The
extent of grief in the postbellum era was so overwhelming that it
exerted a palpable force. No one described this atmosphere more
eloquently than novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. She reflected:
At that time, it will be
remembered, our country was dark with sorrowing women. . . . Toward
the nameless mounds of Arlington, of Gettysburg, and the rest, the
yearning of desolated homes went out in those waves of anguish which
seem to choke the very air that the happier and more fortunate must
breathe.
Is there not an actual, occult
force in the existence of a general grief? . . . It is like a
material miasma. The gayest man breathes it, if he breathe at all;
and the most superficial cannot escape it.ii
No
surprise, then, that the war’s survivors were haunted by it. As the
Indiana Plymouth
Tribune
observed
in 1907: “The war is still present, a vivid reality and yet a
memory. And it is not strange that from its bloody happenings have
grown some superstitions, some curious fireside tales that ill assort
with our arrogant workaday disbelief in ghosts and the unusual.”iii
What
is perhaps most interesting about the ghost stories collected in
Haunted by Memory,
however, is that they reveal that hauntings were not only a postwar
phenomena. Veterans testified that ghosts were a part of the
experience of Civil War soldiers in combat. Take, for example, the
story of Private Henry Moode, who was confronted by the apparition of
a Confederate soldier he recognized—having accidentally stumbled
over his dead body just moments before. Or, the tale of the “mounted
ghost” that terrorized Union pickets on duty near Blaine’s
Crossroads. In the chaos of combat and confronted on all sides by the
inescapable realities of death, Civil War soldiers manifested ghosts.
Or, perhaps, ghosts manifested themselves.
The
daily lives of Civil War soldiers, however, were not constantly
characterized by terror and death. There were idle moments, too. At
such times, soldiers called upon the supernatural as a form of
entertainment. The men of the 116th Pennsylvania, for example, filled
time during the siege of Petersburg by trading accounts of comrades
who returned from the grave to visit their families.
Even
when recounted as pastimes, ghost stories offer insights into
nineteenth-century American culture. The ghosts of the 116th, like
many others described in the stories included in Haunted
by Memory, embodied an
age-old theme in the Anglo-American tradition of supernatural tales:
that of the purposeful ghost. The purposeful ghost appears not merely
to frighten the living, but with the intention of achieving some end.
Oftentimes,
the ghost returns because it is bound to an unfulfilled promise. Many
Civil War soldiers felt the bonds of camaraderie they formed in
combat might transcend death. Faced by the suddenness of death in
battle and the likelihood they would be denied the opportunity to say
final farewells, soldiers sometimes vowed to return from beyond the
grave to visit their brothers-in-arms. They believed such visitations
might bring closure to grieving friends and provide proof of “the
state of the soul after death.” At least, that was the hope of two
unnamed comrades from the 2nd Iowa Cavalry, who reportedly made such
a promise to one another while on picket duty before the Battle of
Farmington. The ghost of “Copleston” appeared to his friend in
the prison barracks at Camp Chase to fulfill a similar promise and to
relate the details surrounding his death.
In
yet another tradition associated with the purposeful ghost, spirits
sometimes returned seeking justice or vengeance. Two stories relate
to wartime homicides, but the most notable is the story of Private
John Rowley. Rowley swore before a US military tribunal that he was
being tormented by the spirit of his comrade, Jerome Dupoy, whom he
confessed to murdering. The haunting of Rowley serves as a reminder
that not all violent deaths came at the hands of the enemy.
The
stories also reveal how quickly Civil War sites became associated
with hauntings. At locations where specific incidents of the war
occurred, the past intruded on the present and stirred memories of
the horrors of the war. Battlefields, in particular, emerge from the
stories as unsettling places. Take, for example, the specters of
Savage’s Station who cried for water from beyond the grave. Or, the
ghostly regiments that stalked the cliffs at Pittsburg Landing.
The
belief that battlefields were haunted undoubtedly stemmed from the
knowledge that not only were they sites of deaths, but of bad
deaths.
The Civil War shattered the cultural construction of the “Good
Death.” That is, a manner of death that followed a specific set of
rituals designed to reinforce family bonds, provide assurances of
Christian salvation, and offer closure to the grieving.iv
The Civil War bestowed precious few “Good Deaths,” leaving
survivors with little consolation. They had no formula to follow when
it came to mourning the sudden, violent deaths of loved ones far from
home. Their grief was compounded by fears that their loved one’s
remains were unidentified, unattended—or worse—unburied.
The
tale of the “Ghost at Post 1” powerfully illustrates not only the
unsettling realities of death in the Civil War, but also the cultural
significance of ghost stories. In this case, the ghost’s purpose is
multi-faceted. In the text, the repeated appearance of a Confederate
apparition led the men of the 6th Illinois Cavalry on an
investigation that resulted in the recovery of his forgotten remains.
After providing the unknown Confederate a decent burial, the ghost
never returned.
