Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

III

CIVIC-MINDED SPIRITS

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CHAPTER TWELVE

OUR ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD

Shiloh, TN

In Cold Harbor, Virginia, the battle commences again promptly at 1 a.m.—soldiers materialize from the earthworks amid the fields, engaging once more in a battle that seems to play on an endless loop. An hour to the south, at Fredericksburg, scene of one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles, ghost sentries stand guard, march in formation, and tend to their wounds. Ghosts of all manner roam the battlefield at Gettysburg: Shouted commands have been heard at Reynolds Woods, shadows roam Little Round Top, and a ragged Texas infantryman known as “the hippie” has appeared to some at Devil’s Den. At Manassas, where the first and second battles of Bull Run were fought, a charred smell hangs in the air, which writer Mark Nesbitt has surmised may be a remnant of Sullivan Ballou, the Union major who was killed at the First Battle of Bull Run and whose body was desecrated and burned by Confederate soldiers after the battle.

At Shiloh a visitor reported seeing a young Confederate soldier sleeping against a wall. “He was lying down on the moss with his knees up,” she later recalled. “He had one arm lying on his cheek, and one arm at his side with his hat over his face. I said, ‘Is he sleeping it off from last night? Is he OK? He appears to be OK.’ We stood there watching the kid. It was sort of a strange thing to find in the woods. And then he wasn’t there. He just dissolved in the air.”

Many tourists at Shiloh have seen the nameless Union drummer boy. The story, as it’s often passed down, is that as a Union offensive began to turn bad, the commanding officer called out a retreat, but the drummer boy instead gave the call once again to attack. Furious, the commanding officer asked him why, and the boy replied that he only knew one signal: attack. But by then, due to the boy’s error, the Union forces had rallied and had taken the hill they’d been fighting for. The commanding officer later sought out the young boy to thank him, only to find he’d fallen in the fighting.

Civil War cemeteries loom large in the American consciousness. After all, the most famous piece of American oration, the Gettysburg Address, was delivered at the dedication of one such cemetery. Lincoln’s speech, brief and iconic, makes a simple and elegant point: it is beyond the power of any great speaker—including the president—to consecrate this, since only the bodies of the dead soldiers can do this, and it is they on whom the foundation of the United States rests. At the heart of Lincoln’s speech is this solemn belief that the greatness of the country lies in its ghosts, to whom we are constantly indebted.

The creation of the Civil War battlefield cemeteries began in 1867, with the wounds of the war still fresh. The conflict was so savage in its destruction of human life that many men were simply unaccounted for; by the end the lists of casualties included only a third of the total number of men estimated to be missing or killed. By early 1866 journalists, politicians, and humanitarians began clamoring for a system of national cemeteries to honor the fallen. James Fowler Russling, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, asked:

Shall we permit their honored graves, holding the best ashes of the land and proudest of the century, to be left liable to desecration by hostile hands, or to be obliterated quickly by time and nature, as among other nations and in other ages? Or rather shall we not at once gather their remains tenderly together into great national cemeteries, few in number but centrally located; beautify and adorn these in a moderate but just way, and solemnly commit them to posterity as a part of the precious price our generation paid for the Union, to be the republic’s legacy and the nation’s inheritance for evermore?

Spurred by these calls to action, the North began to gather its dead, to build monuments not just to individual sufferers but also to the country as a whole. What started at Gettysburg and at a former POW camp at Andersonville was quickly incorporated into a national program, one that ultimately led to seventy-four national cemeteries holding a collective 303,536 dead, at a cost of $4 million—what historian Drew Gilpin Faust has called “arguably the most elaborate federal program undertaken in nearly a century of American nationhood.”

Throughout, the goal, explicit and implicit, was not just to provide proper burial for those who’d died in war and been left on the battlefield but also to build on a narrative of the United States in the wake of the war that had almost destroyed it. A nation that had won a battle fought partly over states’ rights could not now allow its obligation to the dead to fall to the states; the cemeteries of the Civil War must be overseen by the federal government while uniting the states under this larger sovereignty.

The creation of the Civil War battlefield cemeteries also coincided neatly with the transition from churchyards to garden cemeteries. Coming at the end of that major evolution, in which burial grounds shifted from a religious setting to a civic institution, the battlefield cemeteries became a symbol of how Americans strove to make meaning from dead bodies. These men would never rest in family plots and the cemeteries of their hometowns. Instead, their bodies would consecrate the fields of battle, imbuing these lands with an extra symbolic weight. Thomas W. Laqueur notes that “the body, by the fact of its physical location, infuses its meaning into the land where it rests and decomposes”—what mattered was that these men be buried where they fell. The battlefield cemeteries and the preservation of the battlefields themselves were means of creating a more perfect union, of commemorating a loss that couldn’t be fully reckoned with.

