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Geoffrey C. Ward recensisce il libro This Republic of Suffering in cui Drew Gilpin Faust analizza la guerra civile americana (1861-1865) e la conseguente ridefinizione dell’identità nazionale attraverso una prospettiva particolare: la morte e la sepoltura dei soldati.
Questa guerra, con i suoi 620 mila caduti, causò la morte di circa il 2% della popolazione statunitense ed ebbe un impatto tanto forte da provocare un cambiamento nella stessa percezione del perire. Faust si sofferma soprattutto sulla funzione pubblica delle sepolture: se durante la guerra non esisteva nessun sistema statale, nel decennio successivo furono riesumati circa 300 mila soldati dell’Unione caduti nel Sud che vennero seppelliti in cimiteri nazionali costruiti appositamente per accoglierli.
During the Civil War, my great-great-grandfather, a Presbyterian clergyman, served as chaplain to the 104th New York Infantry Regiment. He was a man of stern moral conviction and in weekly letters to his parishioners back home allowed little to escape his censorious eye. President Lincoln’s erratic church attendance irritated him. So did mud and heat and the “intemperance” and “profanity” that he believed were the “great sins of our army,” and he was infuriated by the proximity of his quarters to the “tents of several of the most blasphemous, immoral persons I ever heard.” But in the aftermath of Gettysburg, words failed him. “Sad scenes!” was all he could write after two days spent officiating at the trench burials of Union and Confederate boys. “I have no time, strength nor heart to recall and narrate what I have seen!” Little wonder. Some 7,000 corpses lay scattered across the Pennsylvania countryside, alongside more than 3,000 dead horses and mules - an estimated six million pounds of human and animal flesh, swollen and blackening in the July heat. For weeks afterward, townspeople carried bottles of peppermint oil to neutralize the smell.
Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since. Two percent of the United States population died in uniform - 620,000 men, North and South, roughly the same number as those lost in all of America’s other wars from the Revolution through Korea combined. The equivalent toll today would be six million.
The lasting but little-understood impact of all that sacrifice is the subject of Drew Gilpin Faust’s extraordinary new book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. “Death created the modern American union,” she writes, “not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.” And she continues: “The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.” Her account of how that work was done, much of it gleaned from the letters of those who found themselves forced to do it, is too richly detailed and covers too much ground to be summarized easily. [...]
She begins with what she calls the “work” of dying. The faithful looked forward to what was called a Good Death, with time to see the end approaching, accept it and declare to friends and family members their belief in God and his promise of salvation. The battlefield brutally truncated that serene process, and soldiers and their families alike worried about what that might mean for their chances in the afterlife. Survivors tried to provide reassurance. When one Union soldier was killed during the siege of Richmond, a comrade told his mother that while her boy had died instantly and without the opportunity to declare his faith, he had told his fellow soldiers the previous summer that he “felt his sins were forgiven & that he was ready and resigned to the Lord’s will & while talking he was so much overjoyed that he could hardly suppress his feelings of delight.” [...] When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead, no national cemeteries in which to bury them. The corpses of officers often received special treatment, boxed up and sent home in what one entrepreneur advertised as “Metallic coffins ... Warranted Air-Tight” that could “be placed in the Parlor without fear of any odor escaping therefrom.” Dead enlisted men were generally just wrapped in blankets and buried where they died. Officers “get a monument,” a Texas soldier wrote, “you get a hole in the ground and no coffin.” Men going into combat were issued no identification tags. One soldier made sure he always carried a used envelope “somewhere about me so that if killed in battle my friends might know what became of me.” [...]
Fathers and brothers wandered battlefields in search of missing relatives. So did wives and mothers dressed in black. Private “agents” promised to search for missing men in exchange for a percentage of their widows’ pensions. Spiritualists made a good living conveying vague but consoling messages from the Other Side.
In 1862, Congress empowered the president to purchase grounds for “a national cemetery for the soldiers who shall die in the service of their country” but provided him with no funds with which to buy it. By war’s end, there were just five such cemeteries, three established by Union generals in the western theater, and two - Antietam and Gettysburg - paid for by states from which many of those killed there had come. Only after the war was over - and amid news reports that vengeful Southerners were desecrating Union graves - did Congress finally provide a national solution to what had become a national need. The Union dead were to be gathered from scores of Southern battlefields, identified when possible, then re-interred in burial grounds to be protected and maintained by the federal government. The ghastly work went on for six years, much of it performed by African-American soldiers. When the last body was reburied in 1871, 303,536 Union soldiers had been laid to rest in 74 national cemeteries at a cost of $4 million. Almost half remained nameless. “Such a consecration of a nation’s power and resources to a sentiment, the world has never seen,” wrote one of the officers charged with recovering the bodies.
Confederate corpses were barred. A Northern reporter walking a Southern battlefield stumbled upon the unburied skeletons of two soldiers. His local guide examined their uniform buttons. “They was No’th Carolinians,” the man explained. “That’s why they didn’t bury ’em.” Southern women saw to it that the Southern dead were reburied, but many of those who’d been hastily covered with earth during Confederate forays into the North were never found. As late as 1996, spring rains were still uncovering their bones near Gettysburg. “The war’s staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,” Faust, now the president of Harvard University, writes, “one designed to ensure that lives had been sacrificed for appropriately lofty ends.” Frederick Douglass thought freeing the slaves should have provided the “sacred significance” of all that loss. But, Faust continues, “the Dead became what their survivors chose to make them,” and as the decades passed and memories blurred, “assumptions of racial hierarchy would unite whites North and South in a century-long abandonment of the emancipationist legacy.” In the end most Americans of my great-great-grandfather’s generation - and their successors - allowed their shared memories of suffering to “establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.” We might wish, with Frederick Douglass, that they had decided otherwise, but Drew Gilpin Faust’s profoundly moving book helps us understand why they did not.
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering. Death and the American Civil War, pp. 346, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, $27.95.
The New York Times |
