This Republic of Suffering

by Drew Gilpin Faust

  “Ward K at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C.,” one of the hospitals Walt Whitman visited regularly. Library of Congress.

  In his poem “Come Up from the Fields Father,” Whitman imagined the family that received a letter like those he wrote. In Ohio’s “vital and beautiful” fall, “all prospers well.” Apples and grapes ripen; the wheat is ready for cutting. But amid this harvest of life, news arrives of war’s harvest of death. A letter comes to the farm’s family, written not by their son Pete but in another’s hand. It reports his gunshot wound but does not yet communicate the more terrible truth that “he is dead already” by the time the letter arrives. It is a letter that will destroy the mother, as a rifle has already destroyed the son.36

  John O’Neal, a Gettysburg physician, did not send letters to bereaved families, but he kept a record of the names and locations of Confederate graves he encountered as he traveled about the county visiting patients. These were men already dead, well past O’Neal’s medical ministrations, but he felt nevertheless a sense of obligation that led him to document their often hasty interments in hope of someday transmitting the information to family or friends. Into his journal, scribbled in a little bound volume entitled “The Physician’s Handbook of Practice,” he entered, alongside patients’ names and ailments, lists of dead Confederates, their companies, regiments, and gravesites: “2nd Corps Ground, Back of Schwartz Barn No 1 Crew J. Co. K 8 Fla No 2 Farmer N, Co G. 7 N.C. Died July 26.”37

  Individuals did not just wait for letters or published casualty lists to obtain news about the dead and wounded; they also made use of the press to request information or to share information they had been able to acquire. In both North and South civilians took out personal advertisements to announce the condition of prisoners and the fate of the missing. These notices were used to communicate across the divide of Civil War—to provide southerners with news from the North and vice versa. In 1864, for example, a Richmond paper published a notice placed by Union general Benjamin Butler. Directed to the attention of a Confederate naval surgeon, Butler’s advertisement reported that his son and a friend were alive and had been taken prisoner at the end of June. “They are both well and at [the Union prisoner of war camp at] Point Lookout. I have taken leave to write this note to relieve your anxiety.” He had spoken to the young prisoner, he continued, “in a personal interview.” Butler and the Confederate surgeon had almost certainly been acquainted before the war, and ties of friendship and humanitarianism combined in this instance to yield information about two of the war’s missing. A personal advertisement in a Richmond paper announced to “Hon. R.W.B. of South Carolina—your son Nat is a prisoner at Point Lookout, unwounded, and in his usual health, and all his wants shall be supplied without delay.” This anonymous northern friend of the family of Robert Barnwell was offering not just the immediate solace of information but a promise to supplement the meager fare of Union prison camps for the duration of Nat’s incarceration.

  The New York Daily News ran regular columns of original notices and copied others from Richmond papers. In February 1864 William Racer of Madison County, Virginia, sought information that would “relieve the suspense of…[a] distressed father” about his son, who had been reported wounded at Gettysburg seven months before. Southerner William Smith responded to an inquiry from a northern relative that a Mobile paper had copied from the New York Daily News. “We are all well. Brother Sam died in Vicksburg the 17th of July, of a wound and typhoid fever. My love to all.” Newspaper columns substituted for the personal letter that was unlikely to make its way through military lines. Ever hopeful, the “friends of Sergeant walter farnan, Jr., Company M. Fifteenth U.S. Infantry” sought an end to uncertainty by publishing a request to “the authorities At Richmond” to please confirm if he was indeed the W. Farnham reported to have died in a Virginia hospital two weeks before.38

  Desperate families both North and South traveled by the hundreds to battlefields to search in person for missing kin. Observers described railroad junctions crowded with frantic relatives in pursuit of information about loved ones. When Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. rushed to Maryland fearing his son dead after Antietam, he described the combination of hope and terror that must have been shared by many who traveled to the front in search of kin. When in spite of his worst fears he found the young captain alive, the father characterized his shifting expectations as in some profound sense a shifting reality: “Our son and brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.” The boundary between life and death seemed at once permeable and infinite.39

  Many of those who sought their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons did not enjoy Holmes’s happy outcome. Fanny Scott of Virginia began a search for her son Benjamin after more than three months of silence following the battle of Antietam in September 1862. She wrote to Robert E. Lee early in 1863. He forwarded her letter across the lines to Union general Joseph Hooker, who promised to have the U.S. surgeon general survey the hospital lists from Maryland. Lee enclosed Hooker’s letter in a reply to Mrs. Scott and expressed his hopes “that you may hear good news of your son.” But two months later Lee forwarded a letter sent him through a Flag of Truce that reported, “Diligent and careful inquiry has been made concerning the man referred to in the enclosure and no trace of him can be discovered in any hospital or among the records of the rebel prisoners.” Within days Fanny Scott submitted to Lee a request for a pass through Union lines to herself search for Benjamin. But evidently the effort proved fruitless, for at the end of the war she was still seeking information. Union general E. A. Hitchcock, responsible for war-end exchanges of prisoners, gently responded to Scott’s July 15, 1865, request: “From the length of time since the battle of Antietam and you not having heard from your son during all this time, I am very sorry to say that the presumption is that he fell a victim to that battle. If he were still living I cannot understand why he should not have found means of making the fact known to you.”40

