This Republic of Suffering

Home > Other > This Republic of Suffering > Page 33
This Republic of Suffering Page 33

by Drew Gilpin Faust


  16. Stillé, History of Sanitary Commission, pp. 287, 308.

  17. Ibid., p. 309; John Herrick to Frederick Law Olmsted, December 14, 1862, Washington Hospital Directory Archives, Letters of Inquiry, Box 192.2, folder 3, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL.

  18. Sanitary Reporter, January 15, 1864, p. 135.

  19. Stillé, History of Sanitary Commission, p. 309; Howard A. Martin to H. A. de France, July 4, 1863, John Bowne to H. A. de France, July 9, 1863, July 16, 1863, and July 21, 1863, Philadelphia Agency, Hospital Directory Correspondence, vol. 1, Box 596, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL; H. A. de France to Jos. P. Holbrook, July 27, 1863 and July 18, 1863, Washington Hospital Directory Archives, Box 195.1, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL.

  20. Richard Deering, June 13, 1864, Louisville Hospital Directory Archives, Chattanooga, Special Inquiries, April 8, 1864, to August 25, 1864, Box 284.2, folder 1, p. 58; Report of Hospital Directory, July 9, 1864, Washington Hospital Directory Archives, Box 192.3, folder 12, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL; “The Hospital Directory,” Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1 (December 15, 1863): 109.

  21. Report of Hospital Directory, July 9, 1864, Washington Hospital Directory Archives, Box 192.3, folder 12, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL. For casualty numbers, see James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 742.

  22. Peter Williams to Dear Sir, March 28, 1863, Philadelphia Agency, Hospital Directory Correspondence, vol. 1, Box 596, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL. Susannah Hampton to Dear Sir, September 14, 1863, Philadelphia Agency, Hospital Directory Correspondence, vol. 2, Box 597, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL.

  23. Mrs. Biddy Higgins to Sir, December 16, 1863, Philadelphia Agency, Hospital Directory Correspondence, vol. 2, Box 597, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL.

  24. John Bowne to John W. Wilson, December 17, 1863, Philadelphia Agency, Hospital Directory Correspondence, vol. 2, Box 597, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL.

  25. Stillé, History of Sanitary Commission, pp. 310, 309.

  26. Louisiana Soldiers’ Relief Association and Hospital in the City of Richmond, Virginia (Richmond, Va.: Enquirer Book and Job Press, 1862), p. 30; Kurt O. Berends, “‘Wholesome Reading Purifies and Elevates the Man’: The Religious Military Press in the Confederacy,” in Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 147.

  27. P. Hunter to Oliver H. Middleton, July 27, 1864; Henry W. Richards to Oliver H. Middleton, December 19, 1864; E. W. Mikell to Colonel B. H. Rutledge, June 21, 1864, all in Middleton-Blake Papers, SCHS.

  28. Harper’s Weekly, September 3, 1864, p. 576.

  29. W. H. Fowler, Guide for Claimants of Deceased Soldiers (Richmond, Va.: Geo. P. Evans & Co., 1864), pp. 66, 17; Megan McClintock, “Civil War Pensions and the Reconstruction of Union Families,” Journal of American History 83 (September 1996): 456–80; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge; Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 106–7.

  30. Daily South Carolinian, May 17, 1864; W. D. Rutherford, telegram to Sallie F. Rutherford, July 6, 1862, William Drayton Rutherford Papers, SCL.

  31. Gregory Coco, Killed in Action: Eyewitness Accounts of the Last Moments of 100 Union Soldiers Who Died at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1992), p. 76; Harper’s Weekly, August 1, 1863, p. 495, and September 3, 1864, p. 576. Murphey quoted in Richard F. Miller, and Robert F. Moore, The Civil War: The Nantucket Experience, Including the Memoirs of Josiah Fitch Murphey (Nantucket, Mass.: Wesco Publishing, 1994), p. 80.

  32. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), p. 41.

