So it was about 2.5 percent of the population. That would be the equivalent of some seven million people today. Imagine if we had a war in which we had that kind of death toll.
DR: The Civil War lasted for four years. Why were so many people killed in that war, while in the Revolutionary War, which lasted a lot longer, there were something like 6,800 American casualties?
DGF: There are a couple of explanations. One is that the Civil War was a war of mass armies. This was a war in which probably close to three million people served in military roles. So there were more people to kill.
That was part of it, but it was also the beginning of the era of industrialized warfare where artillery took on a really major role and where the range of firepower was much greater. All of those reasons contributed to an increase in the number of deaths.
DR: As many as 750,000 soldiers were killed. What about civilians?
DGF: We probably will never get an accurate number, but the impact on civilian populations was severe—the spread of disease, for example; the impact of deprivation, especially in the South; starvation, inadequate food; the effects of moving families around and what that did to mortality and morbidity. About two-thirds died from disease.
DR: In those days, we didn’t understand germ theory. Your book points out that some doctors would operate for two days at a time but never washed their hands.
DGF: That, of course, spread gangrene and other kinds of infections.
DR: In the first battle, Bull Run, people thought the war would be over very quickly. People came out to watch it as an entertainment. How many were killed there, and when did people realize this was not entertainment?
DGF: If you look at the number of people killed at Bull Run/First Manassas, it’s very small, actually. The death toll increases dramatically during the war. The Battle of Shiloh [in Tennessee], for example, was a shock, because it was multiple times the number of deaths of First Manassas.
DR: In the Revolutionary War, if an American soldier was shot and killed or wounded, there was time to take him off the battlefield and take him somewhere else. But there were so many people being killed during the Civil War that bodies would just lie there while the other soldiers went somewhere else. Is that what happened? A lot of soldiers were just left on the ground?
DGF: The scale of the Civil War was something that neither army was ready for and neither side anticipated, so the requirements for medical care were inadequate. For example, there wasn’t a regular ambulance service, even in the Union Army, which tended to be better organized and better equipped, until the very last months of the war.
There was no provision for how to handle the dead, no grave registration services, no process of notification of families. It was all on a very informal basis until, toward the end of the war, there were the beginnings of what we might consider modern ways of identifying the dead and providing for them.
There were no dog tags. Soldiers did not carry any formal kind of identification. So, if there was a body on the field, you might find something on that body, an envelope with an address or a Bible with the name or some indication of who that person was, but that wasn’t required. It was simply the decision of that individual. Increasingly during the war, soldiers carried things that they knew could identify them and ensure that their loved ones would be informed.
DR: In those days, how you died was considered very important. It was generally the norm, before the war, that 85 percent of people died in their homes. You died surrounded by your relatives, and you said, “Yes, I believe in God, and I believe in the afterlife.” So there was a right way to die. Can you describe that more?
DGF: There was a concept of a good death, and a good death was good for several reasons. It involved your family. They knew that you died peacefully, but they also knew that you died with the appropriate expressions of fidelity to God, so they could believe they would be reunited with you in an afterlife. This is an overwhelmingly Christian concept. It was an overwhelmingly Christian nation.
The notion that someone would die who was not ready to meet his maker, had not shown that he was a believer, that was terrifying to families, because they thought that was obliteration. That person would never be reunited in another life with the beloved members of his family.
DR: What people would do, as you point out in your book, is if somebody died from a gunshot wound, soldiers who survived might tell their families that these people died praying to God, or that they died peacefully.
DGF: That’s right. Walt Whitman [then a Civil War nurse] wrote a number of letters to families describing the deaths of their loved ones as he had sat by them in hospitals, and those letters are almost formulaic. They go through the elements of the good death, reassuring the family that the individual he witnessed dying had indeed done all the things that should console their families about their future.
DR: Throughout history, humans have thought that bodies are important. What did Civil War survivors do to make sure that their loved ones had an appropriate burial?
DGF: Burial on Civil War battlefields was an exercise in improvisation. There were no regular burial troops. Usually some unit was designated to do the burials. Often it was the unit that had not participated in the battle. Sometimes it would be an enemy unit, captives, who would be told, “You have to bury the dead.”
Sometimes there were no shovels, no implements to do this work. And there were bodies that couldn’t be identified, especially enemy soldiers, those who had lost the battle. The winners of the battle usually held the field, but the bodies of the losers had to be disposed of too. So they’d be buried in gigantic pits—just thrown into pits.
It was customary to bury your own dead in individual graves, to try to find some kind of identifying feature that you might write down. You might put a little marker on the grave. You might send something to a family member if you could get an address. You might find a bottle and put something in the bottle and bury it with the dead person, so that when that individual was exhumed, there would be an identifying characteristic with them. But soldiers would also often have kind of makeshift funeral services or observances over the dead, readings from the Bible.
