Dealing With The Dead In The Civil War

It is estimated that during the Civil War as many as 700,000 may have been killed in the conflict. With carnage on a scale as massive as that there arose the problem during and after the war of how to dispose of such an enormous number of bodies, and body parts, quickly in order to prevent the rise and spread of disease.
In many instances after battles in the war the bodies were often left to lay where they had been felled for many days before the first attempts were begun to repose the dead in any kind of final resting place. Often times the burials were crude and make shift like. Often there were no coffins. The dead would be buried only in a cloth or the blood soaked uniforms they were wearing at the time they were killed.
The sheer number of dead also forced the decision to bury soldiers in mass graves. Pits would be dug and the dead bodies would be rolled or dragged into them and piled on to one another. Sometimes the diggers preparing these burials would tie ropes around the bodies of the dead to drag them into the pits to avoid having to physically touch them with their own bare hands. Once the mass graves were full what would often happen is that the diggers would jump into the pit on top of the bodies and use their own weight to crush down the piles of dead in order that they could lay even more bodies on top of those and fit even more dead into the mass graves.
The records about just how many were killed in the war are very incomplete due to the lack of reliable accounts being kept, especially on the part of the south, and also to the fact that soldiers were not issued any kind of identification tags or "dog tags" yet in the American military. Some soldiers improvised by pinning a piece of paper to their uniforms with their names on them just before a battle or placing a letter they had written or received in their pocket to facilitate their own identification after the battle should they not make it through. Despite this somewhat common practice many soldiers were not identified due to a lack of such identification on their persons at the time of their death.
The Civil War changed America politically, culturally, and spiritually. There were many in both the North and the South who were asking themselves and others: "How could God have allowed this to happen?" It was a time when their faith was being tested and deeply shaken. There is no way to go through such a tribulation without being altered in many ways significantly. The war was a horror. Perhaps it was said most simply and aptly by General William Sherman with his famous phrase "War is Hell."