  33. Katharine Prescott Wormeley, The Other Side of War: With the Army of the Potomac. Letters from the Headquarters of the United States Sanitary Commission During the Peninsular Campaign in Virginia in 1862 (Boston: Ticknor & Co. 1889), p. 145; Clara Barton, Journal, 1863, Clara Barton Papers, LC; T. J. Weatherly Diary, 1864–65, SCL.

  34. Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War (1875; rpt. Bedford, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1993), p. 5; Edwin Haviland Miller, ed., Walt Whitman: The Correspondence (New York: New York University Press, 1961), vol. 1, p. 59; Walt Whitman, “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” Civil War Poetry and Prose (New York: Dover, 1995), p. 16; Whitman, Memoranda, p. 36; M. Wynn Thomas, “Fratricide and Brotherly Love: Whitman and the Civil War,” in Ezra Greenspan, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 35.

  35. Times quoted in Thomas, “Fratricide and Brotherly Love,” pp. 32–33; James Perrin Warren, “Reading Whitman’s Postwar Poetry,” in Greenspan, ed., Cambridge Companion to Whitman, p. 46; Whitman, Memoranda, pp. 65–67; Miller, ed., Whitman: Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 259.

  36. Walt Whitman, “Come Up from the Fields Father,” in Civil War Poetry and Prose, pp. 12–14. See also Walt Whitman, The Wound Dresser, ed. Richard Maurice Bucke (Boston: Small Maynard & Co., 1898); John Harmon McElroy, ed., The Sacrificial Years: A Chronicle of Walt Whitman’s Experiences in the Civil War (Boston: David Godine, 1999); Roy Morris Jr., The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  37. O’Neal quoted in Gregory A. Coco, Gettysburg’s Confederate Dead (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 2003), p. 15.

  38. Daily South Carolinian, July 21, 1864. These were copied by the Carolinian “from the Richmond papers.” New York Daily News, February 5, 1864, February 4, 1864, January 8, 1864.

  39. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “My Hunt After ‘The Captain,’” Atlantic Monthly 10 (December 1862): 764.

  40. Robert E. Lee to Joseph Hooker, February 14, 1863; Joseph Hooker to Robert E. Lee, February 16, 1863; Robert E. Lee to Fanny Scott, February 18, 1863; Charles S. Venable to Fanny Scott, April 1, 1863; William Alexander Hammond to Robert E. Lee, March 23, 1863; Thomas M. R. Talcott to Fanny Scott, April 18, 1963; E. A. Hitchcock to Fanny Scott, July 25, 1865, all in Scott Family Papers, VHS. See Mrs. T. B. Hurlbut to Clara Barton, September 26, 1865, Clara Barton Papers, LC, for a description of Confederate general James Longstreet’s comparable aid to a northern woman searching for her son.

  41. Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, p. 48; Robert G. Carter, Four Brothers in Blue (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), pp. 324–25.

  42. On the unifying power of death, see David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying,” Journal of Southern History 67 (February 2001): 5.

  43. Mrs. R. L. Leach to Clara Barton, March 28, 1874, Clara Barton Papers, LC; Gregory Coco, Wasted Valor: The Confederate Dead at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1990), p. 141. Sébastien Japrisot’s novel and the film based on it, A Very Long Engagement, explore this fantasy of a lost soldier found with amnesia in the setting of the First World War.

  44. Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs to Surgeon General, September 19, 1868, Office of the Quartermaster General, Consolidated Correspondence File, 1794–1915, Portrait of Unknown Soldier, RG 92, Box 1173, NARA, Mrs. Jenny McConkey to Meigs, November 4, 1868; Ellen Hardback to Meigs, October 26, 1868; Mrs. J. P. Coppersmith to Meigs, November 30, 1868; James M. Truitt to Meigs, November 6, 1868, all ibid. See “An Unknown Soldier,” Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1868, p. 679.

