This Republic of Suffering

by Drew Gilpin Faust

  Central to the changes that have occurred since the 1860s is the acknowledgment of the importance of information: of knowing whether a soldier is dead or alive, of being able to furnish news or provide the bereaved with the consoling certainty represented by an actual body. But in 1861, neither the Union nor the Confederate government recognized this as a responsibility. With the outbreak of war both North and South established measures for maintaining records of deceased soldiers, requiring forms to be filled out at army hospitals and sent in multiple copies to Washington or Richmond. Significantly, however, not one of these copies, nor any other sort of official communication, was designated for the family of the dead. And the obstacles to fulfilling even this plan seemed daunting. Samuel P. Moore, surgeon general of the Confederate army, felt compelled in 1862 to issue a circular deploring the “indifference” of his medical officers to record keeping. But his exhortations apparently had little effect. When a January 1864 article in the Charleston Mercury summarized the preceding year’s casualties, the newspaper concluded, “These returns show a great deal of negligence by Captains and Surgeons in reporting the deaths of soldiers.” In the North field commanders interpreted reporting requirements to apply only to rear areas, so in April 1862 the War Department issued General Orders no. 33 to include the combat zone in its efforts to provide for the identification of the dead. But as we have seen, this measure employed language—“as far as possible…when practicable”—that made it more an aspiration than an order, and commanders treated it as such. General Orders no. 33 made no provision for implementing its goals and designated no special troops for graves registration duties. And like earlier measures, it assumed no responsibility for reporting deaths to those who waited at home.4

  In both North and South those on the home front struggled to fill the void of official intelligence. In the days after a major engagement Union and Confederate newspapers covered their pages with eagerly awaited reports. Sarah Palmer of South Carolina reflected the agonies of northerners and southerners alike when she wrote after Second Bull Run, “I do feel too anxious to see the papers and get the list of casualties from Co. K and yet I dread to see it.” Although civilians crowded news offices and railroad junctions waiting for information, the lists were notoriously inaccurate and incomplete.5

  The sources of intelligence for these published lists varied. Sometimes the newspaper report of a regiment’s dead and wounded was preceded by a statement from a chaplain indicating he had collected the information. Indeed, in some commands, this was officially the chaplain’s duty, although that did not necessarily mean he carried it out. One infuriated nurse at a Nashville hospital complained that instead of performing this obligation, the chaplain there spent his time “pitching quoits.” Many regiments—more than half in the Confederate and two-fifths in the Union army—did not have chaplains at all.6

  Searching the casualty lists. Detail from “News of the War.” Drawn by Winslow Homer. Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1862.

  Often an officer introduced the list. In some instances civilians representing charitable organizations assembled the data, recognizing that military officials were too occupied with the concerns of the living to make this a priority. W. P. Price, who represented a South Carolina relief agency, tried to establish a formal system and reported from Atlanta in June 1864 that he had made arrangements for colonels of Carolina regiments to furnish him with regular reports, “by which means I hope to be enabled to furnish correct lists.” But, he continued, his plan seemed imperiled because “I regret to state that several important letters [with information] sent from the field…have miscarried.”7

  Lists frequently included statements acknowledging the inadequacy of their information. As a Confederate newspaper stated in 1863, “Of Company I, 38 men were lost in action. 31 of these are accounted for as prisoners. The remaining seven,” the article conjectured, “must have been killed.” Sons or brothers listed as “slightly wounded” often turned out to be dead, and husbands reported as “killed in action” later appeared unharmed. “I have known so many instances where families have been held in agonised suspense for days by the report of relatives being dangerously wounded when they were not,” one Confederate wrote to an anxious mother in South Carolina. Mathew Jack Davis of the 19th Mississippi kept his family in suspense for four years. “I had been reported killed on the day I was captured,” he related. “I read my own obituary.” Joseph Willett of New York hastened to reassure his sister after the Battle of the Wilderness, “You may have heard before you read this that I was killed or wounded but allow me to contradict the report.” Journalist Henry Raymond, founder of the New York Times, rushed to Virginia in 1863 in response to news of his brother’s death. He engaged an embalmer but could not locate the body, so he went to army headquarters to inquire. Instead of answering his query, an aide produced his brother, quite alive and well. Yankee private Henry Struble was not only listed as a casualty after Antietam but assigned a grave after his canteen was found in the hands of a dead man he had stopped to help. After the war ended, Struble sent flowers every Memorial Day to decorate his own grave, to honor the unknown soldier it sheltered and perhaps to acknowledge that there but for God’s grace he might lie. Recipients of bad news repeated and cherished such narratives, hoping that a different story with a happier ending might emerge, and denying as long as possible the reality and finality of death.8

  More reliable and certainly more consoling than casualty lists were the personal letters that custom required a dead soldier’s closest friends and immediate military superiors to write to his relatives. But months often passed before soldiers in the field found time, circumstance, or strength to write. These communications were, moreover, dependent upon the vicissitudes of the postal service, which, in the Confederacy, grew increasingly unreliable. Southerners complained that by 1864 so many of the postal clerks in Richmond had been conscripted into the army that the mail between the Virginia theater and the home front had entirely broken down.9

