There was no plan for the dead during the American Civil War. Mass graves or leaving them where they fell would only go so far. Discover the heartbreaking fate of the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, and the journey to bring them home.
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00:00There was no plan for the dead during the American Civil War. Mass graves or leaving
00:04them where they fell would only go so far. Discover the heartbreaking fate of the fallen
00:09soldiers of the Civil War and the journey to bring them home.
00:13Of all the wars in which the United States has taken part, the American Civil War was
00:16by far the bloodiest. Over just four years, from 1861 to 1865, hundreds of thousands of
00:22lives were lost. The official estimate was that about 620,000 soldiers died on both sides
00:28combined. But the reality may have been far worse. A more recent analysis of historic
00:33records published in the journal Civil War History indicates that many more soldiers
00:37perished, with an estimated death toll of 750,000 more likely, and perhaps as many as
00:43850,000 total.
00:45The confusion is due largely to haphazard record-keeping amid the chaos of war. In a
00:49single day of fighting at Antietam, some 23,000 soldiers were killed.
00:54We've had the devil's own day, haven't we?
00:56But that wasn't even one of the worst battles of the Civil War. That very dubious honor
01:01goes to the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, which saw the deaths of an estimated 51,000
01:06over a mere three days.
01:09The sudden deaths of masses of soldiers on Civil War battlefields was overwhelming both
01:13emotionally and logistically. In an era before telecommunications or even electricity, how
01:18were officials supposed to coordinate the removal of the dead? The truth is that many
01:22simply didn't. Though hastily assembled groups of soldiers and civilians stepped in to manage
01:27the task, it rarely happened efficiently.
01:30Observers of the aftermath of the Battle of Antietam noted that it took more than a week
01:34for the first of the dead to be buried. With no dedicated burial personnel, no ambulance
01:39service, and no military policy for identification of the deceased, confusion reigned.
01:44Both armies at Antietam performed the somber, final ritual of all great battles, tending
01:50to the dead and dying.
01:52At Antietam, some of the fallen were collected and buried in mass graves, while others were
01:57left in the open indefinitely. This was more likely if the dead were from the opposing
02:02army.
02:03A year or more later, troops moving back over battlefields in places like Bull Run or Chancellorsville
02:07found them littered with skeletons. But little was left to signify whether the deceased fought
02:12for the Union or the Confederacy.
02:14For those who did take it upon themselves to bury the dead, it was impossible to give
02:18each body an individual grade. Soldiers might go to the extra effort if they knew the deceased
02:23or if there were ample time. But with so many remains and often sweltering weather that
02:27encouraged decomposition, mass graves were the only real answer.
02:31Witnesses to mass grave burials explained that soldiers would typically dig long trenches
02:35and carry or drag bodies to the fold, sometimes placing them head-to-foot to save space. As
02:41for grave markers, some survived to delineate a burial spot. Others disintegrated or were
02:46never put there in the first place. This left some mass graves forgotten for well over a
02:50century.
02:51Metal detectorist Kevin Ambrose helped uncover a Civil War-era grave in Centerville, Virginia.
02:55A full excavation began in 1994, revealing the remains of six Union soldiers who'd been
03:01lying there for well over a century. All six were identified and returned to their hometowns
03:05to be reburied.
03:08In the Civil War era, there was no common identification carried by soldiers, unlike
03:11the standard-issue metal dog tags worn in later conflicts. Motivated people might go
03:16through a soldier's pockets to look for something that might offer up a name, but that was hardly
03:20a given. That plus inconsistent record-keeping meant that the living were sometimes listed
03:25as dead and vice versa. The use of mass graves further complicated things, as few on burial
03:30detail took the time to do more than place the marker estimating the number of bodies
03:33buried.
03:35By some estimates, more than half of the dead were never connected to a name at all. Perhaps
03:39most heartbreaking of all was the sight of families wandering battlefields looking for
03:43a familiar face amongst the dead.