  45. Charles H. Morgan to J. M. Taylor, October 2, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Doct. J. F. Walton, October 12, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Lieutenant Colonel W. F. Bennett, October 30, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Captain Vliet, November 17, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Captain R. H. Spencer, November 22, 1864; Captain N. M. Clark to J. M. Taylor, December 27, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Captain H. K. Edwards [December 1864]; J. M. Taylor to L. F. Davis, February 5, 1865; Henry C. Taylor to Alonzo T
aylor, August 16, 1863, all in Henry Clay Taylor Papers, WHS.

  46. Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1997), p. 16. For statistics, see James M. McPherson, personal communication to the author, December 27, 2006. See also Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers While Prisoners of War in the Hands of Rebel Authorities (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1864); James Canon, Diary, WHS; William Best Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in Psychology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1930); Charles W. Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

  47. Bob to J. M. Taylor, April 3, 1895, Henry Clay Taylor Papers, WHS.

  48. “The Sanitary Movement in European Armies,” Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1 (April 15, 1864): 354, 353. On this emerging humanitarianism, see more generally David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), and David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  CHAPTER 5. REALIZING

  1. Abraham Lincoln, “Special Session Message, July 4, 1861,” in James D. Richardson, ed., Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1908), vol. 6, p. 30.

  2. On Gettysburg, see Margaret Creighton, The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pp. 121–22. Kathleen Ernst, Too Afraid to Cry: Maryland Civilians in the Antietam Campaign (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1999), p. 186; Albertus McCreary, “Gettysburg: A Boy’s Experience of the Battle,” McClure’s Magazine 33 ( July 1909): 243–53; Gregory A. Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg: The Aftermath of a Battle (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995), p. 338 (number of Vicksburg deaths). On Baton Rouge, see Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confederate Girl’s Diary: Sarah Morgan Dawson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1913), p. 51. On Natchez see Mel Young, Where They Lie: The Story of the Jewish Soldiers of the North and South (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America), p. 28. For the Vicksburg quote, see John T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities (Hartford, Conn.: L. Stebbins, 1866), p. 358. See also Willene Clark, ed., Valleys of the Shadow: The Memoir of Confederate Captain Reuben G. Clark (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), p. 16. On the shelling of Petersburg, see J. W. McClure to My dearest Kate, J. W. McClure Papers, SCL. On ordnance explosion, see Richmond Enquirer, March 17, 1863. For the Yankee soldier quote, see Oscar O. Winter, ed., With Sherman to the Sea: Civil War Letters, Diaries and Reminiscences of Theodore F. Upson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943), p. 144.

  3. Petition of Citizens of Danville, Virginia, to the Confederate Secretary of War, February 1, 1864, quoted in Robert E. Denney, Civil War Medicine: Care and Comfort of the Wounded (New York: Sterling, 1994), p. 5; Report of the Board of Health of the City and Port of Philadelphia to the Mayor for 1861 (Philadelphia: James Gibbons, 1862), p. 10; William T. Wragg, “Report on the Yellow Fever Epidemic at Wilmington, N.C., in the Autumn of 1862,” Confederate Medical and Surgical Journal 1 (February 1864): 17–18; Ted Alexander, “Destruction, Disease and Death: The Battle of Antietam and the Sharpsburg Civilians,” Civil War Regiments 6, no. 2 (1998): 158. See also J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Frank H. Taylor, Philadelphia in the Civil War 1861–1865 (Philadelphia: The City, 1913).

  4. Gaines Foster, “The Limitations of Federal Health Care for Freedmen, 1862–1868,” Journal of Southern History 48 (August 1982), pp. 353 (quote), 356–67 (estimate). See also Thavolia Glymph, “‘This Species of Property’: Female Slave Contrabands in the Civil War,” in Edward D. C. Campbell and Kym S. Rice, eds., A Woman’s War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), pp. 55–71.

