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37. O’Neal quoted in Gregory A. Coco, Gettysburg’s Confederate Dead (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 2003), p. 15.
38. Daily South Carolinian, July 21, 1864. These were copied by the Carolinian “from the Richmond papers.” New York Daily News, February 5, 1864, February 4, 1864, January 8, 1864.
39. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “My Hunt After ‘The Captain,’” Atlantic Monthly 10 (December 1862): 764.
40. Robert E. Lee to Joseph Hooker, February 14, 1863; Joseph Hooker to Robert E. Lee, February 16, 1863; Robert E. Lee to Fanny Scott, February 18, 1863; Charles S. Venable to Fanny Scott, April 1, 1863; William Alexander Hammond to Robert E. Lee, March 23, 1863; Thomas M. R. Talcott to Fanny Scott, April 18, 1963; E. A. Hitchcock to Fanny Scott, July 25, 1865, all in Scott Family Papers, VHS. See Mrs. T. B. Hurlbut to Clara Barton, September 26, 1865, Clara Barton Papers, LC, for a description of Confederate general James Longstreet’s comparable aid to a northern woman searching for her son.
41. Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, p. 48; Robert G. Carter, Four Brothers in Blue (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), pp. 324–25.
42. On the unifying power of death, see David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Drew Gilpin Faust, “The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying,” Journal of Southern History 67 (February 2001): 5.
43. Mrs. R. L. Leach to Clara Barton, March 28, 1874, Clara Barton Papers, LC; Gregory Coco, Wasted Valor: The Confederate Dead at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1990), p. 141. Sébastien Japrisot’s novel and the film based on it, A Very Long Engagement, explore this fantasy of a lost soldier found with amnesia in the setting of the First World War.
44. Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs to Surgeon General, September 19, 1868, Office of the Quartermaster General, Consolidated Correspondence File, 1794–1915, Portrait of Unknown Soldier, RG 92, Box 1173, NARA, Mrs. Jenny McConkey to Meigs, November 4, 1868; Ellen Hardback to Meigs, October 26, 1868; Mrs. J. P. Coppersmith to Meigs, November 30, 1868; James M. Truitt to Meigs, November 6, 1868, all ibid. See “An Unknown Soldier,” Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1868, p. 679.
45. Charles H. Morgan to J. M. Taylor, October 2, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Doct. J. F. Walton, October 12, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Lieutenant Colonel W. F. Bennett, October 30, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Captain Vliet, November 17, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Captain R. H. Spencer, November 22, 1864; Captain N. M. Clark to J. M. Taylor, December 27, 1864; J. M. Taylor to Captain H. K. Edwards [December 1864]; J. M. Taylor to L. F. Davis, February 5, 1865; Henry C. Taylor to Alonzo Taylor, August 16, 1863, all in Henry Clay Taylor Papers, WHS.
46. Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1997), p. 16. For statistics, see James M. McPherson, personal communication to the author, December 27, 2006. See also Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers While Prisoners of War in the Hands of Rebel Authorities (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1864); James Canon, Diary, WHS; William Best Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in Psychology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1930); Charles W. Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
47. Bob to J. M. Taylor, April 3, 1895, Henry Clay Taylor Papers, WHS.
48. “The Sanitary Movement in European Armies,” Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1 (April 15, 1864): 354, 353. On this emerging humanitarianism, see more generally David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), and David Brion