How Civil War Deaths Advanced America’s Funeral Industry

Before the mid-19th century, most Americans died at home, surrounded by family. Burials were intimate affairs, with the dead laid to rest within days in churchyards or family plots. But during the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of soldiers perished on distant battlefields. Families longed to bring their loved ones home but heat, sanitation issues and rough travel made that nearly impossible.

A November 9, 1864, report from Judiciary Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., described letters from anguished relatives who wondered: “Is my dear child’s grave marked so that I can find it if I am ever able to come after him? Was my husband buried in a coffin?”

In response, an obscure medical procedure began to find a wider purpose. “Embalming emerged during the war as both a means to preserve the bodies of fallen soldiers and to disinfect them,” says Genevieve Keeney-Vazquez, president and CEO of the National Museum of Funeral History. “The goal was to keep the remains intact long enough to return them to their families, allowing for a funeral and the dignity of a proper burial.”

Born out of wartime urgency, embalming laid the groundwork for the professional funeral industry that still shapes American mourning today.

Before the Civil War, medical schools occasionally used preservation techniques for anatomical study, but embalming had little role in everyday funerary practice. The unprecedented scale of wartime loss changed that overnight.

“Embalming really took off when Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, became the first Union officer to be killed,” says Dana B. Shoaf, director of interpretation at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. “On May 24, 1861, Ellsworth was shot while removing a large Confederate flag from the roof of a Virginia hotel.”

Thomas Holmes, a coroner’s physician before the war and later known as the “father of American embalming,” offered his services to Ellsworth’s family. The colonel’s preserved body was taken to the White House, where it lay in state for several days and then moved to New York, where thousands lined up to view the funeral cortege. Ellsworth’s embalming set a powerful example. Families saw that even soldiers who died far from home could be returned for a dignified burial. Demand for the procedure grew quickly.

Embalmers became a familiar sight near encampments and battlefields. Many were not physicians but tradesmen who saw opportunity in tragedy. “They pitched tents close to battle sites and offered soldiers the chance to prepay for their own embalming should they be killed,” says Shoaf. Families also paid steep prices for their services. Over the course of the war, Holmes claimed he had embalmed 4,000 men at $100 per corpse. He even marketed his own embalming fluid, selling it to fellow practitioners for $3 per gallon.

As war casualties mounted, the rush to profit—coupled with inconsistent techniques and little oversight—bred controversy. “In 1864, for example, Timothy Dwight of New York complained that Dr. Richard Burr, a Washington embalmer, tried to extort money from him by holding his son’s body for ransom,” says Shoaf. “Without the family’s permission, Burr embalmed the body and then contacted Mr. Dwight, demanding $100 for its release.”

The chemicals used in embalming posed their own hazards. The mixtures—often containing arsenic, zinc and mercuric chlorides blended with creosote, turpentine and alcohol—were effective at slowing decay but dangerously toxic. (Formaldehyde, the preservative most associated with modern embalming, would not come into use until decades later.) Runoff from makeshift embalming tents frequently leached into the surrounding soil, leaving behind residues of heavy metals and poisons. In some areas, traces of these 19th-century chemicals can still be found in the ground today.

The War Department issued General Order 39 in March 1865, requiring embalmers working near battlefields to be licensed and supervised. Many of these battlefield embalmers went on to set up funeral businesses in peacetime, expanding the role of the undertaker to include transport, preservation, cosmetics, coffin making, viewings and ceremony. The shift was from death managed at home to death managed by professionals.

Perhaps no figure did more to popularize embalming than Abraham Lincoln. After his assassination in April 1865, Lincoln’s corpse was embalmed and transported by train on a long national tour from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois. Along the route, the body lay in state in dozens of cities. Millions of Americans came to view their fallen president. Embalmer Charles Brown was quoted in the press asserting, “The body of the president will never know decay.”

Lincoln’s embalmed remains demonstrated to ordinary Americans that the dead could be presented with dignity, even long after death. With embalming, families had time to gather mourners, hold viewings and plan processions. Open-casket funerals became viable. Families who might once have only had a quick graveside service could now hold wakes or viewings at home, in churches and eventually in funeral parlors.

By the late 19th century, embalming was firmly established as a routine practice in the United States. Professional associations, schools and regulations emerged to standardize methods. The funeral industry expanded into a powerful sector of American life, complete with national companies, trade journals and specialized equipment manufacturers.

It all traced back, in part, to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War. The unprecedented scale of death created urgent demand for preservation, while high-profile embalmings—from fallen soldiers to President Lincoln—normalized the practice in the public imagination. Keeney-Vazquez says funeral professionals still learn this history as part of their required training, beginning with Thomas Holmes and his wartime role in making embalming a standard practice.