We cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow

You know how some people can feel deep within their bosom the first waves of a surge of nascent born again Christianity or the stirring of some other life-changing need? I think I'm very close to beginning to think about becoming a Civil War buff. Mind you, I'm not about to start recreating famous battles or anything but a lifelong fascination with the photography of Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner and others who dragged their cameras to the battlefield during The War Between the States is starting to morph into the desire to know more. Names, dates, battles, aftermaths. I've done this sort of thing before, making myself some years ago an expert on the Salem hysteria. I have volume after volume on the subject and personal notebooks filled with the names of the executed... so obviously this kind of mania is within me. Now, I haven't gone and done anything foolish... yet... but I suspect these wiggly inclinations are about to get the better of me.

I've always found those old photographs from this era to be surpassingly eerie. Sure, all the rubbery dead bodies in the frame probably have a lot to do with that but even more than the carnage it's the coldness and the presence of the woods in the background and the patchwork look of the soldiers' uniforms, which amount to little more than their own clothes to which has been added a cap with a military emblem, a satchel with a military buckle, or a musket. Dirty, bearded and starved, these poor bastards look like concentration camp internees more than terra stamping commandos. Those photographs have a power over me and prompted me to read the Civil War fiction of Ambrose Bierce. I find all of this unbelievably creepy and irresistible.

All of this is coming to a head now with the publication of a couple of books about the Civil War dead, about the (then) unfathomable volume of dead bodies that the Civil War generated and what had to be done about them. I'm particularly interested in Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008), which suggests that the way in which our country responded to the dead weight of so many war casualties actually defined America as we know it now. I quote from Gilpin's introduction:

Bodies were in important ways the measure of the war–of its achievements and its impact; and indeed, bodies became highly visible in Civil War America. Commanders compared their own and enemy casualties as evidence of military success or failure. Soldiers struggled for the words to describe mangled corpses strewn across battlefields; families contemplated the significance of newspaper lists of wounds: "slightly, in the shoulder," "severely, in the groin," "mortally, in the breast." They nursed the dying and buried their remains. Letters and reports from the front rendered the physicality of injuries and death all but unavoidable. For the first time civilians directly confronted the reality of battlefield death rendered by the new art of photography. They found themselves transfixed by the paradoxically lifelike renderings of the slain of Antietam that Mathew Brady exhibited in his studio on Broadway. If Brady "has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it," wrote the New York Times.

This new prominence of bodies overwhelmingly depicted their destruction and deformation, inevitably raising the question of how they related to the persons who had once inhabited them. In the aftermath of battle survivors often shoveled corpses into pits as they would dispose of animals–"in bunches, just like dead chickens," one observer noted–dehumanizing both the living and the dead through their disregard. In Civil War death the distinction between men and animals threatened to disappear, just as it was simultaneously eroding in the doctrines of nineteenth-century science.

I mean no pun, but it sounds like there's a lot of meat here. It would be interesting to find out that a lifelong interest in morbid subjects on my part is actually part and parcel of a perfectly American legacy.