The ghosts that have more or less always existed on these fields—ghosts without name or identification, often even without allegiance to the North or the South—would seem to further help unite us. Rooted to these resonant places, they keep alive acts of heroism, relive moments of courage, and remind us of their sacrifice.

But this wasn’t always the case. While the federal government was burying the Union dead, the economically destroyed South saw its own dead lying fallow and untended. The work of burying Confederate soldiers fell to civilians and became a grassroots movement that gave a purpose of sorts to defeated Southern culture. Southern whites undertook ad hoc attempts to bury their dead, often raising money through the community to cover burial costs and tombstones. This work was largely the provenance of women—grieving mothers and widows who would honor fallen Confederates one last time. Mourning the Southern dead became a way to subtly repudiate the Union and reject the war’s outcome. At a consecration in Savannah, Georgia, of the Confederate dead who’d fallen at Gettysburg, Father Abram Ryan, the so-called poet laureate of the Confederacy, recited an elegy for the dead who’d fallen in a cause “though lost, still just.”

The reincorporation of the Confederate dead into the fold took time. In 1900 Congress appropriated funds for a dedicated Confederate section within Arlington Cemetery, and in 1906 the federal government established the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead, which incorporated earlier ad hoc Confederate cemeteries into the national park system. Finally, the dead of the Confederacy had a permanent home alongside the dead of the Union. The sleeping Southern boy at Shiloh now could haunt alongside the famous Union drummer, the two boys united in the afterlife.

But this left close to four decades in which the Confederate dead had no home to haunt, and in those years, particularly in the immediate wake of the Civil War, it would appear that they roamed free.

“Sometimes we would meet one or two people and they’d ride right on by,” a former slave would later say about the years following the Civil War, “and nobody would speak or say nothing, but just keep straight forward; just the foremost ones that would see them would say, ‘Shiloh,’ and then they’d all hang their heads, or turn their heads, and nobody would say anything.” Stories circulated of an incident in Attakapas Parish, Louisiana: A freedman was awakened one night by a night traveler, who asked for some water. The man filled a bucket with water and gave it to the stranger, who proceeded to drink the entire bucket, then demanded another. After he had drunk the bucket dry a second time and then a third, he thanked the man, telling him how thirsty he’d been, that he had traveled more than a thousand miles in the last twenty-four hours, and that that was the best drink of water he’d had since he’d been killed at Shiloh.

The ghosts rose from Shiloh, from Vicksburg, from Cold Harbor and Antietam. In southeastern Tennessee, travelers noticed a strange, foreboding sentinel keeping watch in front of a dilapidated house on a hill. Occasionally someone asked him who he was; and the reply, in low, sepulchral tones, returned: “A spirit from the other world. I was killed at Chickamauga.” Ghosts stood guard over dilapidated plantations and, like the man in Attakapas, they rode through the night, demanding water to quench an unquenchable thirst, hanging their heads low, speaking in guttural voices, telling all who asked of their deaths on the field of battle.

One former slave would remember, decades later, ghosts who approached him one night and told him “they had come from Manassas Gap to see that the poor widows are not imposed upon. They also said that the rebels were not going to let the taxes be paid. From the two things you would infer that they were rebels killed at Manassas. They said they were risen from the dead, and that they were rebels, too.” A man in South Carolina was awakened one night by a hammering at his door and voices demanding he come outside. Shadowy figures came forth, wanting to know how he’d voted in recent elections—whether for the radical Republicans or for the Democrats—and when he told them he’d voted Republican, one ghost stuck the barrel of a pistol under his chin and dragged him into the woods. There they demanded that he remove his shirt. “What do you all want to whip me for,” he pleaded; “what have I done?” The figures replied, “Off with your shirt; if you don’t you shall go dead. We come from Manassas graveyard; and by Christ we want to get back to our graveyard and cover up before day, by Christ.” These ghosts then whipped him ten to fifteen times, by his recollection, before releasing him, telling him, “You must promise to vote the democratic ticket, or you go dead before we leave you.”

What began in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a series of pranks—born when a few bored Confederate veterans formed a club whose only mandate was that its members “have fun, make mischief, and play pranks on the public”—grew quickly into the nation’s first major terrorist organization, focused chiefly on harassing recently freed slaves and the Northerners who’d come to empower them. The six founders took their name from a gibberish distortion of the Greek for “circle,” kuklos, adding the word “Klan” at the end to emphasis their Scottish heritage: the Ku Klux Klan, a name instantly mysterious, terrifying, what one founder described as the sound of “bones rattling together.”

