This Republic of Suffering [60]
Your son, Corporal Frank H. Irwin, was wounded near Fort Fisher, Virginia, March the 25, 1865…He died the first of May…Frank…had everything requisite in surgical treatment, nursing &c…He was so good and well-behaved…At…times he would fancy himself talking…to children or such like, his relatives I suppose, and giving them good advice…He was perfectly willing to die…and was perfectly resign’d…I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good.
Irwin’s behavior in dying, Whitman concluded, “could not be surpass’d. And now like many other noble and good men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life…in her service.” This was, Whitman assured the grieving mother, a prepared death, a willing death, a patriotic death—certainly a Good Death. And even though Whitman was himself not in any sense an orthodox Christian believer, he closed his letter by offering Frank Irwin’s family a carefully worded consolation of faith: “there is a text, ‘God doeth all things well’—the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul.”35
“Ward K at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C.,” one of the hospitals Walt Whitman visited regularly. Library of Congress.
In his poem “Come Up from the Fields Father,” Whitman imagined the family that received a letter like those he wrote. In Ohio’s “vital and beautiful” fall, “all prospers well.” Apples and grapes ripen; the wheat is ready for cutting. But amid this harvest of life, news arrives of war’s harvest of death. A letter comes to the farm’s family, written not by their son Pete but in another’s hand. It reports his gunshot wound but does not yet communicate the more terrible truth that “he is dead already” by the time the letter arrives. It is a letter that will destroy the mother, as a rifle has already destroyed the son.36
John O’Neal, a Gettysburg physician, did not send letters to bereaved families, but he kept a record of the names and locations of Confederate graves he encountered as he traveled about the county visiting patients. These were men already dead, well past O’Neal’s medical ministrations, but he felt nevertheless a sense of obligation that led him to document their often hasty interments in hope of someday transmitting the information to family or friends. Into his journal, scribbled in a little bound volume entitled “The Physician’s Handbook of Practice,” he entered, alongside patients’ names and ailments, lists of dead Confederates, their companies, regiments, and gravesites: “2nd Corps Ground, Back of Schwartz Barn No 1 Crew J. Co. K 8 Fla No 2 Farmer N, Co G. 7 N.C. Died July 26.”37
Individuals did not just wait for letters or published casualty lists to obtain news about the dead and wounded; they also made use of the press to request information or to share information they had been able to acquire. In both North and South civilians took out personal advertisements to announce the condition of prisoners and the fate of the missing. These notices were used to communicate across the divide of Civil War—to provide southerners with news from the North and vice versa. In 1864, for example, a Richmond paper published a notice placed by Union general Benjamin Butler. Directed to the attention of a Confederate naval surgeon, Butler’s advertisement reported that his son and a friend were alive and had been taken prisoner at the end of June. “They are both well and at [the Union prisoner of war camp at] Point Lookout. I have taken leave to write this note to relieve your anxiety.” He had spoken to the young prisoner, he continued, “in a personal interview.” Butler and the Confederate surgeon had almost certainly been acquainted before the war, and ties of friendship and humanitarianism