This Republic of Suffering [53]
“The United States Christian Commission Office at 8th and H Streets, Washington, D.C., 1865.” Library of Congress.
In 1864 the commission organized the Individual Relief Department, designed to respond to inquiries about the fate of individual soldiers. “To answer these letters often involved a long and difficult search, first at the regiment, then at the field hospital, then in the post hospital or camp,” Reverend Lemuel Moss, home secretary of the commission, remembered in 1868. But often the information could indeed be found. Anna H., “a little girl,” wrote the commission seeking her father because her mother was “almost crazy” with the anxiety of having heard nothing for four weeks. “This is the third letter we have sent off,” she reported, as she begged “for any one to send us back an answer whether my dear father is dead or alive…If we cannot pay you, the Lord will. Do please be so kind, and answer this letter.” The commission sadly informed her that her father was already buried.12
As part of its effort to collect information more systematically, the commission distributed printed notebooks to enable delegates in the field to keep records of the soldiers whom they assisted, information that could easily be passed along to the central Relief Department. A Christian Commission Death Register from Virginia in 1864 provided columns for names, units, dates of death, and “particulars” and “remarks” that usually included an assessment of the deceased’s religious state, as well as details about the disposition of his body. Part of the impetus for the commission’s desire to communicate with families was to provide, where possible, the reassurance that many of these soldiers had indeed died Good Deaths, with the commission delegate often having served as evangelist as well as surrogate kin and record keeper. S. B. Smith appeared in the register as “a chris[tian] and ready to die,” but Samuel Green’s religious condition was “unknown” and George Ewing was decidedly “not a Christian.” One soldier’s family would not be notified because “address of relatives not discoverable” the dying man could only “shake or nod in negative or affirmative response to a question.” Joseph Kramer’s “friends [were] unknown,” so in his case as well there was “no letter written.” George Besse “seemed like a good boy, spoke tenderly of his friends, expressed some religious feeling and seemed to welcome the offer to pray with him and in several instances he joined with apparent fervor…He had by his pillow the likeness of mother and sister.” The commission delegate recorded with evident gratification this example of dying well. Marcus Flambury affirmed “In God I trust” after a half hour conversing with a commission delegate, who surely reported this encouraging indication of salvation to Flambury’s family. But another soldier, troubled and deeply troubling, was past all help—in this world and the next: he appeared in the register as “Self suicide” after he shot himself. Early entries in the register listed gravesites in a hospital cemetery by row and number; later entries became more schematic, as they began to report battlefield rather than hospital deaths and to describe