CSA dead in the ACW?

[Paul_in_Qatar]

How were Confederate bodies handled by the North in the American Civil War?

John Keegan seems to say they were buried in mass unmarked graves. He ought to know, but here in Frederick Maryland, we have a lot of CSA dead in the local boneyard. I suppose it varied from place to place?

And then, how did the CSA handle the Federal dead?

[Mr.Moto]

Frederick isn’t exactly the North. Maryland was a border state that had more than its share of Confederate sympathizers.

[Mr.Excellent]

Indeed - at one point, Union troops had to threaten to shell Baltimore in order to quell pro-Confederate riots.

[Sailboat]

Is “ACW” in common use somewhere, or did you coin it? Never seen it before.

[smiling_bandit]

@Paul_in_Qatar

John Keegan seems to say they were buried in mass unmarked graves. He ought to know, but here in Frederick Maryland, we have a lot of CSA dead in the local boneyard. I suppose it varied from place to place?

The dead were not commonly sent home, this being before body bags and air freight, if the deceased even had enough identification to send to a specific home anyway. Mass graves were a commonplace, but not universal, method of dealing with the problem.

[missred]

There weren’t really a lot of battles, save Gettysburg, north of the Mason-Dixon.

Here in Tennessee, there are CSA soldiers buried in most local cemeteries that go back that far. From what I’ve learned from the UDC ladies and the SCV guys, most localaties had folks who would offer services and burial space in grounds local to battlefields in the name of the Cause. They were likely hoping that someone would do the same for the soldiers they loved in similar circumstances.

I will be touring an historic Nashville cemetery Saturday. It has a statue of General Lee in the center of Confederate Circle. These vets are honored every year on Confederate Memorial Day.
Most CS of A states did have regiments of Federal troops though. There are National Cemeteries local to Nashville and in other parts of the South that have USA civil war dead interred, along with the military from wars from the Revolution to the present day conflicts.

I have Union ancestral family buried twenty-five miles from where I live after losing their lives in the Battle of Murfreesboro / Battle of Stones River (the name changes according to which side is telling the story). They were fighting four hundred miles from home. They are honored on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day.

[Tenar]

@smiling_bandit

The dead were not commonly sent home, this being before body bags and air freight, if the deceased even had enough identification to send to a specific home anyway. Mass graves were a commonplace, but not universal, method of dealing with the problem.

I’m sure that shipping bodies home was by no means the most common outcome, but it must have happened fairly often, given that it is “credited” with popularizing the practice of embalming bodies in the U.S… See here.

[engineer_comp_geek]

You may find this article interesting. It talks about how the Confederate dead were treated at Gettysburg:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/678813/the_forgotten_confederate_soldiers.html?cat=37

One of the saddest and unfortunate aspects of the Battle of Gettysburg was the way the Confederate dead were handled. Unless buried by their comrades, the dead were carelessly buried in a shallow graves, with just enough dirt to cover the bodies. No attempt was made by the Union soldiers
that did the interment to identify the bodies. The Union dead were buried quickly after the battle, but in many cases the Confederate dead were left unburied for days. When the rebel dead was buried, usually a shallow trench was dug and the bodies just rolled into it, in many cases multiple bodies in the same trench.

The lucky ones maybe had a piece of board with their name and unit penciled on it, but these were few compared with the number killed.

The article goes on to describe how many of the bodies were sent back to the South several years after the war had ended. It’s an interesting article, IMHO.

[Paul_in_Qatar]

@Sailboat

Is “ACW” in common use somewhere, or did you coin it? Never seen it before.

ACW for “American Civil War.” I suppose I almost coined it. In the old paper-based war gaming community, ACW applied to a game called the American Civil War. I have not seen it in print for many years.

[Sailboat]

@Paul_in_Qatar

ACW for “American Civil War.” I suppose I almost coined it. In the old paper-based war gaming community, ACW applied to a game called the American Civil War. I have not seen it in print for many years.

We can use “TLU” in the South.

(For “the Late Unpleasantness,” of course.)

.

[Tranquilis]

@Paul_in_Qatar

John Keegan seems to say they were buried in mass unmarked graves. He ought to know, but here in Frederick Maryland, we have a lot of CSA dead in the local boneyard. I suppose it varied from place to place?

Eh. Keegan is good, but he’s not that good. ‘Mass graves’ is a rather broad brush.

The basic issues were ‘what have I got in the way of resources (people, land, equipment), how many bodies, and how much time?’

Where the local community was available and willing to help, or a unit was stationed nearby for a long time, burial was often very close to or even at civilian standards. Where both forces were still in the field, and a battle was possible, or rapid maneuvering going on, burial might not happen at all. Or anything in-between.

[Kizarvexius]

@Sailboat

We can use “TLU” in the South.

(For “the Late Unpleasantness,” of course.)

.

Or, as my father puts it, TWoNA – “The War of Northern Aggression.”

[chowder]

@Kizarvexius

Or, as my father puts it, TWoNA – “The War of Northern Aggression.”

And that’s another thing.

Why do you guys call your civil war by different names?

The War Between the States, The War of Northern Aggression, The anything else war

We’ve had a civil war and we call it The English Civil War, not The War between the Faggotty guys with feathers in their hats and the other guys with helmets on.

Sorry for the hijack

[davekhps]

@chowder

And that’s another thing.

Why do you guys call your civil war by different names?