DR: Families who either could afford to, or were inclined to, would try to get their loved ones’ bodies back for more appropriate burial. Did they go to the battlefield themselves? Did they send people? Were there services they could hire?
DGF: All of the above. Families tended to swarm to battlefields. There’s a very famous story of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. rushing to the battlefield of Antietam [in Maryland] where he heard his son Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice, had been injured. He goes down on a train from Boston, and all around him are families of individuals who have been reported as wounded or killed. People rushed to Antietam and rushed around the battlefield trying to get news of where their loved one might be, trying to engage a shipping company—families had to have means to do this, of course—to transport their loved one back to their hometown, and to find some kind of news that would enable them to come to a firm understanding of what had happened to their son or brother.
DR: Did embalmers say, “Hire me and I’ll go embalm your loved one”?
DGF: It was a thriving business. A lot of embalmers had offices here in Washington, and they would say, “We’ll go out to the Virginia battlefields and find your loved one and embalm them and they’ll be safely shipped home.” A lot of these people were a little crooked, and would sometimes claim they’d found bodies when they hadn’t, or extort money from families. It was such a thriving business that General Ulysses Grant, at one point, was so infuriated, he banned all embalmers from his lines, because he felt they were exploiting families.
DR: If you were a Confederate soldier and you killed a Union soldier, would you just walk away?
DGF: Probably, if you killed that soldier, it was in the heat of battle, and you would be far away by the time the battle was over. If the Confederates, for example, held the
ground, and it was covered with dead Union soldiers, it would be the responsibility of the commander of the Confederate unit to say, “How are we going to handle the dead?”
DR: Let’s suppose you were an officer. Do you get treated differently when you’re dead than if you’re an enlisted person?
DGF: Absolutely. Why was that? Partly because your death would be more notable to those in your company. They would make a bigger effort to notify your family. But also it would be likely your family would either come or send someone or send money to have your body shipped home.
DR: The Union had roughly two hundred thousand African Americans who were fighting for the North after the Emancipation Proclamation. If those African American soldiers were in combat with a Confederate group and the Confederates killed them, did they give them a decent burial?
DGF: Often the Black dead were dishonored by the Confederates. There are examples of African American soldiers being left on the battlefield for extremely long periods of time to essentially disintegrate. There was a real degradation of African American soldiers by Confederates.
DR: When the war started, were there any government cemeteries where soldiers who had died could be buried?
DGF: The national cemetery system really emerges from the Civil War experience. What happens in the course of the war is a recognition that this notion of improvisation about the dead, a neglect of responsibility on the part of the government, simply cannot persist in a nation that is resting on the soldiers of the common people and on an ideal of democracy.
So there’s an enormous shift in sentiment, even in four short years. As you know, Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address next to piles of coffins that were being interred in a national cemetery that had been created there.
By the end of the war, there is a movement for reburial of the Union dead. Troops who are still serving from the war fan out across the South and locate more than three hundred thousand Union bodies and reinter them in seventy-four national cemeteries that are the creation of the Civil War. When we think about the national cemeteries that we know so well and often go to on Memorial Day, those really are the product of this changed attitude of the Civil War, where the government says, “It is our responsibility to care for those who lost their lives in our service.”
DR: After the war was over, there were more national cemeteries set up. Would Confederate soldiers be allowed to be buried in the North?
DGF: Confederate soldiers were not buried in those cemeteries, and this excursion into the South to identify bodies was one that sought out only Union bodies. There are examples of the people looking for the Union dead and taking a Union body while leaving the skeleton of a Confederate soldier untreated and unburied.
It was hugely resented in the South, and it led to organizations led by southern women to identify the Confederate dead, to go out from Richmond and other sites where there had been extensive fighting, and to do, essentially, what the northern government did, but in a private way through these women’s organizations. If you think of something like Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, tens of thousands of southern dead were brought there. I think there are thirty-eight thousand Confederate soldiers in a cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia. That was the result of these organizations of southern women.
DR: How many soldiers were killed at Gettysburg during those three days of combat in July 1863?
DGF: It was about seven thousand.
DR: When President Lincoln spoke there in November, were all those bodies buried?
DGF: No, a lot of them still were piled up.
DR: You talk in the book about how the sixth commandment says we’re not supposed to kill people. How did these very religious people in the South and in the North get used to the idea “I’m going to kill people”?
DGF: That was a question that interested me a lot. How do you train people to think that killing is okay? There was a lot of resistance to it, religious resistance, that then was mitigated by a sense that there were religious reasons to advance the cause of whichever side the individual was on. So God would permit it.
But then there was, sometimes, a reluctance to actually pull the trigger or to do whatever act it took to kill someone else. And so we see people who didn’t fire their guns right or fired them in all directions.
DR: When the war was over and efforts were made to figure out who died and where they died, how many of the dead were actually identified?
DGF: Slightly less than half were identified, ultimately. There are huge numbers of unknown soldiers.
DR: The hospitals in which these soldiers were put—were they very sanitary? Were the surgeons that good?