  5. Jestin Hampton to Thomas B. Hampton, October 8, 1862, Thomas B. Hampton Papers, CAH; Caleb Cope et al., “An appeal in behalf of the Refugee Woman and Children concentrating in and about Nashville, Tennessee, December 23, 1864” (Philadelphia, 1864), printed circular, Civil War Miscellanies (McA 5786.F), McAllister Collection, LCP; Randolph County petition in Ira Berlin et al., eds., Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: New Press, 1992), p. 150; Mary H. Legge to Harriet Palmer, July 3, 1863, Palmer Family Papers, SCL; Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 247.

  6. Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas, 1968), p. 35; Mary H. Mitchell, Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine (1985; rpt. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1999), p. 50; Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 419.

  7. “in memoriam,” Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1 (August 15, 1864): 615; Frank Moore, Women of the War: Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice (Hartford, Conn.: S. S. Scranton, 1867), pp. 390, 53; Mary Denis Maher, To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989).

  8. Mary Boykin Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 199, 209–11; Daniel E. Sutherland, Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861–1865 (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 73; Winthrop D. Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Elvira J. Powers, Hospital Pencillings (Boston: Edward L. Mitchell, 1866), p. 71; Kym S. Rice and Edward D. C. Campbell, “Voices from the Tempest: Southern Women’s Wartime Experiences,” in Campbell and Rice, eds., A Woman’s War, pp. 103–6.

  9. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 279–88; Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974), lists the dead and wounded on pp. 213–32.

  10. Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 85, 74; Phillip Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981); Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Homefront (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999).

  11. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Killed at the Ford,” Atlantic 17 (April 1866): 479.

  12. Marjorie Ann Rogers, “An Iowa Woman in Wartime,” Annals of Iowa 36 (Summer 1961): 31; Oliver Hering Middleton Family Correspondence, SCHS.

  13. Reuben Allen Pierson, August 3, 1862, in Thomas W. Cutrer and Michael Parish, eds., Brothers in Gray: The Civil War Letters of the Pierson Family (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), p. 110.

  14. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. 14, pp. 245, 244. See also Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 93. See Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). See also contemporary mourning manuals: Daniel C. Eddy, The Angel’s Whispers; or, Echoes of Spirit Voices (Boston: Horace Wentworth, 1866), and Emily Thornwell, The Rainbow Around the Tomb; or, Rays of Hope for Those Who Mourn (New York: Der
by & Jackson, 1857).

  15. Abbie Brooks Diaries, April 4, 1865, Mss 39f, Keenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Ga.; Kate Foster Diary, November 15, 1863, RBMSC; Kate Stone, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868, ed. John Q. Anderson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955), p. 258; Cornelia Hancock, South After Gettysburg: Letters, 1863–1868 (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1956), pp. 67, 15; Myrta Lockett Avary, ed., A Virginia Girl in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), p. 41; Mary Greenhow Lee Diary, July 24, 1863, WFCHS.

  16. Louis P. Towles, ed., A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 341, 348, 342, 359.

  17. J. Michael Welton, ed., “My Heart Is So Rebellious”: The Caldwell Letters, 1861–1865 (Warrenton, Va.: Fauquier National Bank, 1991); Towles, ed., World Turned Upside Down, p. 404.

  18. Towles, ed., World Turned Upside Down, p. 404; Mrs. H. [Anna Morris Ellis Holstein], Three Years in Field Hospitals of the Army of the Potomac (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1867), p. 13.

  19. Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 216; Major General F. H. Smith, Superintendent, Virginia Military Institute, General Orders no. 30, May 13, 1863, VMIA, online at www.vmi.edu/archives/Jackson/cwjacksn.htm.

  20. On mourning garb, see “Fashionable Mourning,” Christian Recorder, September 19, 1863; Katherine Basanese, “Victorian Period Mourning,” The Courier: The Official Newsletter of the American Civil War Association 1 (May 1995): 5–7; “The Fashion of Mourning,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 54 (March 1857): 286. See also Joan L. Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840–1900 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995).

 

‹ Prev