Memento Mori — A Pilgrim’s Journey to Fallen Civil War Soldiers

More Than Six Hundred Thousand Men Died In the American Civil War. Their Graves Still Speak To Us Today.

Death rarely comes lightly. But for soldiers on the battlefield and in its aftermath, it arrives in a particularly grim way, wherever they may be fighting, whomever the enemy, whenever the time.

I came here often. Here in the heart of my city lay a Civil War cemetery I discovered packed with striking tombstones, all white marble, all with the crystalline sheen on their smooth surfaces that made them glimmer in the sun, all of them uniform and tidy, all of them in long neat rows with calculated symmetry.

Some stones bore the marks of deep gray veins that ran the lengths or widths of the stone. Often the craggy veins moved in random directions, sharp in their unpredictable twists and turns across the pristine white, at odds with the evenness of the arched stones, as if to reveal the jaggedness and unevenness of life.

They seemed to convey the stories of the men who lay here, capturing the atmosphere that prevailed in this space of both serenity and unspeakable suffering.

I first entered the cemetery’s two heavy black iron gates a decade ago, coming here on Memorial Day. As I descended the gently sloping field where it lay, I thought of these stones simply as artifacts telling the sweeping tale of a war brought about by irreconcilable differences, fought furiously, forcing the 85-year-old nation to engage both sides in over 10,000 military engagements, both large and small, with an uncertain conclusion that would determine the fate of a nation.

When I came here later I gazed longer at the engraved names along each row. I paused to look at the careful and meticulous carving out of death years on some of them, although for most of these men even this was absent. I paused in the shade of its monumental trees, set here to take root to provide shade and comfort to visitors like me, or balm for the families and descendants of loved ones resting here.

But with each visit, the war’s sweeping timeline and the cemetery’s simple aesthetic beauty seemed to diminish, becoming a kind of background to a different landscape that would unfold before me.
This week I passed again through the cemetery’s two heavy black iron gates. It was the long Memorial Day weekend.

I felt the same magnetic pull to be here as I always had, as if each visit contained its own purpose, its own message. The field’s long sweeping slope spread out again before me. I descended this time to the edge of a tall stone wall that separated the men and several women buried here from a deep tangled ravine on one side and busy streets and buildings on the other.

This time the cemetery’s message was different.

For the first time I felt viscerally connected here, a part of the landscape itself, a pilgrim not a passerby, as if my place were as a guest among these men who shared their names and death years with me, and occasionally their ranks and regiments on these silent stones. I was expected to make an attempt to get to know them instead of just noting their white and gray stones.

As I passed each one this time I touched the top of their marble headstones to acknowledge them one by one. This time I stopped to utter their names out loud. This time I read out loud the year of their death and sometimes the month and day, if that had been known at the time and recorded here. They had been given no birth dates here, no mention of life’s achievements, no tribute from those who admired or loved them.

I tried to make sense of — to reimagine — each of their stories from what little information their markers provided. I had to look further than the death year on each stone. There were oblique hints here full of meaning but which I could see only vaguely in my mind.

This cemetery had opened in 1862. The nation had begun to build its immense armies and prepare for the vast scale of its carnage. Here as elsewhere graveyard details of men were assigned to lay out the country’s first National Cemeteries. Approximately 30 cemeteries would be created and still more after the war. Here in the cemetery where I walked, more than 2,500 souls rested, the overwhelming majority of them Union soldiers, including black recruits from the U.S. Colored Troops, as well as several Civil War women nurses, a handful of Confederate soldiers, and soldiers from other wars.

Many of the Union soldiers here succumbed to battlefield wounds or diseases they contracted while being treated in the makeshift hospitals and military camps here in Maryland’s capital after the war began. While the city of Annapolis saw no battle, it was geographically well situated to become a major center for POW exchanges with the Confederacy. Union soldiers were retained here until they could return to their regiments once an exchange was arranged. Many of the recruits arrived here to fill the hospitals with their battlefield wounds and life-threatening illnesses. If they were too sick or maimed to return to the battlefield they were released to go home. Those unable to leave were buried here.

The field where I stood now saw a steady flurry of military activity that continued until the war’s end. Clara Barton, the “Angel of the Battlefield,” set up her medical headquarters two or three miles away — in a larger field filled with thousands of tents and barracks. Here she continued her wartime tasks of directing nursing operations, distributing medical supplies, coordinating burials and identification of soldiers, and setting up her Missing Soldiers Bureau to reconnect those who had gone off to battle with their families, or to inform families that their sons or fathers or brothers had died and, in all too few cases, been properly buried.

The stones I touched today revealed the astonishing distances these men had traveled mostly by foot and often without adequate food or clothing to battlefields — each many hundreds of miles — and then finally here to their death. Many of their markers bore the names of the states from which they came: Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and even Alabama. All these Union soldiers had endured long marches to battlefields before resting here.

Now as I looked over the field, every name seemed to bounce off their stones.

For the first time I could see these men arriving in this war-touched city, dressed in uniforms or in rags. All hoped to find their way home again. All had felt their own ineffable mix of emotions — courage, pride, calm, anguish, anger, peace, epiphany — in the moments before their deaths. Many had written to their loved ones in the days and months before and spoken of campfires, the rumbling of cannons in the distance, the wistful call of the bugle at sunrise and sunset, the rancid taste of weevil-filled hardtack biscuits, their wounds, and the seemingly incessant volley of bullets that did finally cease.

For the first time I saw the gritty grueling work of the burial details as they carried the men and women here from the city’s makeshift hospitals and camps nearby. And for the first time I saw Clara Barton stepping nearby as the war ended to focus her duties on ensuring proper burial for the wartime dead. The “unknown soldiers” here, while unnamed on the glistening stones all around, were no longer lost to obscurity.

It is astonishing to consider that this war’s military fatalities — somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 men — is roughly equal to the total number in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, combined. Today I saw this small field as part a titanic struggle. In honoring it, we assure those in it a common dignity.

Before I left, a white-petaled daisy set on the arched top of one stone caught my eye. It captured the sun’s pre-dusk angled light in a way that made it appear luminous and projected an ethereal cast.

Someone had brought this token of acknowledgment here earlier today. This is how it is supposed to be, I thought — small gestures to affirm and enliven the community between the living and the dead, to bring together past and present into that inviolable communion of which we are all a part. Today’s message for me was that each of these soldiers’ stories, and the stories of the women who cared for them, form part of our ineffable human whole.

I said farewell and passed again through the two heavy black iron gates to the busy streets and honking horns. I would return again.

The sun set and dipped down over the western horizon.

Medium
8 June 2021