03:45For much of the war, Union General Ulysses S. Grant allowed civilians to move through
03:49battlefields so long as they didn't get in the way of the military. Modern archaeologists
03:53also struggled to identify the dead after the fact. The six Union soldiers buried near
03:57Centerville, Virginia, uncovered in the mid-1990s, had been placed in coffins in their uniforms,
04:03but they didn't carry any identification, and researchers had to use historic documents
04:07and forensic analysis of the remains to connect them with lost soldiers from the 1st Massachusetts
04:12Infantry. At the time, DNA analysis was still difficult to access and highly expensive.
04:18Families of Civil War soldiers sometimes found themselves in terrible limbo. Some got word
04:22of their loved ones' fates, though it wasn't guaranteed, and letters sometimes arrived
04:26long after a soldier's death. That's because, in the same way that there was no official
04:30or organized way of identifying remains, there was no procedure for notifying families.
04:35Some dying soldiers managed to write their own letters home, or fellow service members
04:39might take it upon themselves to contact a fallen comrade's family. But not everyone
04:43was so lucky, as the many anonymous battlefield graves make painfully clear.
04:47However, not everyone was so overwhelmed or careless that identifications couldn't be
04:51made. Shortly after the war, famed nurse Clara Barton set up the Missing Soldiers Office,
04:56which helped to identify over 20,000 men. Barton used her own money to keep the Enterprise
05:01going, answering thousands of inquiries and poring over records with a small team. The
05:05office also managed to publicize a regular roll of missing men that put thousands of
05:09names of disappeared soldiers onto posters and in newspapers across the country.
05:13Ex-inmates of prison camps also proved invaluable to Barton's efforts, which helped families
05:17gain closure and benefit from the deceased's pension.
05:21The many soldiers' remains were buried with little hope of later identification. Towards
05:25the end of the war, the new art of embalming offered an alternative. Before this, funerals
05:29and burials were rushed affairs, even if there wasn't a war going on.
05:33The mourning and remembrance continued after a grave was closed. Families had to bury the
05:37remains of loved ones before decomposition made itself too obvious. But what to do about
05:41someone who died on a battlefield far from home? Families who learned of a loved one's
05:45death sometimes requested that their remains be shipped home. The lack of refrigeration
05:50made this a gruesome affair. The answer was a fringe practice, embalming.
05:55Like so many other practices around death and dying in the Civil War, however, preserving
05:59corpses was a haphazard and quasi-professional process. Early attempts involved replacing
06:04body fluids with arsenic and mercury solutions. Despite the less-than-consistent results,
06:09enough people asked for embalming that the government began requiring licenses for embalmers.
06:14Perhaps a welcome change, as earlier less-accomplished embalmers rather ghoulishly set up shop alongside
06:19battlefields, and even encouraged soldiers to pay for the process ahead of their deaths.
06:24Even though death is said to be the great leveler, the remains of Civil War soldiers
06:28were often treated differently based on race and class. Given that embalming bodies and
06:32transporting them home was an expensive proposition, it was often reserved for fallen officers
06:37with more money. Officers' remains were more likely to come home embalmed than in caskets.
06:41The business of death and the preservation of bodies turns undertakers into overnight
06:47millionaires.
06:48The lower-class dead were typically found in graves dug closer to where they fell. Some
06:53Union officers' remains were even put to rest in the garden of Confederate General Robert
06:57E. Lee's wife. Race still divided Black and white soldiers even after death. When they
07:02were buried in cemeteries, Black troops were typically consigned to segregated sections,
07:07even at Arlington National Cemetery.
07:09On the battlefield, burials didn't always play out this way, though. Colonel Robert
07:12Gould Shaw, the white commander of a Black regiment, was buried in a mass grave with
07:16his troops after they were killed during a July 18, 1863 attack. Confederates meant it
07:22as an insult, but Shaw's abolitionist family considered it an honor, and requested that
07:26his remains stay where they had been originally buried. Segregated burials continued until
07:31President Harry S. Truman ordered the integration of the military in 1948.
07:36Though photography had been around for decades by the time of the Civil War, war photographers
07:40were still a new sight.
07:42Antietam looms large in American memory, because it was the first major battle to be thoroughly
07:47documented by photography.
