This Republic of Suffering (19 page)

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.
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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.
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“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.
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“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 captivity. Civil War prisons were indeed, as one inmate observed, “the closest existence to a hell on earth.”
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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.
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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.

The commitment to individual rights that emerged as such an important principle of the northern cause made attention to particular soldiers' fates and identities inescapable; honoring the dead became inseparable from respecting the living. But the strongest impetus for these changes was the anguish of wives, parents, siblings, and children who found undocumented, unconfirmed, and unrecognized loss intolerable. The Civil War took place in a newly and self-consciously humanitarian age. “The world is more easily moved by the spectacle of human misery than it ever has been,” wrote a northern relief worker, explaining why “the Christian public either in this or any other country” would not allow soldiers to suffer as they had “in all previous wars.” This was an age in which family ties were celebrated and sentimentalized, an age that believed, moreover, that it possessed the agency and responsibility, as well as the scientific expertise, to mitigate suffering.
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