This Republic of Suffering (17 page)

Amid all these compelling stories, John Bowne found himself especially engaged by the tribulations of a young woman who feared she had been deserted rather than bereaved but had no intention of quietly enduring the injustice she believed she had suffered. “Mrs Biddy Higgins alias Hayes,” a domestic working for a respectable Philadelphia family, wrote in search of her husband, Peter Hayes, alias Higgins—“the latter being his real name”—a member of a New York Artillery regiment:

I was married to him by the name of Higgins by the Priest of the Cathedral, 18th and Logan Square Philadelphia about nine months ago. He was 15 months in the U.S. General Hospital West Philadelphia and was sent away to his Regiment last July, I think, but
I never heard from him afterwards at all He never wrote to me,
although he knows
perfectly well
my address, having been here scores of times. This makes me a little suspicious that he might
possibly perhaps
have been married
previously
to somebody else, as he acted lovingly towards me and we
never
had a difference or
even angry word
at any time, so it is
too bad
of him to desert me. Now as you are organization to help the poor, I hope you will be kind enough to find out for me 1st
Where Peter Hayes comes from
and who are his family and friends where he formerly lived before entering the Army, so I may write to them to enquire about him. Perhaps you could ask him this 1st before you ask him 2nd what reason he has for
never
writing to me or even letting me know where he was, or ever sending me any money at all, although I have been very ill and I do not think he could have been a very steady young man in his morals, and I have always been modest and of
excellent
character beyond any doubt, never running after the men, but he came
for a year
before I was married to him to the family where I had been a servant for many years and who will give me the best of characters.

Please reply soon as I am so much worried in my mind “Mrs Biddy Higgins alias Hayes”
²³

Bowne determined he would “try to do what I can for Mrs Biddy Higgins as I think she has been hard dealt by.” But within a week of her letter, she appeared in person at the directory office to report that she had received a letter from her husband with money and a daguerreotype and that she expected him home on furlough in a few days. “So Biddy is all right,” a directory official scribbled on her file. She was among the lucky ones.
²⁴

Ultimately the commission estimated it successfully answered 70 percent of requests for information. Although its war-end report acknowledged that this service had differed “essentially” from anything the commission had originally expected to do, it “was the work, perhaps of all others, the…most gratifying of any undertaken by the Commission.” Even as they amassed their dispassionate statistics and implemented comforting bureaucratic order and discipline in their efforts to name the dead, the Sanitarians became humanitarians and sentimentalists in spite of themselves.
²⁵

The Confederacy, lagging behind the North in both men and matériel, also faced greater shortages of information. The South had not experienced the same explosion of voluntary associations that had characterized the North in the prewar years and never developed centralized wartime charitable organizations like the Sanitary and Christian commissions. But Confederates also sought means to systematize the collection of information about casualties and ways to make that intelligence available to kin. The Louisiana Soldiers' Relief Association, for example, promised to provide information to “friends at home” about any Louisiana recruit serving in Virginia, and the Central Association and the South Carolina Relief Depot endeavored to gather information for South Carolinians. Southern religious newspapers often printed “Soldiers' Guides,” gathered from hospital censuses, listing news and location of the killed and wounded.
²⁶

Less philanthropically inclined individuals also sought to meet the demand for information. Across Virginia a number of southerners worked the battlegrounds offering themselves as paid agents to Confederate families in search of information. In the spring of 1864 the eighteen-year-old son of South Carolina's prominent Middleton family disappeared in Virginia. His father, Oliver, procured the services of a representative who scoured camps and hospitals in search of information about the missing soldier. Oliver Jr. had fallen at Cold Harbor, but a survey of all field hospitals, an inquiry to the Confederate commissioner of prisons, a query to the Union prison at Camp Lookout, and interviews with men from his company all proved fruitless. “I will still endeavor to learn the exact fate of your son,” P. Hunter promised. At last, through a friend, the father learned of his son's death in a farmhouse close to the field and secured details about the location of his grave under a nearby apple tree. The boy's consoling last words were “tell my father I died like a Middleton.” Oliver Sr. immediately began to make arrangements to bring the body home.
²⁷

In northern cities entrepreneurs also established themselves as agents who would seek missing soldiers for a fee. An enterprise on Bleecker Street in New York City, for example, called itself the “U.S. Army Agency” and advertised in
Harper's Weekly
in 1864 for “legal heirs seeking information as to whereabouts of Soldiers killed or wounded in Battle.” In return for their efforts in locating men, they would claim a share of the deceased's back pay or the widow's pension—thus the appeal to “legal heirs.”
²⁸

