How were all the bodies disposed of?

http://civilwartalk.com/threads/fort-pillow.5082/

It seems clear to me you could use some more reading on the subject. The above link is 30+ pages long and full of detail, good & bad. Read the whole thing and you'll take out of it what you want anyway. Men were murdered there simply because they were black men wearing a blue uniform. CS soldiers said so & USCT men said so. Forrest put a stop to it before the KIA reached 100% & WIA 0%. As I said there are at least 2 other threads on the subject & I have no urge to side track this one.

So you live 20 minutes from Ft Pillow -shrug- I live 45 minutes from the Mall of America and work their regularly, that doesn't qualify me as an expert on the MoA. Some of the worst "historical experts" I have ever seen were re-enactors. Which is why I don't play war anymore. MOre often than not I refer to local historical societies as hysterical societies and take many of their writing w/ a grain of salt, especially their writings from the ACW as they can be more than a tad... biased.
 
In one notorious incident, the Union army paid a local farmer named Wise $1 a body to dispose of the Confederate dead from the Fox's Gap action at the Battle of South Mountain. Instead of burying them, he dumped around 60 of them down a dry well on his property where they remained for about 20 years until they were disinterred and reburied in a Confederate cemetery in Hagerstown, MD. (The well has been excavated by archeologist and sealed over to prevent relic hunters from looting the site.) The incident gave rise to a local ghost story titled, "Turn Me Over," where Wise is confronted by the ghost of the soldier on top of the pile who is tired of lying in the same position for years and wants to be turned over. The odd thing about it is that the well wasn't that far from his house--the smell coming from that well, with 60 or so decomposing bodies inside, must have been incredible.

The Wise farm incident was unusual, and as mentioned by others, many soldiers were buried in shallow graves or mass graves near where they fell. It was not uncommon for relatives to dig them up and take them home for reburial. There was a tremendous fear of being buried anonymously in those days and many northern soldiers bought privately made ID tags or had them sent to them by relatives (the armies didn't issue them).

Embalming was just taking off, too. There are accounts of embalmers following the larger armies and fighting over the bodies of officers, whose families were most likely to pay for embalming services. One overzealous embalmer actually sabotaged his competitor's equipment so he could have the business for himself.

ID tags, embalming, grave digging--there was money to be made!

(Of course, not everyone was out to make money off the dead--I recall that a family near the Petersburg line where the Union army broke through buried a Union officer in their garden and left him there until his family came to get him.)
Interesting story for me as my GGF was wounded at Fox's Gap on September 14, 1862. I waked the ground a few years back with my wife. I was looking for a ravine where my GGF had spotted many Confederate dead. As we approached the ravine my wife who was walking in the field along the tree line said she felt a presence. My feeling was it was the breeze, but who can say?
 
http://civilwartalk.com/threads/fort-pillow.5082/

It seems clear to me you could use some more reading on the subject. The above link is 30+ pages long and full of detail, good & bad. Read the whole thing and you'll take out of it what you want anyway. Men were murdered there simply because they were black men wearing a blue uniform. CS soldiers said so & USCT men said so. Forrest put a stop to it before the KIA reached 100% & WIA 0%. As I said there are at least 2 other threads on the subject & I have no urge to side track this one.

So you live 20 minutes from Ft Pillow -shrug- I live 45 minutes from the Mall of America and work their regularly, that doesn't qualify me as an expert on the MoA. Some of the worst "historical experts" I have ever seen were re-enactors. Which is why I don't play war anymore. MOre often than not I refer to local historical societies as hysterical societies and take many of their writing w/ a grain of salt, especially their writings from the ACW as they can be more than a tad... biased.
there are 2 sides to this battle along with everything. Some will side with the union,some will side with the south. Both you and I have proved to wich side we are loyal,so lets end the argument here before the thread gets closed..
 
there are 2 sides to this battle along with everything. Some will side with the union,some will side with the south. Both you and I have proved to wich side we are loyal,so lets end the argument here before the thread gets closed..
Read the thread, you may learn something you can use in your visits to Ft Pillow.
 
"I realize this is an unpleasant subject, but thinking of battles like Gettysburg, with 50,000 killed in three days, it occurs to me to ask how on earth did they bury all those bodies? Plus, it would have to be done quickly to avoid the spread of disease. Who buried them? Did they use prisoners, free slaves, or did they hire locals?"

Thread reopened, OP is posted above, please stick to that topic, thanks for your help.

