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19. Clara Barton, Lecture Notes [1866], Clara Barton Papers, LC.
20. Elmer Ruan Coates, “Be My Mother Till I Die” (Philadelphia: A. W. Auner, n.d.), Wolf 115; “Bless the Lips That Kissed Our Darling: Answer to: Let Me Kiss Him for His Mother” (Philadelphia: Auner, n.d.); J. A. C. O’Connor, “Bless the Lips That Kissed Our Darling” (New York: H. De Marsan, n.d.), Wolf 115. See also George Cooper, “Mother Kissed Me in My Dream” (Philadelphia: J. H. Johnson, n.d.), Wolf 1468. All these song sheets are in the American Song Sheet Collection, LCP.
21. William J. Bacon, Memorial of William Kirkland Bacon: Late Adjutant of the Twenty-sixth Regiment of New York State Volunteers (Utica, N.Y.: Roberts Printer, 1863), p. 50.
22. On condolence letters, see Michael Barton, “Painful Duties: Art, Character, and Culture in Confederate Letters of Condolence,” Southern Quarterly 17 (1979): 123–34; and Barton, Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), pp. 57–62. See also William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Janet Gurlin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982). For contemporary guidebooks for letter writers, see The American Letter-Writer and Mirror of Polite Behavior (Philadelphia: Fisher & Brother, 1851), and A New Letter-Writer, for the Use of Gentlemen (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1860). For an acknowledgment of the ritual of the condolence letter in Civil War popular culture, see the Daily South Carolinian, February 26, 1864; see also June 22, 1864, and the song by E. Bowers, “Write a Letter to My Mother!” (Philadelphia: n.p., [1860s]), Wolf 2677, LCP.
23. Williamson D. Ward diary quoted in Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves, “Seeing the Elephant”: Raw Recruits at Shiloh (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 98; Minutes, July 1864–June 1865, Confederate States Christian Association for the Relief of Prisoners (Fort Delaware), Francis Atherton Boyle Books, 1555 SHC.
24. W. J. O’Daniel to Mrs. [Sarah A.] Torrence, quoted in Haskell Monroe, ed., “The Road to Gettysburg: The Diary and Letters of Leonidas Torrence of the Gaston Guards,” North Carolina Historical Review 36 (October 1959): 515; William Fields to Mrs. Fitzpatrick, June 8, 1865, Maria Clopton Papers, Medical and Hospital Collection, ESBL; I. G. Patten to Mrs. Cadenhead, August 5, 1864, in I. B. Cadenhead, “Some Letters of I. B. Cadenhead,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 18 (1956): 569; Henry E. Handerson, Yankee in Gray: The Civil War Memoirs of Henry E. Handerson with a Selection of His Wartime Letters (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1962), p. 62.
25. William Fields to Mrs. Fitzpatrick, June 8, 1865, Maria Clopton Papers, Medical and Hospital Collection, ESBL; Clara Barton, Manuscript Journal, 1863, Clara Barton Papers, LC. See also Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 94, 148; “Our Army Hospitals,” unidentified and undated newspaper clippings, Louis C. Madeira Civil War Scrapbooks, vol. A, pp. 111–26, LCP. For an example of a nurse cueing a soldier to leave a message for his wife, see William H. Davidson, ed., War Was the Place: A Centennial Collection of Confederate Soldier Letters (Chattahoochie Valley Historical Society, Bulletin no. 5 [November 1961]): 115. On the important role of hospital personnel in a Good Death, see Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 131; Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 29; Corby, Memoirs of Chaplain Life, p. 93. See also Jestin Hampton to Thomas B. Hampton, January 25, 1863, Thomas B. Hampton Papers, CAH;