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By Root 7252 0

May 1864. The man had arrived too weak to give any information about himself and would have been quickly forgotten if he had not had in his possession the considerable sum of $360. The surgeon in charge of the hospital arranged to have him photographed after his death, and this likeness was copied by the press at the request of the War Department. The announcements seeking his identity also noted that the dead man had left an ambrotype of a child. Letters from women streamed into Meigs’s office. While some may indeed have been fortune hunters seeking to claim the money, the great majority displayed what seems like such poignant desperation that it is difficult to doubt the sincerity of the wrenching tales they told. Mrs. Jenny McConkey of Illinois appeared to recognize the futility of her hopes when she wrote suggesting the unidentified man might be her son, whom she had last heard from in 1862. The photograph of the little boy was hard to explain, for her son was childless. But, she rationalized, he might have carried the portrait in any case “as he was very fond of children.” A Pennsylvania woman whose husband had last been heard of in the infamous Confederate prison camp at Andersonville described her life as “one constant daze of anxiety” because of her inability to get any information about his fate. Martha Dort wrote explaining that her husband had reportedly been shot while being transferred from one prison to another in 1863, “but that may not be true. Mistakes do often occur.” She was encouraged to hope by the report of the child’s photograph, for her husband had carried an ambrotype of their son, aged three or four, in plaid pants with his hands in his pockets. She enclosed fifty cents for a copy of the photograph. Meigs’s office returned the money, for the picture did not match her description.44

“An Unknown Soldier.” Copied from a deathbed photograph and published in an effort to locate his survivors. Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1868.

The mysterious soldier was never identified; the child in the ambrotype was never provided with the details of his father’s death or with his $360 inheritance. But the unknown man had proved the catalyst for an outpouring of despair from women who represented the many thousands of loved ones left not just without their husbands, brothers, or sons but bereft of the kind of information that might enable them to mourn. It is chilling to recognize the very limited expectations of the many women who wrote to Meigs: the man they all sought to claim as their husband was quite dead; they were no longer looking to find a living person; the most they dared hope was for relief from the incapacitating uncertainty that controlled their lives. A professor at Gettysburg College who aided many civilians searching for kin after the battle there perceptively described “aching hearts in which the dread void of uncertainty still remained unsatisfied by positive knowledge.” It was in some sense information as much as individuals that was “missing” in Civil War America. Those who had long since given up on reclaiming lost loved ones alive still sought eagerly for details of their lives, deaths, and burials.

Henry Clay Taylor. Photographed on his twenty-fifth birthday. Wisconsin Historical Society.

J. M. Taylor of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, was as assiduous and tenacious as Fanny Scott in search of information about his son, who was captured at Chickamauga in September 1863. Initially confined in Richmond’s Libby Prison, twenty-five-year-old Henry Taylor managed to communicate with his parents by concealing miniature letters in buttons smuggled to the North. Early hopes for his return dimmed, for prisoner exchanges had been suspended, and Henry was transferred south. Months of confinement and scanty prison fare took their toll, and he fell sick with diarrhea and consumption. By summer 1864 his parents learned he had entered a military hospital in Charleston. The irregular news they had received since his capture now almost ceased, until in October a fellow Union prisoner wrote from South