athenians and Trojans stopping to grieve and to attend to their dead:
    Just as the sun began to strike the plowlands,
rising out of the deep calm flow of the Ocean River
to climb the vaulting sky, the opposing armies met.
And hard as it was to recognize each man, each body,
With clear water they washed the clotted blood away
And lifted them onto wagons, weeping warm tears.
Priam forbade his people to wail aloud. In silence
They piled the corpses on the pyre, their hearts breaking,
Burned them down to ash, and returned to sacred Troy.
And just so on the other side Achaean men-at-arms
Piled the corpses on the pyre, their hearts breaking,
Burned them down to ash and returned to the hollow ships. 31
    The United States had only recently begun to create cemetaries for military burial. In 1847 the State of Kentucky had established the nation’s first public military cemetery. This provided for the Kentucky volunteers who had been killed in the Mexican War. In 1850 the US government established a federal cemetery and a monument for war dead near Mexico City. Some 750 soldiers were reinterred there. These burials represented but a fraction of those who had died during the war. None of the men buried in this federal cemetery were identified. 32
    As the Civil War casualties increased, the US government determined that it would provide cemeteries on or near some battlefields for those who died as a result of the war. At war’s end, many argued that this practice needed to be institutionalized and memories made indelible. In 1866 James Russling argued in an article for Harper’s that there should be a system of national military cemeteries and a proper burial of all who had died for the Union cause. It was just, he