Posted as moderator
 
Carrie McGavock did some pretty detailed bookkeeping as well. She did her best to identify people and to keep personal things found with the bodies. In one field there were better than 1000 dead but the farmer who owned it wanted to plant. There was an outcry raised, as he would be plowing through the bodies, but he was determined and in no way going to (or able to) move them. So, the McGavocks went and got them, reburied them on their 2 acres. Sometimes all there was to identify them was the buttons on their uniforms. Over the years people came and retrieved their loved one, and Carrie would carefully mark what occurred by that person's name in her book. One elderly couple came with a wagon full of dirt from Georgia. They could not take their son back home but wanted him buried in Georgia soil - so they brought the soil with them!
 
Interesting story for me as my GGF was wounded at Fox's Gap on September 14, 1862. I waked the ground a few years back with my wife. I was looking for a ravine where my GGF had spotted many Confederate dead. As we approached the ravine my wife who was walking in the field along the tree line said she felt a presence. My feeling was it was the breeze, but who can say?

Freddy--When you visited Fox's Gap you either parked in or drove by this small dirt parking area at the entrance. The picture below shows the location of Wise's farmhouse (the red square) and the location of the well where the bodies were dumped (red X). You can see how close the well was to his house. Although neither the house nor the well are marked today, you can still see a circular depression in the ground where the well once existed. The well has been excavated and sealed and is on park property. I also have a postcard from the early 1900s that shows Wise's house and marks the spot where Reno was shot, but it's in a PDF file.

Reno's monument is the large square area to the right and the 17th Michigan Field is across the street from that. General Gardner's monument is much smaller--it's near the two historical markers across from the parking area (he was taken to South Mountian Inn where he died. It's still operating. I had a nice buffet brunch there not long ago.)

It's hard to visit such places without it invoking some kind of emotional response, knowing what took place there--I sometimes get goose bumps walking the ground up there.

Wisehouseandwell.png
 
When I visited Allatoona Pass I was VERY familiar w/ the battle and the layout of the terrain. I had only a short time to wander the field. In my mind I knew how small the battlefield was but in walking the field I came to realize that it was BOTH smaller & larger than I imagined from my reading & studying the maps. The Eastern Redoubt was tiny compared to how I imagined it & the Star Fort... imagining more than 1000 men crammed in their was chilling. Standing in the spot where 100 or so CS troops started a charge only to have approx 60 of them hit by a well aimed volley was beyong chilling.

Walking that field gave me a new appreciation of the courage it took to do what those men did. By late 64 those men KNEW what was was all about and yet they kept falling in.

Seeing the mass graves of 150 years ago and seeing how nature has claimed them in a way validates that there are no southern or northern graves anymore; they are all Americans.
 
When I visited Allatoona Pass I was VERY familiar w/ the battle and the layout of the terrain. I had only a short time to wander the field. In my mind I knew how small the battlefield was but in walking the field I came to realize that it was BOTH smaller & larger than I imagined from my reading & studying the maps. The Eastern Redoubt was tiny compared to how I imagined it & the Star Fort... imagining more than 1000 men crammed in their was chilling. Standing in the spot where 100 or so CS troops started a charge only to have approx 60 of them hit by a well aimed volley was beyong chilling.

Walking that field gave me a new appreciation of the courage it took to do what those men did. By late 64 those men KNEW what was was all about and yet they kept falling in.

Seeing the mass graves of 150 years ago and seeing how nature has claimed them in a way validates that there are no southern or northern graves anymore; they are all Americans.

Well said....
 
Carrie McGavock did some pretty detailed bookkeeping as well. She did her best to identify people and to keep personal things found with the bodies. In one field there were better than 1000 dead but the farmer who owned it wanted to plant. There was an outcry raised, as he would be plowing through the bodies, but he was determined and in no way going to (or able to) move them. So, the McGavocks went and got them, reburied them on their 2 acres. Sometimes all there was to identify them was the buttons on their uniforms. Over the years people came and retrieved their loved one, and Carrie would carefully mark what occurred by that person's name in her book. One elderly couple came with a wagon full of dirt from Georgia. They could not take their son back home but wanted him buried in Georgia soil - so they brought the soil with them!


This is a custom in my area even today though with less dirt.

One of my Confederate ancestors (a great grand father) was a native of Nelson County, Virginia and served in a company raised in that county. After the war and the death of his first wife he went west for several years but eventually settled in Bennettsville, SC where he died in 1907. My grand mother (his daughter from a second marriage) told me that in the 1920s she went to Virginia to visit relatives but also to bring back a container of Virginia soil to spread on her father’s grave.

More recently, about ten years ago, a lady contacted my SCV camp about providing an honor guard for a ceremonial moving of soil from the grave of her great grandfather, buried in a neighboring county, to the graves of his wife and daughter buried in this county. The great grandfather died in 1890 and after his death the wife eventually moved to this county to live with her daughter – she died here in 1935.

