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FeedBurying Tom Bell
West Chester’s favorite son came home in a box. He was one of the lucky ones.
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After 18 years of banning the news media from covering the return of war casualties, the Obama Administration has ruled that dead soldiers’ families will decide who may be present. Even so, partisans continue to debate what is most respectful.
But, really, why respect the military dead at all? Punctiliousness about the corpses of U.S. soldiers can be traced to the Civil War. Back then, only a few were treated as tenderly as Lt. Col. Thomas S. Bell of West Chester.
Bell, a young lawyer and one of the town’s favorite sons, was killed at the Battle of Antietam. Three days later, on Sept. 20, 1862, Bell’s uncle and a friend received his body at the train station. There, they pried open the rough coffin—hammered together on the battlefield by Bell’s comrades—and looked inside.
Their reaction: Ewwwww. “Decay’s effacing fingers have been busily at work marring the lineaments of his fine face and features,” reported the Village Record newspaper at the time.
What to do? A public funeral had been announced for the following day, and tradition required the presence of a corpse. Still, the icky facts were undeniable. Bell’s remains were taken straight to the Oaklands Cemetery.
In that era, most of the nation’s used-up cannon fodder was simply shoveled into pits or left to rot. Burial details, observed one Union chaplain, covered bodies “much the same as farmers cover potatoes, with this exception, however: the vegetables really get more tender care.” Many went into the ground naked, stripped by those desperate for clothing and shoes. Such tales shocked a nation in which a “good death” happened at home, in old age and surrounded by family, and then followed by religious services and a proper burial.
“Perhaps the most distressing aspect of death for many Civil War Americans was that thousands of young men were dying away from home,” wrote historian Drew Gilpin Faust. “But four years of civil war overturned conventions and expectations.”
Bell was the son and namesake of a prominent local judge. Thomas S. Bell Sr. had moved in 1821 from Philadelphia to Chester County to practice law. In 1837, he was elected to represent Chester and Montgomery counties at the state constitutional convention. Later, he served in the state senate and, for five years, on the Supreme Court.
By 1859, the year in which his son was admitted to the Chester County bar, Judge Bell had returned to private practice. Father and son discussed working together.
Young Tom Bell was raised in a house that still stands at Church and Miner streets. Educated at the West Chester Academy (now West Chester University), he studied law in his father’s office. Bell joined the county militia in 1858 and ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 1860. Public spirited and ambitious, he was among the first to respond when President Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the rebellion.
“Do try, my dearest father, to keep up your spirits,” Bell wrote from Camp Curtin near Harrisburg in April 1861. “I am going in a just cause, and the almighty arm that protects us in peace will not be withdrawn from me in the crash of battle.”
Brave words, but Bell spent his first enlistment doing nothing much. The Civil War was expected to be short, so early volunteers signed up for only three months. Bell’s unit, the 9th Pennsylvania Volunteers, was mustered in April and discharged in July.
But that was enough time for Bell to demonstrate his character. When another regiment rioted after receiving hardtack rather than bread, Bell reacted quickly.
