This Republic of Suffering [57]
Please reply soon as I am so much worried in my mind “Mrs Biddy Higgins alias Hayes”23
Bowne determined he would “try to do what I can for Mrs Biddy Higgins as I think she has been hard dealt by.” But within a week of her letter, she appeared in person at the directory office to report that she had received a letter from her husband with money and a daguerreotype and that she expected him home on furlough in a few days. “So Biddy is all right,” a directory official scribbled on her file. She was among the lucky ones.24
Ultimately the commission estimated it successfully answered 70 percent of requests for information. Although its war-end report acknowledged that this service had differed “essentially” from anything the commission had originally expected to do, it “was the work, perhaps of all others, the…most gratifying of any undertaken by the Commission.” Even as they amassed their dispassionate statistics and implemented comforting bureaucratic order and discipline in their efforts to name the dead, the Sanitarians became humanitarians and sentimentalists in spite of themselves.25
The Confederacy, lagging behind the North in both men and matériel, also faced greater shortages of information. The South had not experienced the same explosion of voluntary associations that had characterized the North in the prewar years and never developed centralized wartime charitable organizations like the Sanitary and Christian commissions. But Confederates also sought means to systematize the collection of information about casualties and ways to make that intelligence available to kin. The Louisiana Soldiers’ Relief Association, for example, promised to provide information to “friends at home” about any Louisiana recruit serving in Virginia, and the Central Association and the South Carolina Relief Depot endeavored to gather information for South Carolinians. Southern religious newspapers often printed “Soldiers’ Guides,” gathered from hospital censuses, listing news and location of the killed and wounded.26
Less philanthropically inclined individuals also sought to meet the demand for information. Across Virginia a number of southerners worked the battlegrounds offering themselves as paid agents to Confederate families in search of information. In the spring of 1864 the eighteen-year-old son of South Carolina’s prominent Middleton family disappeared in Virginia. His father, Oliver, procured the services of a representative who scoured camps and hospitals in search of information about the missing soldier. Oliver Jr. had fallen at Cold Harbor, but a survey of all field hospitals, an inquiry to the Confederate commissioner of prisons, a query to the Union prison at Camp Lookout, and interviews with men from his company all proved fruitless. “I will still endeavor to learn the exact fate of your son,” P. Hunter promised. At last, through a friend, the father learned of his son’s death in a farmhouse close to the field and secured details about the location of his grave under a nearby apple tree. The boy’s consoling last words were “tell my father I died like a Middleton.” Oliver Sr. immediately began to make arrangements to bring the body home.27
In northern cities entrepreneurs also established themselves as agents who would seek missing soldiers for a fee. An enterprise on Bleecker Street in New York City, for example, called itself the “U.S. Army Agency” and advertised in Harper’s Weekly in 1864 for “legal heirs seeking information as to whereabouts of Soldiers killed or wounded in Battle.” In return for their efforts in locating men, they would claim a share of the deceased’s back pay or the widow’s pension—thus the appeal to “legal heirs.”28
Missing information about soldiers’ deaths often had practical as well as emotional significance. In the South claims for back pay, as well as for the Confederate funeral allowance—$45 for an officer and $10 for an enlisted man—had to be accompanied by proof of death. Military record keeping was so imperfect that, as the superintendent