Lincoln, the Civil War, and Embalming

My boss at the Noble House back in Door County is putting together the spring newsletter, and she asked me to write an article for it. Our tour this summer is going to be A House In Mourning: Victorian Funerals so she gave me the assignment of writing about embalming during the Civil War. Spoiler alert: If you are squeamish, this might not be a good article for you to read!

Lincoln, the Civil War, and Embalming

By Denise Fuller

A friend of Lincoln’s, Col. Elmer E. Elsworth, tried to take down a large Confederate flag from the roof of an inn. The flag could be seen from the White House. The innkeeper, who sympathized with the South, shot and killed him. Elsworth was one of the first Civil War casualties, and Lincoln asked that he be embalmed so that he could lie in state in the White House. Dr. Thomas Holmes, the father of embalming, did such a good job of embalming Elsworth that when Lincoln’s son, Willie, died a year later, Lincoln had him embalmed by Henry P. Cattell who also embalmed Lincoln after his assassination. Lincoln was the first president to be embalmed.

Prior to this time, the French had developed a method for injecting arsenic into the Carotid artery of specimens for medical students to dissect. Unfortunately, the embalming fluid had a tendency to injure or kill the anatomists. Dr. Holmes developed a safer embalming fluid out of arsenic, creosote, alcohol, mercury, turpentine, and zinc. His “non-toxic” embalming fluid is still contaminating old cemeteries.

After Willie Lincoln was embalmed, his father commissioned Dr. Holmes to embalm the federal soldiers who were killed in action. Dr. Holmes had trained other embalming surgeons in his method and took them with him to help with the commission. Military officers were initially embalmed for $50 per corpse, and enlisted men were embalmed for $25 each. Then the price was raised to $80 for officers and $30 for enlisted men. At this point, Dr. Holmes and others figured out that they could make more money on their own than serving under the government commission, and they started charging $100 per embalming. The average wage at this time was less than $400, so they focused more on embalming the officers whose families were thought to have more money.

Dr. Richard Burr created and distributed handbills inviting the curious to watch him embalm soldiers’ bodies. Timothy Dwight of New York complained that Dr. Burr embalmed his son’s body without permission after he died in battle and then held his body for ransom until the family paid him $100. Nearly half of all Federal soldiers died without anyone knowing who they were, partly because the enemy would take their valuables and clothing and no one could identify them. Embalmers would sometimes dress these bodies and put them on display in coffins in undertakers’ storefront windows near military centers. They would also talk with soldiers about pre-paying to be embalmed in case they were killed in battle. These practices caused such a problem with morale that on March 18, 1865, Major General Benjamin F. Butler and the War Department issued General Order Number 39 stating that no one was permitted to remove or embalm soldiers’ bodies without a special license from the Provost Marshal of the Army, Department, or District where the body was located. The general order also restricted disinterring temporarily buried bodies when it would pose a health threat to the troops, and it governed the scale of prices. It wasn’t particularly followed during the war, but it set a standard for later regulations.

Interestingly, Dr. Holmes requested that he not be embalmed after his death.


Resources:

  • Preserving the Union: A History of Modern Embalming by Susan Parsons
  • Embalming Surgeons of the Civil War by James William Lowry, published by Tacitus Publications, 2001
  • Civil War Embalming Surgeons by Dr. Michael Echols
  • Untitled article by James C. Lee published in America’s Civil War, November 1996
  • National Museum of Civil War Medicine, February 20, 2016

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