AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: Death And The Civil War

From acclaimed filmmaker Ric Burns, "Death And The Civil War" explores an essential but largely overlooked aspect of the most pivotal event in American history: the transformation of the nation by the death of an estimated 750,000 people – nearly two and a half percent of the population – in four dark and searing years from 1861 to 1865.

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A soldier looking upon a Union soldier's grave with the body of a Confederate soldier seemingly tossed aside in Antietam, Maryland, September 1862.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Dr. Richard Burr at work embalming a soldier's body in 1860.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Dead Federal soldiers on battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 7, 1863.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Unfinished Confederate graves near the center of the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Dead Confederate soldiers at the scene of Ewell's attack near the Spottsylvania Court House in Virginia, May 19, 1864.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Dead Confederate soldier from the siege of Petersburg in the trenches at Fort Mahone in Petersburg, Virginia, April 3, 1865.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Burial of Federal dead at Fredericksburg, Virginia, April 15, 1865.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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African Americans collecting bones of soldiers killed in the battle of Cold Harbor in Virginia one year earlier, April 1865.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Three women looking at graves in the Confederate Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina, 1903.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Unidentified girl in mourning dress holding framed photograph of her father as a cavalryman with sword and Hardee hat, 1861.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Unidentified woman wearing mourning brooch and displaying framed image of unidentified soldier, 1861.

Courtesy of Library of Congress

With the coming of the Civil War, and the staggering and completely unprecedented casualties it ushered in, death entered the experience of the American people as it never had before – on a scale and in a manner no one had ever imagined possible, and under circumstances for which the nation would prove completely unprepared. The impact would permanently alter the character of the republic, the culture of the government and the psyche of the American people – down to this day.

“Transpose the percentage of dead that mid-19th-century America faced into our own time – seven million dead, if we had the same percentage,” says author Drew Gilpin Faust, on whose groundbreaking book, "This Republic of Suffering," the film is based. “What would we as a nation today be like if we faced the loss of seven million individuals?”

"Death And The Civil War" tracks the increasingly lethal arc of the war, from the bloodless opening in 1861, through the chaos of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the unspeakable carnage of 1864 – down through the struggle, in the aftermath of the war, to cope with an American landscape littered with the bodies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many unburied, most unidentified.

The work of contending with death on this scale would propel extraordinary changes in the inner and outer life of all Americans – posing challenges for which there were no ready answers when the war began – challenges that called forth remarkable and eventually heroic efforts on the part of individuals, groups and the government – as Americans worked to improvise new solutions, new institutions, new ways of coping with death on an unimaginable scale.

Before the Civil War, there were no national cemeteries in America. No provisions for identifying the dead, or for notifying next of kin, or for providing aid to the suffering families of dead veterans. No federal relief organizations, no effective ambulance corps, no adequate federal hospitals, no federal provisions for burying the dead. No Arlington Cemetery. No Memorial Day.

The program premieres in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of Antietam, the bloodiest one-day battle in American history.

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