Free On Hallowed Ground by Robert M Poole

lines, where commanding officers were responsible for disposing of the dead, thousands of soldiers were interred in plots laid out near battlefields. 31 One could mark the progress of the war by the sudden appearance of these rough-and-ready cemeteries, which sprouted overnight
among the blasted trees, abandoned wagons, and shell-cratered fields around Washington and Richmond. If the dead could be identified by letters in their pockets or notes pinned to their uniforms, their graves
were marked with crude wooden headboards noting the soldier’s name and company. In the haste of the moment, names were often
misspelled or incomplete; even this scanty identifying information, scrawled in pencil or crudely carved on markers, weathered
and became indecipherable in time. Fallen officers and soldiers from well-to-do families were usually shipped home, with expenses
borne by relatives. 32
    Many others went to their graves anonymously. In this age before dog tags, two out of five Civil War fatalities were fated
to be unknown soldiers. 33 If time allowed, a comrade might record a few descriptive details of an anonymous corpse for the quartermaster’s files.“Dead
of gunshot wound of bowels,” one such burial report read, “age unknown, regiment, rank, and company unknown … light brown
hair, light complexion, blue eyes, 5'6".” 34 Such fragmentary notes were useless when, years later, grieving relatives came looking for a lost soldier, who would have
been tumbled into a mass grave with scores or even hundreds of others, their tomb marked by a single headboard recording the
number of dead and the dates of the action that killed them. Others simply lay where they had fallen in battle, left to the
elements as the fighting rushed to another point. 35 There was little time for ceremony.
    Nor was there much hope of a dignified burial for the unfortunate warrior who died in Washington’s hospitals—in part because government expenses were so tight and personnel so scarce, in part because Washington’s hot, humid climate required that the dead be disposed of quickly. 36 There was no refrigeration to preserve remains, and the new science of embalming was too expensive for the farm boys, immigrants,
and small-town youths who did most of the fighting. They left the hospitals as they had entered them—penniless—and far from
friends and relatives who might have provided them a better send-off. 37
    The quartermaster’s office, which took charge of burials around Washington, made contracts with undertakers to dispose of the dead. These contractors collected bodies, hauled them away, provided a
shroud, crammed them into cheap coffins, buried them, and erected a wooden headboard—all for $4.49 per soldier. 38 With trade booming, some of the capital’s undertakers had trouble keeping pace with demand. Citizens grumbled about the stench,
and when the uncollected bodies piled up, irate notes flew from hospitals to the War Department. 39 In a typical message, a surgeon at Harewood Hospital gave an assistant quartermaster a tongue-lashing for leaving a dead
soldier moldering in his ward for three days:
    The body of John Northrop, late Priv. of Co. I 188th Regt. N.Y. Vols. of whose death you had the usual notice on the 8th inst.
not having been taken away by friends for Private Burial, you will please have interred on the 11th inst. at 2 p.m. 40
    In addition to these delays, which were for the most part unavoidable, it became clear that contractors handled their dead
soldiers with less care than they would accord a load of turnips bound for market: they cut corners to save money, dug shallow
graves to save time, slapped coffins together with gaps between the thin pine planks, and sometimes rolled a serviceman in
a blanket and buried him with no casket at all. Even in a capital inured to the cruelties of war, though, some assaults on
human dignity surpassed endurance. When residents living near the Judiciary Square Hospital