In its first incarnation the Klan led a regime of terror throughout the South, harassing, beating, torturing, and killing hundreds and thousands in their quest to maintain white supremacy. With an economy built on the exploitation of free labor, the South in the years following the Civil War was left not only with a ravaged and defeated landscape but with its most fundamental economic structure invalidated by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. The sharecropping system, and eventually Jim Crow laws, would become proxies for slavery in the sense that, for all Southern whites’ racism toward the black community, these freed slaves were still vital to the economy and could not be allowed to migrate to the North. Just as slave owners had prevented blacks from escaping prior to the Civil War, it now became equally imperative to discourage this movement among liberated slaves, a job taken up by the Klan.

It was an enforcement that relied heavily on the presence of ghosts. The man who woke in the middle of the night to find a ghost from Shiloh demanding water was later identified only as a “radical negro,” as were most of the victims of the Klan. Members would arrive at the home of a black family in the dead of night, dressed in sheets or other makeshift costumes (the formal robes associated with the Klan would come much later), claiming to be the ghosts of Confederate soldiers killed at various battles. Often stories of these visits would involve some sort of simple stage magic trickery: a skeletal hand would be inserted in a robe so that when a Klansman offered to shake someone’s hand, they would get instead a disembodied hand. Another common ruse involved rigging an oilskin bag beneath the robe with a hose going to the mouth so the Klansman could appear to drink voluminous amounts of water.

Whether or not these stage tricks were actually employed or just folktales told by the Klan is a matter of much debate. Even if the stories were real, it’s doubtful that such rudimentary jokes were believable. As Wyn Craig Wade notes in his history of the Klan, despite the stereotype of black people being more susceptible to superstition than whites, “the Klan legends of terrified ‘darkies’ scurrying from ghosts of the Confederate dead probably say more about the aggrandizement of the white ego than about black gullibility.” Put another way, it’s probable that a freedman awakened in the middle of the night by a (likely) drunk Confederate veteran pretending to be a ghost had plenty to be frightened of that was not supernatural. Wade notes that “it has been suggested that blacks might have played into the Klansmen’s hands, hoping that their feigned fright would avert a more violent form of intimidation. It then becomes a question of who was controlling whom.”

How often these implausible-sounding pranks were actually employed, and what psychological effect they had on their victims, might never be fully known. But the spectral aspect of the Klan was one of its defining features in its early years. Central goals were to keep liberated slaves in the South to prop up the economy and to keep out white “carpetbaggers” who’d come to provide education and resources to newly liberated slaves. As Gladys-Marie Fry notes in her book Night Riders in Black Folk History, “The concept of returning Confederate dead was meant to suggest that the slave regime had not ended, though the South was subdued, and that former controls were still being perpetrated.” If anything, the goal was to prove that these ghosts were even more powerful, having returned from the grave and been elevated to a new supernatural status. Southern whites tried—usually unsuccessfully—to convince freedmen and -women that moving north was futile, since spirits of the Confederate dead could follow them anywhere, no longer limited by their physical bodies. In Edward H. Dixon’s fantastical novel The Terrible Mysteries of the Ku-Klux-Klan, a Klan leader proudly proclaims, “The Klux is the living dead, and it is the strength of weakness. Bound hand and foot with cords that gall and eat into running sores the dead flesh, the living Klux riseth and walketh abroad in the black night.”

The use of ghosts as a means of social control predated the Klan. Slave owners employed so-called patterollers, usually poor whites, who would patrol the countryside at night; such patrols would regularly use spook stories, among other tactics, to help keep enslaved people from escaping. “The fraudulent ghost,” Fry writes, “was the first in a gradually developed system of night-riding creatures, the fear of which was fostered by whites for the purpose of slave control.” A man in a white sheet on horseback riding ominously through a forest could help substantiate rumors that the forest was haunted and that those who valued their lives best avoid it. By spreading ghost stories, Southern whites hoped to limit the unauthorized movement of black people. If cemeteries, crossroads, and forests came to be known particularly as haunted, it’s because they presented the easiest means of escape and had to be patrolled.

Now it’s common to think of such places as the provenance of spirits. We have stories for such places: a tragic death, forlorn lovers, a devil waiting to make a deal—stories that reflect a rich tradition of American folklore. But all this might have come much later, and these places might have first earned their haunted reputation through much more deviant methods. In the ghost-haunted legacies of many of these public spaces lies a hidden history of patrolling and limiting access. These should be places more or less open to all—meeting points, thoroughfares, public property, the sacred resting places of the dead. But in many parts of the country where access to these places have long been restricted, the spirits of the dead have been marshaled as one more weapon to be used by an invisible army.