Bones in the rebel lady’s boudoir: ethnology, race and trophy-hunting in the American Civil War

Abstract

This article discusses the collection and use of enemy skulls and other bones as trophies by soldiers and their supporters in the American Civil War. This behaviour was condemned at the time as that of ‘savages’. However, the author argues that it was a local symptom of the shifts taking place after the Enlightenment in the ways in which human diversity was conceptualized. Civil War soldiers who collected and displayed their enemies’ remains did so for some of the same reasons that comparative anatomists had begun to collect, display and study such objects at the time. They, too, assumed that the fundamental material evidence of human differences lay under the skin, in the bones and, above all, in the skull.

The Social History of Disaster Victim Identification in the United States, 1865 to 1950

“…Such precautions were futile, however, as burial of the dead often fell to whichever side won the battle. At best, the winning side would bury enemy combatants in large trenches, with little attention to individual identity; at worst, enemy combatants might not be buried, but stripped of valuables and left exposed to scavengers (9).…”

Curious afterlives: the enduring appeal of the criminal corpse

“…This practice might have been especially prevalent among Confederate soldiers, and in turn the northerners made much of the savagery and barbarism of this collection of body parts. Harrison (2010) argues that the collection of anatomical war trophies is of a piece with the efforts of nineteenth-century scientific men to build anatomical collections, and represents attempts by both sides to show that their enemy was 'other', and to emphasise racial difference. Harrison's argument, however, is not wholly convincing: although there is plenty of evidence of emerging racialised discourses of difference which draw upon phrenology, there is little evidence that Confederate skull-takers were participating in those discourses.…”

The Places and Tools of Execution

“…Local slaves reported to a Union army surgeon that Confederate soldiers had dug up soldiers' graves to make rings from the bones and drinking cups from skull tops. 87 There was a tendency in the American press to assume that European-Americans were less 'superstitious' than their European cousins, and hence, perhaps, the regular reporting of hanging rope selling as part of the souvenir trade. How do we know, though, that these items were desired solely as macabre souvenirs?…”