After a discussion with the lady and with the SCV camp in the neighboring county, it we decided instead of just moving soil that we would move the remains and re bury him along side his wife and daughter. This we did with great pomp and ceremony in his honor but still with all the dignity befitting such an event. The large crowd was moved if not awed by the ceremony.

“The marching armies of the past along our southern plains are sleeping now in quite rest beneath the Southern rains. The bugle call is now in vain to rouse them from their bed; to arms they'll never march again- they are sleeping with the dead. No more will Shiloh's plains be stained again to our noble warrior's tread for them no more shall reveille sound at the break of dawn, but may their sleep peaceful be till God’s judgment morn. We bow our heads in solemn prayer for those who wore the gray and clasp again their unseen hands on our memorial day.”
 
Carrie McGavock did some pretty detailed bookkeeping as well. She did her best to identify people and to keep personal things found with the bodies. In one field there were better than 1000 dead but the farmer who owned it wanted to plant. There was an outcry raised, as he would be plowing through the bodies, but he was determined and in no way going to (or able to) move them. So, the McGavocks went and got them, reburied them on their 2 acres. Sometimes all there was to identify them was the buttons on their uniforms. Over the years people came and retrieved their loved one, and Carrie would carefully mark what occurred by that person's name in her book. One elderly couple came with a wagon full of dirt from Georgia. They could not take their son back home but wanted him buried in Georgia soil - so they brought the soil with them!

Reburying bodies was very dangerous due to exposure to possible disease.
 
That is very, very interesting. I didn't know that putting native soil in the grave was a custom. Do you know where it originates? I'm wondering if it's a European custom or one acquired from Indians. We have always buried our people in the soil they were born on no matter where they died. Only about ten years ago a local Hupa family finally got the money together to get their soldier from France, where he had died in WWII, to rebury him in the valley where he was born. The French graciously paid the cost of shipping the body, which was quite a lot!
 
Reburying bodies was very dangerous due to exposure to possible disease.

If the person didn't die of a contagious disease, what disease specifically would there be a danger of? People killed by trauma don't contract contagious illness after they die. There might be some risk of e coli poisoning if one handled bodies and then touched food, but no more so than any other time when one would be around e coli, such as using the outhouse, changing a baby's diaper, etc.

Unless you're proposing some new evidence about disease transmission, it's a common myth, and may have been believed by people at the time, but it's not objectively true. For example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16105324

I suspect it came from back in the day when odor was thought to spread disease--a common belief at the time of the war--so of course the odor of decaying bodies, combined with the evidence of disease being spread by handling both live and dead bodies during epidemics, would make people think that any dead bodies must spread disease, even if they were killed by trauma. But it wasn't objectively dangerous, and in fact, a lot of people may already have been used to handling bodies of their loved ones, in the days before funeral homes.
 
Please note, I made the necessary correction to the number of casualties in my original post.

Diana, sorry, I didn't mean to post up just your original OP with the incorrect figures, I totally missed the correction you posted.

Lee
 
One elderly couple came with a wagon full of dirt from Georgia. They could not take their son back home but wanted him buried in Georgia soil - so they brought the soil with them!

My Grandfather was born and raised in the Highlands of Scotland. Although a naturalized US citizen (and proud of it), he never ceased tiring of telling stories of the old country and how much he missed it. A few months after his passing in the 80's I had a chance to go to Scotland. I brought back a 35mm film canister (remember those?) of soil from his hometown and poured it on his grave. In some small way he will always be buried in his native ground.

Hadn’t thought about that for years until this thread.
 
When I was at Stones River and Chickamauga/Chattanooga, I made a point of going to the cemeteries there and visiting the graves of my ancestor's 3rd Wisconsin Battery mates who died either from wounds or disease. I have never lived in Wisconsin and had no access to soil from there, but I had some of the state quarters for Wisconsin and I felt driven to place a Wisconsin quarter in the soil at the base of each headstone to honor their service.* I never knew these men, and I don't know if my ancestor was friends with them or not, but I tell you, it's very powerful to pay your respects like that to an ancestor's comrades.

When I'm up in the Wash DC area again, I hope to visit one of my ancestor's graves at the Old Soldier's Home cemetery. (He died of disease shortly after the Seven Days battles, one day after entering the hospital, and is my only Civil War ancestor buried within driving distance). I plan to honor him with a NY state quarter. I'll bring a hankie, too.... :cry:

*I don't know the legalities of my actions, but I figure it couldn't hurt anything. Anyone have a different opinon?
 
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