This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Faust expands on the theme of an incomplete death by citing the statistic that “men—more than 40 percent of deceased Yankees and a far greater proportion of Confederates—perished without names” (1687).

Well into the first half of the war, neither the North nor the South was equipped to handle the sheer number of dead with a sufficient record-keeping apparatus. The author lists a couple of instances of mistaken identity that resulted in a family member’s rejoicing at the unexpected good news that the supposedly-dead soldier was alive. One particularly poignant example is of a Northern soldier who, because he lent his canteen to another soldier who was later found dead, was himself listed as a casualty and assigned a grave. The author writes, “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” (1746-48).

As mentioned previously, letters home to loved ones of fallen soldiers were common. This chapter expands on that idea by including details about the woeful performance of the mechanisms designed to connect letter-writers to the people meant to receive those letters. In desperation, some volunteer organizations stepped into the breach and took on this task.

In the same vein came the Individual Relief Department, established with an eye toward fielding queries about the whereabouts of soldiers who hadn’t written home for some time. The Christian Commission, a volunteer organization,, took a leading role in post-battle identification of the dead, in order to more easily inform next-of-kin.

More successful was the Sanitary Commission, motivated not by Christian ideals but by pragmatic considerations. The organization worked systematically, establishing bureaus in multiple cities to coordinate work and communication between army hospitals and families of soldiers. According to the author, the commission responded to 70 percent of the requests it received. Among the more famous individuals who wrote to next of kin was the poet Walt Whitman. Whitman, the author writes, was an unofficial orderly:

His efforts were less medical than consolatory; he provided rice puddings, small amounts of spending money, stamped envelopes and stationery, peaches, apples, oranges, horseradish, undershirts, socks, soap, towels, oysters, jellies, horehound candy—and love, comfort, and ’cheer’ (1987-88).

These organizations all aligned themselves with the North. Given that such communication and logistics were virtually nonexistent in the South, families in those states stood little chance of determining the whereabouts of soldiers who stopped writing home. The postal system as a whole was so subpar in the South that families who didn’t hear from soldiers for weeks were rarely surprised.

To address the demand for information on missing or dead soldiers came seekers-for-hire: people who would, for a fee, do what official organizations could not. Some of these agents, as the author terms them, would accept a share of the deceased’s back pay or widow’s pension in lieu of money up front, in a grim equivalent of a lawyer working on commission. Survivors had to consider practicalities, such as death benefits. Insurance companies insisted on seeing a death certificate before issuing payments, so it was in a survivor’s best interest to be able to prove such a death, as painful as that might be to endure.

Because news from the battlefield to the home front traveled so slowly, soldiers invented their own means of keeping their families informed. Some soldiers sent telegraphs home after battles, so their families wouldn’t have to wait to read death listings in newspapers. Other soldiers had identifying papers, badges, or other personal effects on them at all times—especially before what they expected to be fierce fighting—so word of their death and delivery of their body would be more likely. Some who survived the war kept these identification signifiers as souvenirs.

Another way families received status updates on their soldiers was through the press. Many families placed personal ads in newspapers to convey or inquire about the wellbeing of their loved ones. Those who didn’t want to rely on others took matters into their own hands and descended on battlefields, with or without protection or permission, desperate to find out for themselves what other people wouldn’t—or couldn’t—tell them.