What we now call green burials were the default in America prior to the Civil War and the resulting invention and popularization of embalming. Before the mid-1800s, deceased white folks were washed and dressed by the women of the house and laid to rest in shrouds and handmade caskets on family property. Non-landowners were buried on church grounds or in the town commons. Except for the burial itself, the entire process took place within the home and didn’t involve morticians or funeral directors — occupations that didn’t exist at the time.
In the case of Black folks in the antebellum South, owners of enslaved persons took deliberate steps to impede religious or cultural traditions as a means of control. Moreover, written records of daily life during that time were generally personal diaries of the owners, who rarely wrote about the enslaved’s burial services. Despite a lack of written records, death was everywhere among enslaved Black people and especially prevalent among children. One study estimates that 90% of enslaved Black children died before the age of 16 in coastal South Carolina and Georgia forced labor camps.
The burial services of enslaved Black folks often included long processions, song, and prayer after dusk, presumably to allow for enslaved people from neighboring plantations to attend. Burial grounds were placed on marginal property — rocky, tree-filled thickets that would otherwise be too difficult to clear for farming — to protect them. In Gullah Geechee tradition, graves were marked with shells; in other places graves were marked with stone or wood slabs. Cedar or yucca plants were also used as grave markers to symbolize the life that persists even in the face of death, a tradition that can be traced back to Haiti, where African and Christian beliefs mixed.
During the Civil War, as soldiers died on battlefields in droves, American burial traditions fundamentally changed. Even if wealthy families could afford shipping their boys home for burial in the family plot, their bodies couldn’t last the long train ride without decomposition. Enter experimental embalming procedures. Pioneering physicians would commandeer barns and sheds near the battlefields, sometimes even erecting their own tents, to practice embalming techniques on fallen soldiers, and would charge families up to $100 per body. It’s estimated that during the Civil War, out of the 600,000 soldiers who were killed, 40,000 were embalmed. While there is not much documentation, it’s likely that all embalmed soldiers were white. Black soldiers were either buried in Black cemeteries near where they died or buried in segregated portions of white cemeteries; it wasn’t until 1948 that Arlington National Cemetery was integrated.