Undertakers in the 19th Century

[BettyO]

I have a question which someone may be able to answer here:

If a soldier died in battle and his body was shipped home, would it be embalmed in the field or would it be packed on ice and THEN shipped home to a local undertaker? What if the person died in winter? How would this be handled? If it had already been embalmed before shipping, would a local undertaker have to get involved to have it moved to the family's house for the funeral and burial?

Thanks!

[Rsmyth]

Good questions Betty. I can only say that a cottage industry developed involving embalming. Embalmers travelled to the battle fields and then had the deceased shipped home. Prior to that the dead were buried where they fell. I had heard of some well off departed whose coffin was placed in a copper container that was filled with ice for the shipment. What happened when the body arrived home I do not know. The body of JWB was shipped from one undertaker to another but not all the soldiers were as well off as the Booths.

[Laurie Verge]

The embalmers back then had to be doctors or surgeons trained in the practice. They were not undertakers as we think of them today. I would think that that would reduce the amount of embalmers who were available on or near the battlefields.

It also depended on the condition of the body, I believe, as to whether or not it could be embalmed - and the smell was a big factor. If the body was too smelly, railroads would refuse to ship it. I have also read that if the putrefaction occurred once on board the train, the body would be taken off at the next stop and buried.

As for icing them down for transportation, I would think that ice was a scarce commodity for the military; and weren't the majority of battles fought in non-winter months?

I also wonder about the military's ability to properly identify many of the remains in order to get them home to loved ones.

[Gene C]

From "This Republic of Suffering" by Drew Gilpen Faust, p79

After the Battle of Cedar Mountain (Culpeper Co., VA) in 1862 most of the Federal dead lay unburied for days, although the bodies of thier officers were packed in charcoal and sent to Washinton, where they were to be placed in metalic coffins and shipped to their homes across the North. Confederate Charles Kerrison described a similiar differentiation in treatment acccording to rank when he attempted to retrieve the body of his brother Edwin, a private killed in the spring of 1862. When one of four officers for whom metalic coffins had been provided proved lost, Kerrison hoped he might appropriate the surplus casket for Edwin. But he seemingly never questioned that a higher-ranking soldier should have been provided a coffin while his own brother had none."

p73 "Haste and carelessness frequently yielded graves so shallow that bodies and skeletons reappeared, as rain and wind eroded the soil sheltering the dead and hogs rooted around battlefields in search of human remains. For men burried on the field, coffins were out of the question; a blanket was the most a man could hope for as a shroud. As a northern relief worker reported about burials in Virginia in 1864, 'None have been buried in coffins since the campaign commenced."

I have just started reading this book. Bill Nash (LincolnMan)n gave me this assesment of the book and he is right on
"..at times I was fascinated with it - at other times it was depressing"

[Rsmyth]

I believe the term embalming surgeon was given to anyone that posted the bond and received the federal permit to embalm during the war. Embalmers handed out vouchers to soldiers heading to battle and then searched the dead for the coupons. Henry P. Cattell who embalmed both the President and his son had no formal medical training. Rather he was the stepson of one of the founders of Brown and Alexander and had been trained in the procedure. After the war as business declined many left the field and the work was left to undertakers.

[Rsmyth]

There will be a seminar on embalming at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD this October.
http://www.fredericknewspost.com/section...D9jY_F5mSM

[Laurie Verge]

If you have never been to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, MD, you should plan on adding it to your itinerary if you visit the Washington area. Frederick is about an hour's drive from D.C., site of the Monocacy Battlefield, close to Gettysburg, etc. The museum is wonderful -- and I am very picky about museums.

It was interesting to read that charcoal was used in shipping bodies.