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National Life After DeathCivil War carnage and the quest for American identity.

By Richard Wightman FoxPosted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 12:29 PM ET

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Previously, Richard Wightman Fox posited that Lincoln's faith doesn't suit either side in the culture wars and commented on America's never-ending battle over how to think about Jesus. Christopher Benfey examined Matthew Brady's civil war photographs. David Greenberg discussed Lincoln's army tribunals and Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus. Mark Oppenheimer argued that, her femaleness notwithstanding, Drew Gilpin Faust was a conservative choice for the presidency of Harvard.

At Gettysburg, for example, where 7,000 men lay dead after three days of fighting, thousands of Northerners soon arrived to hunt for their missing men. As many as 1,500 Yankee dead were embalmed and sent home when lucky relatives with sufficient means managed first to find them, then to locate a metallic coffin required for shipment. The national cemetery dedicated by Lincoln four months later arranged the dead democratically, not by rank, but the bodies of many officers from well-to-do families had already been expressed home rather than left for burial with the mass of soldiers. As for the Confederate fallen, the luckier of them, too, were not left to molder. Faust notes that as Robert E. Lee's forces retreated in haste, some of the 6,000 African-Americans who had accompanied the troops to the Pennsylvania battlefield managed to retrieve their masters' bodies and shepherd them at least part of the way home. Even when they took social inequality for granted, Faust implies, Americans of all backgrounds still shared identical expectations about the proper deathbed experience, the decent burial, and the hoped-for heavenly destination.

Over the last generation, professional historians downplayed the Civil War as the key pivot point in 19^th-century American development, stressing instead the growth of industrialism before the war and the rise of large-scale organizations and nationally based professional identities (like that of historians themselves) after the war. Political and military events took a back seat to social change. Having always kept the war in her own scholarly sights, Faust offers a compelling reassertion of its basic importance in society and politics alike. Civil War death so profoundly challenged conventional rituals and identities, she argues, that it helped spark political and cultural support for the larger organizations, public and private, of the late-19th century. In the process, the federal government "assumed the unprecedented role of the citizen's friend," as the nation built up a new sense of unity out of the memory of young men's sacrificial deaths. In the North, Clara Barton's "Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army" was soon joined by a major government initiative to identify and rebury the dead in national cemeteries—perhaps, writes Faust, "the most elaborate federal program undertaken in nearly a century of American nationhood."

At the same time, as Faust subtly shows, Northerners and Southerners kept on building separate collective identities, after the fighting stopped, as they honored their fallen men. Each region kept revitalizing its own nationalism in counterpoise with the other. Lacking the material resources commanded by Northerners, Southern white women in cities and towns alike mobilized to rebury the Confederate dead. In Winchester, a town in northern Virginia that had seen numerous battles throughout the war, women took the lead in gathering 2,500 bodies that lay within a 15-mile radius of the town and placing them in Stonewall Cemetery, built adjacent to a national cemetery for Yankee dead. They succeeded in identifying almost 1,700 men; the remaining 800 were buried together in a central mound encircled by the marked graves. Through this symbolically powerful public work, Southern women helped create the mythic Confederate nation that grew out of the ashes of the actual Confederacy.

The Civil War ended slavery and formally reunited the country, but as This Republic of Suffering makes abundantly clear, a more or less unified white American identity could follow only a generation later. Northern and Southern whites had to embark first upon their separate quests to memorialize their dead—campaigns based upon the same cultural assumptions about death but vastly different organizational strategies and resources. And before Northern whites could reconcile themselves with a post-Reconstruction, segregated South, they needed to forget the tens of thousands of African-American soldiers who had died for liberty and union too. That process required time, since black veterans did all they could after the war to remind the nation of their service. The irony is that the fallen white soldiers whom both sides had labored so tirelessly to identify and rebury as individuals passed into 20^th-century American memory as collectivities of white Southern and white Northern heroes, sacrificed for a politically rejoined yet still racially divided nation.

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Richard Wightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, is writing a book about the death and funeral of Abraham Lincoln.

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