The War Between the States, The War of Northern Aggression, The anything else war

We’ve had a civil war and we call it The English Civil War, not The War between the Faggotty guys with feathers in their hats and the other guys with helmets on.

Sorry for the hijack

Mostly a matter of personal opinion. The obviously accepted term is the Civil War/ American Civil War. The War Between The States is less common, but obviously still neutral. Anything other than that, and you’re usually trying to make a point.

That said, in 2009, very, VERY few people say “The War of Northern Aggression” any way other than tongue-in-cheek, i.e. it’s a way for Southerners to poke Yankees in the ribs :).

Actually, anyone who’s studied the Civil War also knows that the North and the South couldn’t even agree on the names for many battles. Antietam in the North, Sharpsburg in the South; Bull Run in the North, Manassas in the South, etc.-- the Union often referred to battles according to their nearest geographical feature, while the Confederacy named the battles according to the nearest town. You’ll still hear a few of these used interchangeably even today, particularly in academic/history junkie circles.

[chowder]

@davekhps

That said, in 2009, very, VERY few people say “The War of Northern Aggression” any way other than tongue-in-cheek, i.e. it’s a way for Southerners to poke Yankees in the ribs :).

.

Funny you should say that. When I was staying with some Rebel friends in Alabama they swore the war wasn’t over, the South was just waiting on supplies.

::>insert Rebel Yell<::

[ElvisL1ves]

There were plenty of Confederate deaths in Northern prison camps, and they weren’t always buried respectfully, either.

[chowder]

@ElvisL1ves

There were plenty of Confederate deaths in Northern prison camps, and they weren’t always buried respectfully, either.

Why did you guys treat your fellow countrymen in such a horrible manner?.

OK, it was North v South but bloody hell you were all Americans when all’s said and done

[Tranquilis]

@davekhps

Actually, anyone who’s studied the Civil War also knows that the North and the South couldn’t even agree on the names for many battles. Antietam in the North, Sharpsburg in the South; Bull Run in the North, Manassas in the South, etc.-- the Union often referred to battles according to their nearest geographical feature, while the Confederacy named the battles according to the nearest town. You’ll still hear a few of these used interchangeably even today, particularly in academic/history junkie circles.

This one is hardly an area of disagreement. It’s just alternate naming conventions. You need some system for designating battles and events, and it’s pretty much a coin-toss which to use.

@chowder

Why did you guys treat your fellow countrymen in such a horrible manner?.

OK, it was North v South but bloody hell you were all Americans when all’s said and done

Oh, this is hardly unique to the US… Anyone who knows anything about world history can eassily find plenty of equal or worse examples nastiness to one’s fellow citizens.

But, to give a straight answer, people in the North and South didn’t really feel all that much kinship. Economically and socially, the North and South really were disctinct cultures - Even now, there are marked regional cultures in the US, many of which I’m sure you could name off the top of your head without even thinking about it.

[chowder]

@Tranquilis

Oh, this is hardly unique to the US… Anyone who knows anything about world history can eassily find plenty of equal or worse examples nastiness to one’s fellow citizens.

But, to give a straight answer, people in the North and South didn’t really feel all that much kinship. Economically and socially, the North and South really were disctinct cultures - Even now, there are marked regional cultures in the US, many of which I’m sure you could name off the top of your head without even thinking about it.

Point taken altho’ it surprises me when you say that people from the North/South didn’t feel much kinship. Surely they were aware that they were all Americans and had fought a war against us devilish British to be recognised as such.

Regional cultures?

I can probably can name some but at the moment my brain isn’t working:smack:

[Sailboat]

This is a shorthand summary of a lot of complex history: not all the people involved considered all the prisoners fellow Americans…there was a willful blind spot. The prisoner treatment situation was poisoned by race relations.

When the North was contemplating enlisting black soldiers, the South responded with a combination of horror (slaveholders always lived with a lurking fear of armed uprising by the slaves, and perhaps because of that, Southerners reacted viscerally to the idea of black soldiers coming against them) and contempt (there was a lot of talk about this being the ultimate example of Northern cowardice.) Influential Southern figures (some generals and some fire-eaters in the Confederate congress) declared they would enslave or kill black soldiers and hang their white commanders instead of treating them as honorable prisoners of war.

Union responses to these threats (threats both real and somewhat overblown) brought the entire system of prisoner exchange to a grinding halt. Neither side had prepared for keeping large numbers of prisoners indefinitely, and to make further preparations was hard when everyone wanted to believe the situation would be temporary, so prisoners tended to accumulate in inadequate camps with inadequate food and shelter, and disease and squalor took their grim toll. Guilt at the situation, anger at the other side, and the stresses of what was becoming a total war made the camp guards on both sides more likely to neglect and mistreat their prisoners. Look at Abu Ghraib as a modern example of how this kind of situation deteriorates.

Eventually Union general Grant realized that restarting prisoner exchanges would do the South’s war effort much more good than it would the North’s, and he consistently turned down any offers to restart the prisoner exchange system for the rest of the war.

Neither the North nor the South intended to be inhumane to prisoners when the war started, and nobody deliberately proposed a change of policy toward white prisoners. But the dark coiling fears that underlay the South’s system of racial slavery eventually brought them to propose evil treatment of people the North was just beginning to realize were brothers-in-arms, and that cast a shadow over prisoner-captor relations for the rest of the war.