Beyond
the text, however, the “Ghost at Post 1” serves a larger symbolic
purpose. It is important to note that this particular story appeared
in the National
Tribune.
Founded in 1877, the National
Tribune
played a pivotal role in the construction of Civil War memory among
Union veterans.v
It actively encouraged veterans to submit their recollections of the
war to its regular column “Fighting Them Over”—where the tale
of the “Ghost at Post 1” appeared. Collectively, the column
constituted a history of the war that was shaped by and meaningful
for veterans.vi
The
story of the “Ghost at Post 1” must therefore be understood in
the context of Civil War memory. It reflects the popular turn towards
reconciliation that dominated Civil War commemoration in the late
nineteenth century. In this period, aging white veterans increasingly
relished recollections of the war that emphasized the common bravery
of volunteer soldiers on both sides and minimized the moral and
political opposition over racial slavery that drove them into
conflict.vii
The “Ghost at Post 1” concludes with a particularly meaningful
act of reconciliation. By respectfully tending to the remains of the
unknown Confederate soldier, the men of the 6th Illinois Cavalry
quite literally put the spirit of sectional antagonism to rest.
Death, in this case at least, symbolically restored the common
humanity of erstwhile foes.
There
is one final and compelling thread that can be traced through the
selection of stories in Haunted
by Memory: that is the
importance of women’s experiences to understanding the impact,
prosecution, and subsequent interpretation of the Civil War. When,
for example, Sarah Whiteside showed a Boston newspaper correspondent
the spot where fifty soldiers had once been buried in her garden, she
offered chilling testimony of how the war blurred the line between
the battlefield and the home front and, in particular, how it
violated the domestic world of women. Her story reminds readers that
women’s experiences were not ancillary to the war, but rather
central parts of the story.viii
The
fortunes of armies in the field rose and fell with those of the
“Nameless Heroines” of the war, as one unknown contributor to the
Anaconda
Standard termed
them. Women both inspired and compelled men to enlist. At the same
time, painful and worrisome separations from female friends,
relatives, and loved ones drove some men to desertion. The anonymous
soldier in “The Corporal’s Story” claimed to have been so
distressed by news that his wife was seriously ill that he put a plan
to desert into action. Before he was missed, however, a female
apparition frightened and shamed him into returning to camp.
Perhaps
most powerfully, however, these stories call us to reframe our
understanding of the destruction inflicted by the war. Particularly,
the psychological damage, devastation, and death wreaked on women.ix
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps observed keenly the omnipresence of
“sorrowing women” across the nation—“whose misery crowded the
land.”x
In keeping with the popular gothic tropes of the day, writers often
romanticized women’s grief. See, for example, A. L. Soule’s
account of the death of “Miss Blaine,” who he said succumbed to a
broken heart following the death of her lover in the cavalry. Another
correspondent claimed the ghost of a woman led him to the grave of
Robert H. Lane, who was killed in the Battle of Chantilly. He later
learned the ghostly woman was Lane’s fiancé, who also died of a
broken heart.
As
the most divisive and deadly event in US history, the Civil War
forever altered the lives of its survivors and the cultural landscape
of the nation. It encouraged Americans, who already embraced the
supernatural as an important element of their culture, to popularize
ghost stories as a means of examining the unsettling legacies of the
war. Whether they brought readers any degree of closure is hard to
say, but their prevalence indicates the extent of suffering the Civil
War inflicted.
i
J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,”
Civil
War History
vol. 57, no. 4 (December 2011), 307–348.
ii
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters
From a Life
(Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 96–97.
iii
Plymouth
[In.]
Tribune,
February 7, 1907.
iv
See John R. Neff, Honoring
the Civil War Dead (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 2005);
Faust, This
Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New
York: Vintage, 2009).
v
Crompton B. Burton, “‘Let Every Comrade Lend Us a Hand’:
George E. Lemon and the National
Tribune
in James Marten and Caroline E. Janney, Buying
and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America (Athens:
The University of Georgia Press, 2021), 68, 69. See also Brian
Matthew Jordan, Marching
Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New
York: Liveright, 2014), 75–79; Steven E. Sodergren, “‘Exposing
False History’: The Voice of the Union Veteran in the Pages of the
National
Tribune”
in Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera, eds. The
War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 137, 139.
vi
Steven E. Sodergren, “‘Exposing False History’: The Voice of
the Union Veteran in the Pages of the National
Tribune” in The
War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans,
eds. Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 143–144.
vii
Neff, Honoring
the Civil War Dead,
5; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering
the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 5–7; Nina
Silber, The
Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 162; Paul H.
Buck, The
Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (New
York: Vintage, 1927), 310, 318–319.
viii
See Stephanie McCurry, Women’s
War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019).
ix
Lisa Tendrich Frank, “The Union War on Women” in The
Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 174–175.
edited by Samuel R. Phillips (
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