Undertakers in the 19th Century

[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"