  The Scott incident illustrates several significant aspects of the problem of the missing of the Civil War. First, it demonstrates the possibility of an individual’s being entirely lost—a circumstance many civilians found difficult to fathom. As we have seen, the scale of the war presented unprecedented challenges of record keeping, so that undoubtedly many of those never identified were bodies that could not be connected with names. But another aspect of Civil War death contributed to the large numbers of unidentified—and would contribute even more dramatically to the nameless ranks of World War I dead. The Civil War sometimes obliterated not just names but entire bodies, often leaving nothing behind to identify or bury. A Union chaplain described in the aftermath of Gettysburg “little fragments so as hardly to be recognizable as any part of a man.” Another soldier wrote in horror of comrades literally “blown to atoms.” Many Civil War soldiers actually vanished, their bodies vaporized by the firepower of this first modern war. This may have been the fate of Benjamin Scott. Civilians found this outcome incomprehensible, but soldiers who had witnessed the destructiveness of battle understood all too well the reality of men instantly transformed into nothing. The implications of bodily disintegration for the immortality of both bodies and souls was troubling, and the disappearance of bodies rendered the search for names all the more important.41

  Fanny Scott’s story demonstrates as well the unifying power of death even amid the divisive forces of war. General Lee was not above concerning himself with the fall of an individual sparrow—though one assumes that Scott was no ordinary soldier but one whose family had some larger claims of class and connection on Lee’s compassion. But the intimacy of this all-American war displays itself strikingly here, as Lee readily corresponded with his Yankee counterpart, who himself acted promptly and decisively to honor his enemy’s request. Even as they contemplated the spring campaign that would produce their bloody confrontation at Chancellorsville, Lee and Hooker found themselves on the same side as Mrs. Fanny Scott in her desperate pursuit of information ab
out her son. Killing enemy soldiers was the goal of both generals and both armies, yet bereavement could unite them in common purpose.42

  Fanny Scott’s 1865 request for information about a son who had by then been gone almost three years suggests the depth and tenacity of the need to secure accurate information about the fate of missing men. General Hitchcock’s letter to Scott seems to reflect a certain incredulity that she had not yet resigned herself to a grim conclusion that he regarded as both undeniable and unavoidable. Yet Fanny Scott’s story demonstrates not just the nationally unifying power of death but also the intensity and persistence of its hold upon the bereaved, especially in circumstances of continuing uncertainty. Nine years after the end of the war Mrs. R. L. Leach was still seeking information about what had happened to her son after he was sent to a hospital ship in Virginia. Unable to admit he must be dead, she confessed, “we think sometimes that he is in Some Insane Hospital.” Without further information she lived in “suspense,” even as she acknowledged “to know he was dead would be better.” Jane Mitchell had received a letter after the Battle of Gettysburg from a soldier who described burying a corpse he found rolled in a blanket with her son’s name pinned to it. But she never saw the body or found the grave and was never convinced it was really her son. “I would like to find that grave,” she wrote. “It was years before I gave up the hope that he would some day appear. I got it into my head that he had been taken prisoner and carried off a long distance but that he would make his way back one day—this I knew was very silly of me but the hope was there nevertheless.” The absence of identifiable bodies left these women with abiding uncertainty and fantastical hopes, illusions that for them made the world endurable.43

  The power and longevity of hope manifested themselves dramatically in the responses that Union quartermaster general Montgomery Meigs received when he decided in 1868 to publish in northern magazines a drawing of a soldier who had died unidentified in a Washington military hospital in May 1864. The man had arrived too weak to give any information about himself and would have been quickly forgotten if he had not had in his possession the considerable sum of $360. The surgeon in charge of the hospital arranged to have him photographed after his death, and this likeness was copied by the press at the request of the War Department. The announcements seeking his identity also noted that the dead man had left an ambrotype of a child. Letters from women streamed into Meigs’s office. While some may indeed have been fortune hunters seeking to claim the money, the great majority displayed what seems like such poignant desperation that it is difficult to doubt the sincerity of the wrenching tales they told. Mrs. Jenny McConkey of Illinois appeared to recognize the futility of her hopes when she wrote suggesting the unidentified man might be her son, whom she had last heard from in 1862. The photograph of the little boy was hard to explain, for her son was childless. But, she rationalized, he might have carried the portrait in any case “as he was very fond of children.” A Pennsylvania woman whose husband had last been heard of in the infamous Confederate prison camp at Andersonville described her life as “one constant daze of anxiety” because of her inability to get any information about his fate. Martha Dort wrote explaining that her husband had reportedly been shot while being transferred from one prison to another in 1863, “but that may not be true. Mistakes do often occur.” She was encouraged to hope by the report of the child’s photograph, for her husband had carried an ambrotype of their son, aged three or four, in plaid pants with his hands in his pockets. She enclosed fifty cents for a copy of the photograph. Meigs’s office returned the money, for the picture did not match her description.44

  “An Unknown Soldier.” Copied from a deathbed photograph and published in an effort to locate his survivors. Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1868.