Missing information about soldiers' deaths often had practical as well as emotional significance. In the South claims for back pay, as well as for the Confederate funeral allowance—$45 for an officer and $10 for an enlisted man—had to be accompanied by proof of death. Military record keeping was so imperfect that, as the superintendent of claims for Alabama put it, “frequently the fact and date of death cannot be ascertained” because “repeated orders of the Adjutant and Inspector General have not been fully appreciated and complied with.” Most often a “final statement” procured from the company commander of the deceased soldier had to substitute for absent documentation. In the North, passage of an 1862 act providing pensions for widows as well as dependent sisters and mothers of dead soldiers made similar evidence necessary for those wishing to claim these benefits. Securing required documentation was no easy task, and families with the means often turned to agents who proffered themselves as experts in negotiating the Union or Confederate army bureaucracies.
²⁹

Even when information was accurate and available—through newspaper casualty lists or the offices of a charitable organization or from a paid agent—it was often not delivered until long after the event. Weeks or months of waiting were common. In South Carolina, for example, the first casualty lists from the Wilderness appeared in the newspapers ten days after the battle. No wonder a Confederate officer took advantage of rank and privilege—and the fortuitous residence of his family near a telegraph line—to send a telegram home after every engagement reporting simply, “I am well.”
³⁰

“I am well.” Telegram from William Drayton Rutherford to Sallie Fair Rutherford, July 6, 1862. South Caroliniana Library.

His decision to take the matter of providing information into his own hands typified the behavior of many Civil War participants, who devised a variety of means to ensure that their fate would be reported. Although no official identification badges were issued by either army, soldiers, aided in some cases by enterprising civilians, devised their own precursors to the dog tag. A Union burial party working late on the night of July 4, 1863, to inter the Gettysburg dead came across the body of a boy of about nineteen. In his pocket they found “a small silver shield with his name, company, and regiment engraved upon it.” They copied the information onto a wooden headboard for his grave and forwarded the shield to his father. Soldiers in the Union army could purchase badges from sutlers in the field or from a variety of establishments on the home front that advertised regularly in the press. The badges seem to have been far less commercially available in the South, but Confederate soldiers invented their own substitutes. A pocket Bible inscribed with name and address and even instructions about notification of kin served quite effectively. Many Union soldiers adopted such informal methods as well. Josiah Murphey of Nantucket made sure always to have a used envelope addressed to him “somewhere about me so that if killed in battle my friends might know what became of me.”
³¹

Advertisement for soldiers' identification badges.
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
September 10, 1864
.

Stories have become legendary of soldiers scribbling their names on bits of paper and pinning them to their uniforms before engagements they expected to be especially bloody—such as Meade's planned attack on Lee's field fortifications at Mine Run in 1863 or Grant's suicidal assault at Cold Harbor the next year. After Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was shot at Antietam and taken to a field hospital in a nearby house, he was afraid he would faint or die and be left nameless, so he wrote on a slip of paper, “I am Capt. O. W. Holmes 20th Mass. V Son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D. Boston.” Holmes recovered and kept the paper for the rest of his life. These soldiers' terror that their identities would be obliterated expressed itself with a grim and almost dispassionate practicality. They confronted the enormity of death with ingenious attempts to control at least one of its particulars. If a soldier could not save his life, he hoped at least to preserve his name.
³²

“I am Capt O W Holmes, 20th Mass V, Son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, MD, Boston.” “I wrote the above when I was lying in a little house on the field of Antietam which was for a while within the enemy's lines, as I thought I might faint & so be unable to tell who I was.” Note written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Harvard Law School Library.

Soldiers had many allies among the civilian population in their effort to maintain their identities and to provide for notification of kin. Katherine Wormeley, serving on a Union hospital ship during the Peninsula Campaign, used the same method as the fatalistic soldiers. “So many nameless men come down to us, speechless and dying,” she wrote, “that now we write the names and regiments of the bad cases and fasten them to their clothing, so that if they are speechless when they reach other hands, they may not die like dogs.” To die without an identity seemed to Wormeley equivalent to surrendering one's humanity, becoming no more than an animal. Nursing pioneer Clara Barton kept a series of small—one imagines pocket—notebooks into which she entered information about the families of dying soldiers so that when time permitted she could write to the survivors. The diary of T. J. Weatherly, a South Carolina physician who attended Confederate troops in Virginia, served a similar purpose. “Columbus Stephenson, Bethany Church, Iredell County, NoCa,” he noted on a torn and undated page, “to be written to about the death &c of Lt. Thomas W. Stephens[on].”