This Republic of Suffering [104]
As he contemplated his assignment, Whitman concluded that “a knowledge and a record of every grave” must be “in the possession of some living person.” Like Clara Barton, he sought surviving witnesses who alone had the information necessary to enable him to locate and identify the dead. Whitman composed a circular entitled “Important Information Wanted,” addressed to “Surgeons, Chaplains, Agents of Sanitary and Christian Commissions, Quartermasters, Officers or Soldiers,” and forwarded it to three hundred newspapers and periodicals for publication. Announcing that the United States Quartermaster General had ordered the preparation of a “record…of all Union soldiers who have been buried in the Rebel States,” Whitman requested assistance in locating the fallen. Whitman later reflected, after completion of the assignment, how important this circular had proved not simply in generating information but in engaging the broader public. His communication, he judged, had proved critical in creating a “sympathetic chord” and had “exerted an influence in the creation of the public sentiment which justified and sustained the subsequent measures adopted.”12
The circular provoked an outpouring of responses. Relatives begged Whitman to find the remains of lost kin; other correspondents furnished “drawings and descriptions” indicating the exact spot where a friend or comrade had been buried. Often, Whitman reported, these proved “so minute and accurate in the details, that any person could proceed with unerring certainty to the very grave.” A letter from A. T. Blackmun, for example, explained that his brother had been buried in a cemetery five miles east of Vicksburg, in an orchard near the railroad. “The grave is under & to the South side of the fourth apple tree, in the third row of trees, counting from the side nearest Vicksburg.” Pencil marks on Blackmun’s letter indicate that these detailed directions served their purpose and that his brother was indeed found. Isaac Weightman of the 29th Pennsylvania, killed in battle in Georgia, was buried “on the left side of the Railroad going towards Atlanta about a mile off along a small creek near the Breastworks of the rebels…by a big tree,” reported a letter written by a neighbor on his mother’s behalf. A fellow soldier had sent the bereaved woman information about her son’s death and burial, but she had not been able to visit or reclaim his body. A piece of cracker box inscribed with lead pencil marked his grave; his body was buried in only his trousers. “Any information will be a great solace to his mother who has given three (3) sons and (3) sons in law to the armies of our country.”13
Chaplains wrote to Whitman with complete lists of regimental dead and their places of burial. One clergyman who had returned home to New Bedford, Massachusetts, provided documentation for two hundred graves in Tullahoma, Tennessee. Many soldiers seemed to have “whiled away boredom copying names from graves,” lists that they eagerly forwarded in response to Whitman’s request. Surgeons sent plans of hospital burial grounds with numbered graves and rolls of names. Officers who had been in charge of burial parties on the field had sometimes prepared plots of interments. “In the case of the 46 Ohio Regiment,” Whitman reported, “such a paper, stained and soiled at the time of burial,” would lead “to the identification after the lapse of more than 4 years of the entire group of dead