  The mysterious soldier was never identified; the child in the ambrotype was never provided with the details of his father’s death or with his $360 inheritance. But the unknown man had proved the catalyst for an outpouring of despair from women who represented the many thousands of loved ones left not just without their husbands, brothers, or sons but bereft of the kind of information that might enable them to mourn. It is chilling to recognize the very limited expectations of the many women who wrote to Meigs: the man they all sought to claim as their husband was quite dead; they were no longer looking to find a living person; the most they dared hope was for relief from the incapacitating uncertainty that controlled their lives. A professor at Gettysburg College who aided many civilians searching for kin after the battle there perceptively described “aching hearts in which the dread void of uncertainty still remained unsatisfied by positive knowledge.” It was in some sense information as much as individuals that was “missing” in Civil War America. Those who had long since given up on reclaiming lost loved ones alive still sought eagerly for details of their lives, deaths, and burials.

  Henry Clay Taylor. Photographed on his twenty-fifth birthday. Wisconsin Historical Society.

  J. M. Taylor of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, was as assiduous and tenacious as Fanny Scott in search of information about his son, who was captured at Chickamauga in September 1863. Initially confined in Richmond’s Libby Prison, twenty-five-year-old Henry Taylor managed to communicate with his parents by concealing miniature letters in buttons smuggled to the North. Early hopes for his return dimmed, for prisoner exchanges had been suspended, and Henry was transferred south. Months of confinement and scanty prison fare took their toll, and he fell sick with diarrhea and consumption. By summer 1864 his parents learned he had entered a military hospital in Charleston. The irregular news they had received since his capture now almost ceased, until in October a fellow Union prisoner wrote from South Carolina that Henry could not recover. “I think it due you that you know the facts,” the soldier explained. Taylor received the letter through the lines nine days later. “It makes a child of me,” the father reported. He began a series of frantic inquiries, seeking to end the “painful suspense” with information from escaped and paroled prisoners and from military officials both North and South. In mid-November Taylor learned of two Union officers who were reported to have said they buried Henry. Now, assuming him dead, Taylor continued to write in pursuit of details: “Please bear in mind that the most trivial circumstances in regard to the last moments [and] death of our loved one will be of much interest to us.” On December 27 Taylor received a letter from another former prisoner confirming that Henry had died at Charleston on October 3. But this was not the kind of official notification that would satisfy Taylor’s longing to know everything possible about Henry’s last days. Nor would it enable Taylor to, as he put it “settle my son’s ac[counts] with the government.” He continued to write to secure such evidence and to locate Henry’s effects, “which will be preserved as relicks.” Taylor was particularly concerned about the return of a twenty-five-dollar gold piece he had sent Henry just before his death and about remuneration for Henry’s “servant…a negro by the name of Sam,” who, Henry had reported in 1863, “thinks as much of me as any dog does of his master.” As soon as Charleston fell into Union hands, Taylor began efforts to bring Henry’s body home.45

  “Libby Prison, Richmond Virginia, April 1865.” Library of Congress.

  Henry Taylor was one of the estimated 9 percent of Civil War dead who expired in prison camps. Like Henry, most of these men died in the years after the North’s suspension of regular prisoner exchanges in mid-1863 in response to Confederate mistreatment of captured black soldiers. The North’s numerical superiority made exchanges disadvantageous in what was fast evolving into a war of attrition, but Yankees and Confederates alike suffered in the harsh conditions that accompanied the rapid expansion of prison populations. Neither side had anticipated the need to hold so many men in captivity, and neither side had made adequate provision for supplying food, shelter, or medical care. In the course of the war 194,743 Union soldiers and 215,865 Confederates were held prisoner, and 30,218 northerners and 25,976 southerners died in captivi
ty. Civil War prisons were indeed, as one inmate observed, “the closest existence to a hell on earth.”46

  In April 1895 J. M. Taylor received an answer to a letter he had recently sent one of Henry’s old comrades. The veteran, who noted he was now gray-haired, confessed he could not recall enough about the layout of the Charleston hospital to answer Taylor’s very specific inquiry about the circumstances of Henry’s last days: “Maybe that some of the other boys may remember more about it.” Thirty years might have led the soldier to put the war out of his mind, but the father could not. The consoling “facts” were still missing.47

  Four years of Civil War propelled a remarkable shift in attitudes and behavior toward accounting for the dead. Military procedures themselves began to reflect this transformation, and in July 1864 the U.S. Congress passed an act that established a new organizational principle for handling casualties. This measure for the first time designated a special graves registration unit rather than, as had heretofore been the case, assuming that soldiers could simply be detailed from the line to carry out burial duties. When Confederate general Jubal Early attacked Fort Stevens near Washington, D.C., in 1864, this new unit, under Assistant Quartermaster James Moore, succeeded in identifying every Union body and recording every grave. But during the final operations of the war, men were not spared to serve in registration units, and the effort was abandoned. It represented nevertheless a new departure and, together with the establishment of the beginnings of the national cemetery system, marked a growing recognition of governmental responsibility for the remains—both bodies and names—of those who had perished in Civil War camps and battlefields.