  Voluntary organizations worked to fill the void left by the failure of military and governmental officials to provide information to families. In the North both the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission, the two most significant Union-wide charitable efforts to grow out of the war, came to regard communication with families as central to their efforts. The Christian Commission proclaimed its commitment in words printed at the top of each page of the stationery it distributed to soldiers at the front: “The U.S. Christian Commission send this sheet as a messenger between the soldier and his home. Let it hasten to those who wait for tidings.” In just three months during the spring of 1864 the commission reported that it had supplied 24,000 quires of paper and envelopes to the Army of the Potomac, and in the days after large battles it transported hundreds of letters from military hospitals and camps to nearby post offices. After Sherman’s army reached Savannah in December 1864, the commission delegates who had been following his troops rented rooms and installed fifty writing desks, where soldiers produced three hundred letters a day.10

  In cases of soldiers’ grave illness or death, commission delegates—the unpaid volunteers upon whom the work of the organization rested—wrote in their behalf, composing letters “for soldiers still lingering” or “to carry ‘last words.’” It was one of the fundamental responsibilities of its five thousand delegates, as the commission described it, “to spare no pains to give immediate and accurate information of the wounded and dead to those who waited” at home, and the commission estimated they had written more than 92,000 letters for soldiers by the end of the war. General field agents, regional supervisors of the commission, reported the active effort that delegates undertook to identify the dead in order to be able to send news to loved ones. After the Battle of Chattanooga, one agent related with satisfaction, “We were able to fill out many home letters, by the memoranda gathered during the night from the lips of the dying and from the letters and diaries found on the dead. Ordinarily, unless the body had b
een robbed, in the inside breast pocket of the blouse there would be a letter from friends, a photograph, a Christian Commission Testament, or a hymn-book, with the name and regiment and home address.”11

  “The United States Christian Commission Office at 8th and H Streets, Washington, D.C., 1865.” Library of Congress.

  In 1864 the commission organized the Individual Relief Department, designed to respond to inquiries about the fate of individual soldiers. “To answer these letters often involved a long and difficult search, first at the regiment, then at the field hospital, then in the post hospital or camp,” Reverend Lemuel Moss, home secretary of the commission, remembered in 1868. But often the information could indeed be found. Anna H., “a little girl,” wrote the commission seeking her father because her mother was “almost crazy” with the anxiety of having heard nothing for four weeks. “This is the third letter we have sent off,” she reported, as she begged “for any one to send us back an answer whether my dear father is dead or alive…If we cannot pay you, the Lord will. Do please be so kind, and answer this letter.” The commission sadly informed her that her father was already buried.12

  As part of its effort to collect information more systematically, the commission distributed printed notebooks to enable delegates in the field to keep records of the soldiers whom they assisted, information that could easily be passed along to the central Relief Department. A Christian Commission Death Register from Virginia in 1864 provided columns for names, units, dates of death, and “particulars” and “remarks” that usually included an assessment of the deceased’s religious state, as well as details about the disposition of his body. Part of the impetus for the commission’s desire to communicate with families was to provide, where possible, the reassurance that many of these soldiers had indeed died Good Deaths, with the commission delegate often having served as evangelist as well as surrogate kin and record keeper. S. B. Smith appeared in the register as “a chris[tian] and ready to die,” but Samuel Green’s religious condition was “unknown” and George Ewing was decidedly “not a Christian.” One soldier’s family would not be notified because “address of relatives not discoverable” the dying man could only “shake or nod in negative or affirmative response to a question.” Joseph Kramer’s “friends [were] unknown,” so in his case as well there was “no letter written.” George Besse “seemed like a good boy, spoke tenderly of his friends, expressed some religious feeling and seemed to welcome the offer to pray with him and in several instances he joined with apparent fervor…He had by his pillow the likeness of mother and sister.” The commission delegate recorded with evident gratification this example of dying well. Marcus Flambury affirmed “In God I trust” after a half hour conversing with a commission delegate, who surely reported this encouraging indication of salvation to Flambury’s family. But another soldier, troubled and deeply troubling, was past all help—in this world and the next: he appeared in the register as “Self suicide” after he shot himself. Early entries in the register listed gravesites in a hospital cemetery by row and number; later entries became more schematic, as they began to report battlefield rather than hospital deaths and to describe interments with far less specificity.13

