Last week PBS aired a beautiful episode of American Experience (that show has been batting a thousand for a decade, I swear) called Death and the Civil War. Directed by Ric Burns, it deals with how unprepared the government was to handle the slaughter of the war, how perpetually re-shocked the populace was every time a battle resulted in thousands dead, how the lack of systematic measures to cope with battlefield dead laid waste to Victorian notions of "the good death," how soldiers made pacts with each other to rig up something remotely in keeping with a proper death, how even years after the war the government (for Union soldiers) and private organizations (a Richmond ladies' society for Confederates) were still trying to locate and rebury battlefield dead in a respectful way.
It was fascinating from a societal perspective and genuinely moving. The letter from a dying soldier that opens the documentary brought me to instant sobs. Also the long quote from this theoretically prose piece but not really of Walt Whitman's.
Quote:
the infinite dead—(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes' exhalation in Nature's chemistry distill'd, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)—not only Northern dead leavening Southern soil—thousands, aye tens of thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.
And everywhere among these countless graves—everywhere in the many soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over seventy of them)—as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles—not only where the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all the peaceful quarters of the land—we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word Unknown.
Although this never came up explicitly, the documentary also cast a whole new light on the research I've been doing about the American resurrection men. It explains the callousness of the grave-robbers and doctors, the ambivalence of the professional classes and the horrified reactions of everyone else. When it came to dealing with cadavers, the devastating, confounding, contradictory aspects of the mass death experience tied people into a Gordian knot until well into the next century.
You can watch it online right now, but expect it to be taken down sooner rather than later so they can sell DVDs. Watch it. Like this weekend at the latest.
Death and the Civil War
Re: Death and the Civil War
Re: Death and the Civil War
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