07:50The equipment was bulky and complex, yet photographers like Alexander Gardner, Timothy H. O'Sullivan,
07:56and Matthew Brady took their darkroom wagons to battlefields anyway, intent on documenting
08:01the horrors of war in a way sketches and reports never could, while also gaining fame and commercial
08:06success.
08:07Gardner, in particular, was complicated. After gaining attention for his photographs of the
08:11aftermath of Antietam, Gardner made his way to document the human wreckage of Gettysburg.
08:16Once there, he took a photo he later said was of a fallen Confederate sniper on a rocky
08:20outcrop, naming it Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter. It was accompanied by a dramatic text written
08:25by Gardner that pointed out details such as the blanket where the rebel had laid down
08:29to die. But Gardner was almost certainly lying.
08:32It looks like the realistic and gruesome aftermath of a firefight. But in reality, it's as posed
08:39as your favorite selfie.
08:41On the battlefield, Gardner had probably taken the remains of a Confederate infantryman he
08:45photographed and moved it to that picturesque outcrop, according to historian William Frasinito's
08:49analysis in Gettysburg, A Journey in Time.
08:52The finishing touch was a rifle Gardner used as a regular prop, and which almost certainly
08:56would not have been used by a sniper.
08:59As the growing number of dead presented a stark reminder of the cost of war, it became
09:03increasingly obvious that some sort of change was needed. For many, it was unacceptable
09:07that so many of the dead lost their lives with no honor given to their names. Of course,
09:11this was easier to accomplish once the war was over.
09:15Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Virginia's
09:19Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. That fall, Quartermaster General Montgomery C.
09:24Meggs ordered soldiers to begin searching out Union graves to identify and protect the
09:29resting places of the dead. It turned into a six-year effort that included the reburial
09:33of more than 300,000 Union soldiers, though little more than half were identified.
09:39Nameless or not, many of the dead were bound for one of 74 new national cemeteries established
09:44by the federal government. It was just as well for those who had been buried in former
09:47Confederate territory, as many in the South were not prepared to respect the graves of
09:51the Yankees, whom many still opposed.
09:54Today, Arlington National Cemetery is a peaceful, solemn place. But it was once a sprawling
09:59estate belonging to Mary Anna Acustis Lee, wife of Confederate Commander Robert E. Lee.
10:04The Union seized it at the beginning of the war, though the Lee family continued fighting
10:08for its return for many years. Few on the Union side were sympathetic to the Lees, however.
10:13This is a Union facility for Union soldiers!"
10:16Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meggs thought it was only right that Lee should
10:19lose the property and perhaps his life, too.
10:22No one went so far as to execute Lee or any other top Confederates, but Montgomery Meggs
10:27saw to it that Arlington would serve a more useful purpose than hosting high-class soirees
10:31or well-mannered strolls about the grounds. Part of the estate became home to an estimated
10:361,500 formerly enslaved people, who constructed homes, schools, and churches in what became
10:41known as Freedman's Village. Another plot was set aside for military burials, with
10:45the first interment in May 1864. Later that year, Meggs proposed that the area become
10:50a 200-acre National Military Cemetery. It was officially designated as such on June
10:5515, 1864.
10:58The Union and postwar governments weren't especially interested in caring for the Confederate
11:02dead. During the war, at least one Union officer complained when he learned that remains from
11:06both sides were being buried together.
11:08To you, he's a victim. To me, a cold-blooded killer.
11:14After the war, the massive reburial effort conducted by the federal government only extended
11:17to Union soldiers. If Confederate dead were honored, it was only by civilians who organized
11:22and paid for the effort themselves. These civilian groups, largely comprised of white
11:26women, were known as the Ladies Memorial Association. In addition to arranging for the recovery
11:31and reinterment of thousands of dead soldiers, they also engaged in postwar memorialization
11:36and myth-making that honored the lost cause of the Confederacy, with monuments and the
11:41organization of Confederate Memorial Day, an occasion that continues to be observed
11:45by certain private citizens and even public figures into the 21st century.