
The Dead Toreador, by Édouard Manet, c. 1864. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
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Miscellany
A Gettysburg resident, F. W. Biesecker, won the contract in 1863 to bury the Union dead, at the rate of $1.59 per corpse, in the town’s recently dedicated national cemetery. After the war, between 1865 and 1870, there were large-scale efforts to rebury all Union soldiers in national cemeteries; to separate them from Confederate corpses, workers assessed jacket color, shoe make, and cotton-underwear quality.
Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
—Horace Walpole, 1784