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From: "Batha Karr" <>
Subject: Re: [PaCambri] Civil War bodies
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 11:47:05 -0700
References: <e4.606bba77.2f15ac77@aol.com>


Joe - Subject: [PaCambri] Civil War bodies

Read Lincoln at Gettysburg the Words that Remade America by Garry Wills
published by Simon and Schuster.

The residents of Gettysburg had little reason to feel satisfaction with the
war machine that had churned up their lives. General Meade may have pursued
Lee in slow motion, but he wired headquarters that "I cannot delay to pick
up the debris of the battlefield." That debris was mainly a matter of
rotting horseflesh and manflesh-thousands of fermenting bodies, with
gasdistended bellies, deliquescing in the July heat. For hygienic reasons,
trading the smell of burning flesh for that of decaying flesh. 8000 human
bodies were scattered over, or (barely) under, the ground. Suffocating teams
of soldiers, Confederate prisoners, and dragooned civilians slid the bodies
beneath a minimal covering, as fast as possible-crudely posting the names of
the Union dead with sketchy information on boards, not stopping to figure
out what units the Confederate bodies had belonged to. It was work to be
done hugger-mugger or not at all, fighting clustered bluebottle flies black
on the earth, shoveling and retching by turns. The buzzards themselves had
not stayed to share this labor-days of incessant shelling had scattered them
far off.

Even after most bodies were lightly blanketed, the scene was repellant. A
nurse shuddered at the all-too-visible "rise and swell of human bodies" in
these furrows was had plowed. A soldier noticed how the earth "gave" as he
walked over the shallow trenches. Householders had to plant around the
bodies in their fields and gardens, or brace themselves to move the rotting
corpses to another place. Soon these uneasygraves were being rifled by
relatives looking for their dead-reburying other bodies they turned up, even
more hastily (and less adequately) that had the first disposal crews. Three
weeks after the battle, a prosperous Gettysburg banker, David Will, reported
to Pennsylvania's Governor Curtin: "In many instances arms and legs and
sometimes heads protrude and my attention has been directed to several
places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring
them."

Someone had to halt the unauthorized rummaging to identify the dead, had to
deal with states preparing to send commissioners to reclaim their units'
fallen men. Curtin made Wills his agent. ...Wills named William Saunders
...to create the cemetery's layout...

Burial by states posed a problem. Saunders did not know how many bodies
would be found for each state. His allocation of spaces had to be
provisional, shifting as the bodies were processed. That processing was
supposed to be pushed forward at the rate of a hundred bodies a day - a rate
that would allow safe reburial between the first frost and the ground's
freezing. but it was hard to keep up that pace (the task would not be
completed till next spring). First the Confederate bodies turned up had to
be identified as such and reburied deeper down. It was not always easy to
make even this identification, since some needy Confederate troops were
wearing lost or captured Union pants, blankets, or other equipment then they
died, Will's agent in the matter swore that no enemy tainted the ground
where martyrs to the Union lay, but it is now recognized that some Southern
bodies were mistakenly included.

Even Northern soldiers were hard to sort into their proper units.Those whose
state could not be ascertained-even though their names could-were buried
with the "unknown." Some bodies had been stripped of belongings before their
first hasty burial. The possessions that survived-mainly Bibles, but also
dental bridges and other personal effects-had to be catalogued and labeled
for safekeeping, in case relatives sought them. Separated body parts were
often hard to assign in the mass-burial trenches. Loose clothing and
blankets were reburied to prevent attempts to use contaminated goods. Then
the caskets were filled, loaded on carts, taken to the new site, and
distributed by state according to Saunders's allotment of space. Finally
these bodies-tumbled about in the confusion of war, already buried once or
several times, pawed over by foraging humans or beasts, unearthed again and
ticketed-rejoined their ranks to lie in the deceptively calm order prepared
for them.



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