  In the closing year of the war Christian Commission representatives became increasingly involved not just in providing information to families but in working to ensure the preservation of the identities of the dead. The night after the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, the general field agent for the Army of the Cumberland described commission delegates searching the field to “gather up the dead, identify them through their comrades, if possible, and mark them by a card.” The delegates had assumed the role of a volunteer graves registration service. After Appomattox the following spring, Christian Commission representatives would search battlefields and burying grounds around Petersburg and Richmond, locating, recording, and protecting soldiers’ graves. Ultimately the commission published this list of interments together with the records of the dead in several Confederate prisons, a total of eight thousand names, “for gratuitous distribution among the friends of the lost.” In the course of the war the Christian Commission had come to recognize that its pastoral duties, its concerns for “spiritual consolation,” and its commitment to Christian souls also involved a commitment to Christian bodies and to the individual identity of the immortal self. This was a service they performed both to comfort the survivors and to demonstrate appropriate respect for the dead, each one of whom was a candidate for divine salvation.14

  The Sanitary Commission approached the work of naming the dead rather differently, in keeping with the more general contrasts that distinguished the two agencies. While the Christian Commission was motivated by humanitarian sympathy and religious benevolence, the Sanitarians regarded such an approach as unduly sentimental, lacking the hard-headed realism and the order and discipline necessary to a modern age and a modern war. Working through a system of paid agents, the Sanitary Commission derided the amateurishness inherent in the volunteer efforts of the Christian Commission. The United States Sanitary Commission sought to bring dispassionate principles of science and efficiency to bear on the national crisis; relief efforts, while necessary, seemed less important than the establishment of rules of military organization that would maximize prevention of disease and effective management of wounds. Its Bureau of Vital Statistics, its inspections of camps and of soldiers, represented important manifestations of the effort to use the war as a kind of natural scientific experiment. “The vast proportions of our national Armies,” wrote Charles Stillé in his official report of commission activities during the war, “…afforded facilities not likely to occur again…and it would have been most unfortunate had the opportunities thus afforded for the study of large numbers of men in their hygienic and physiological relations, been suffered to pass unimproved.” Led by well-connected members of a wealthy elite, the Sanitary Commission attained a size and financial strength, as well as a public influence and reach, that far exceeded that of the Christian Commission.15

  But just as the Christian Commission was compelled by the demands of war to redirect its focus to this world from the next, so the Sanitarians—especially agents amid the misery of the battlefields—found themselves inevitably caught up in the pressing human needs of the moment. In the problem of handling the unidentified dead and wounded, issues of order and humanitarianism converged. Recognizing that before the desired revolution of science and prevention could be effected, “a vast amount of suffering would ensue” requiring “methodical and large measures of relief,” the commission had established early in the war a Special Relief Service, which undertook such activities as distributing extra clothing, procuring special foods for the sick, helping discharged soldiers to find their way home, distributing reading matter, and answering inquiries about missing soldiers. Like the Christian Commission, the Sanitary Commission came to regard itself as a “great medium of intercommunication between the people and the Army,” and it was soon overwhelmed with requests for information.16

  Dedicated to order and system, the Sanitarians created a bureaucracy to meet the growing demand. Late in 1862 the commission established a Hospital Directory through which it hoped to “supply a greatly needed want” by centralizing information on the name and condition of every soldier admitted to a Union military hospital. On the third floor of the commission’s office in downtown Washington, D.C., three full-time clerks copied data from the daily reports of dozens of hospitals into large ledgers. The directory began to advertise in order to announce its new services to the public. “Having seen your notice in the paper of your establishment of information of missing sogers,” John Herrick of Michigan declared, “I now write to find out what has become of my brother which I hav not heard from since august last.” Herrick thought he might have been “wounded at the battle of bullrun or antietam,” and he urged the directory to investigate.17

  By March 1863 three additional bureaus had been established in Philadelphia, New York,
and Louisville to divide responsibility for all 233 army general hospitals. Commission officers did not simply wait for patients to arrive in hospitals; “as soon as the roar of the battle had ceased,” Sanitary agents accompanied relief workers onto the field in order to make lists of the dead and wounded. “While bodily suffering was relieved by one class of agents, every effort was made by the other to cheer and encourage the sufferer by an assurance that his friends at home should know, at once, his exact condition.”18

  During the directory’s first year, some 13,000 specific inquiries were submitted and 9,203 answered. By early 1865 more than a million names had been recorded in office ledgers. Gathering information about all these men was no small feat. On July 4, 1863, for example, John Bowne of the Washington directory office left for Gettysburg to procure names of casualties from what he already knew had been a momentous battle. But five days later he complained that “the returns are coming provokingly and sadly slow.” Survivors were more concerned with caring for the wounded and burying the dead than with reporting on their fate. Bowne had found “by experience it is only when in a state of rest that the officers notice my communications.” Nearly two weeks after the battle Bowne had eight thousand names of Gettysburg’s fallen entered into his ledgers, but he observed that the directory’s records had never been “so confused…and so unsatisfactory from their want of fullness.” Reports from field hospitals were riddled with errors and omissions, often lacked dates, and were frequently illegible, “written with the faintest lead pencil.” Directory officials hired extra help and even “encroached on the Lord’s Day” to accomplish their task, for it seemed a permissible “work of mercy.” But the scale of death at Gettysburg challenged the fledgling directory’s capacity, and six weeks after the battle, the register of dead and wounded remained woefully incomplete.19