DGF: We need to understand that medicine in the mid-nineteenth century was so far from what we understand or expect of medicine today. As you mentioned earlier, the germ theory of disease was not even understood. It was very hard to treat wounds without contaminating them with infection. It was not a pleasant thing to be in a Civil War hospital.
DR: Were soldiers afraid that they would be put with the dead and buried when they were still alive? Was that a problem?
DGF: That was something many soldiers were quite scared about, and there were stories about piles of bodies where someone started making a noise in the middle and was saved.
DR: Is that why they put bells in the coffins, so you could ring them?
DGF: That was a nineteenth-century practice that extended beyond the war.
DR: How did Arlington National Cemetery come about? Were Union soldiers buried there as a way to punish Robert E. Lee?
DGF: Montgomery Meigs, the quartermaster general of the United States, was responsible for, among other things, burials and bodies. His son was, in his view, murdered by Confederate troops after he had already surrendered, so Montgomery Meigs was extremely bitter about the South. Part of the reason, I think, that southerners were not even considered for inclusion in the national cemetery system is that he would hear none of it. He also was the leading voice in saying, “Let’s put a graveyard on the property of Robert E. Lee.”
DR: As part of what we learned from that war, in future wars what did the U.S. government do? Did it require dog tags?
DGF: There’s been a revolution, first in attitude. We feel so strongly now that we are responsible for those who die in the nation’s service. We also feel so strongly, and I think comrades feel so strongly, about people serving with them that their bodies must be recovered, must be brought home.
This attitude is one that would have seemed very alien in 1858. It was really the Civil War that changed that attitude, and that then led to policies: dog tags or other identification is required so that an individual can be repatriated or the family can be informed. Then processes were put in place to inform families about the state of their loved ones and what happened to them. Also as much information as possible was developed about how soldiers led their last moments of life and how they died.
Grave registration units and the various bureaucracies that surround them were important too. It was often not even contemplated, except informally by a chaplain or by someone in a company or another military unit, to write down who had been killed. That kind of information wasn’t typically available.
Now, of course, this is all routine.
DR: If you were an African American soldier fighting for the Union, could you be buried in a regular Union cemetery?
DGF: What you see in the early national cemeteries is segregation of Blacks and whites in those settings.
DR: The lesson you took away from your research is that we weren’t really prepared for the enormous carnage, and therefore we allowed people to die without appropriate burials in many cases?
DGF: Certainly that was one lesson I took away from it. In some ways, it’s gruesome.
But for me, doing the research was inspiring, as I saw people struggling with such difficult circumstances and inventing ways to be human amid a context of inhumanity. Even within the impossible world that Civil War battles involved, you coul
d do things to retain the important values that defined you as something more than simply an animal. Soldiers will say, “We can’t throw these comrades in the ground like chickens. We need to do more than that.” Seeing the human spirit triumph even under those kinds of conditions was very moving for me.
KEN BURNS on the Vietnam War
Documentary Filmmaker
“I’ve been drawn to stories that reveal us to ourselves. Who are we? Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans?”
America’s successes in the Revolutionary War, the Spanish-American War, and World Wars I and II provided most Americans by the 1960s with a certain sense of power, if not omnipotence—i.e., “We’ve never lost a war.” The War of 1812, despite the British destruction of the federal buildings in Washington, D.C., and the Korean War—where an armistice produced nothing close to a victory—were not seen, somehow, in the American psyche as “losses.”
So when engagement in Vietnam began in the late 1950s, a series of U.S. presidents committed U.S. forces there for a variety of geopolitical reasons, including a desire to keep America from losing a war—even though it was widely recognized in the senior levels of the Johnson and Nixon administrations that the war could not be “won” in any military sense. This is made quite clear in the epic documentary on the war by Ken Burns (codirected with Lynn Novick).
Ken first came to widespread national attention and acclaim with his Emmy Award–winning PBS series The Civil War in 1990. That film, which took more than five years to finish, attracted PBS’s largest audience ever, and showed the public a film style that has become synonymous with Ken Burns: frequent use of historic still photos, revelation of heretofore largely unknown facts or vignettes, lyrical and era music background, voice-overs by well-known individuals, and interviews with prominent individuals telling personal anecdotes.
The focus of this interview, which took place on November 28, 2017, at the Library of Congress as part of the Congressional Dialogues series, was another multi-evening series that Ken produced over a ten-year period and that PBS aired in 2017—The Vietnam War. In the interview, he makes at least two critical observations: First, the U.S. government, during both Democratic and Republican administrations, throughout a war that resulted in more than 58,000 American soldiers dying, knew such a war could not really be won militarily; and, second, these administrations saw the war as really a domestic political undertaking rather than a military or strategic geopolitical undertaking. This is obviously disheartening for those who, like me, lived through this era, with all of its upheaval, turmoil, dislocation, and the deaths of friends and colleagues.
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