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Carolina that Henry could not recover. “I think it due you that you know the facts,” the soldier explained. Taylor received the letter through the lines nine days later. “It makes a child of me,” the father reported. He began a series of frantic inquiries, seeking to end the “painful suspense” with information from escaped and paroled prisoners and from military officials both North and South. In mid-November Taylor learned of two Union officers who were reported to have said they buried Henry. Now, assuming him dead, Taylor continued to write in pursuit of details: “Please bear in mind that the most trivial circumstances in regard to the last moments [and] death of our loved one will be of much interest to us.” On December 27 Taylor received a letter from another former prisoner confirming that Henry had died at Charleston on October 3. But this was not the kind of official notification that would satisfy Taylor’s longing to know everything possible about Henry’s last days. Nor would it enable Taylor to, as he put it “settle my son’s ac[counts] with the government.” He continued to write to secure such evidence and to locate Henry’s effects, “which will be preserved as relicks.” Taylor was particularly concerned about the return of a twenty-five-dollar gold piece he had sent Henry just before his death and about remuneration for Henry’s “servant…a negro by the name of Sam,” who, Henry had reported in 1863, “thinks as much of me as any dog does of his master.” As soon as Charleston fell into Union hands, Taylor began efforts to bring Henry’s body home.45

“Libby Prison, Richmond Virginia, April 1865.” Library of Congress.

Henry Taylor was one of the estimated 9 percent of Civil War dead who expired in prison camps. Like Henry, most of these men died in the years after the North’s suspension of regular prisoner exchanges in mid-1863 in response to Confederate mistreatment of captured black soldiers. The North’s numerical superiority made exchanges disadvantageous in what was fast evolving into a war of attrition, but Yankees and Confederates alike suffered in the harsh conditions that accompanied the rapid expansion of prison populations. Neither side had anticipated the need to hold so many men in captivity, and neither side had made adequate provision for supplying food, shelter, or medical care. In the course of the war 194,743 Union soldiers and 215,865 Confederates were held prisoner, and 30,218 northerners and 25,976 southerners died in captivity. Civil War prisons were indeed, as one inmate observed, “the closest existence to a hell on earth.”46

In April 1895 J. M. Taylor received an answer to a letter he had recently sent one of Henry’s old comrades. The veteran, who noted he was now gray-haired, confessed he could not recall enough about the layout of the Charleston hospital to answer Taylor’s very specific inquiry about the circumstances of Henry’s last days: “Maybe that some of the other boys may remember more about it.” Thirty years might have led the soldier to put the war out of his mind, but the father could not. The consoling “facts” were still missing.47

Four years of Civil War propelled a remarkable shift in attitudes and behavior toward accounting for the dead. Military procedures themselves began to reflect this transformation, and in July 1864 the U.S. Congress passed an act that established a new organizational principle for handling casualties. This measure for the first time designated a special graves registration unit rather than, as had heretofore been the case, assuming that soldiers could simply be detailed from the line to carry out burial duties. When Confederate general Jubal Early attacked Fort Stevens near Washington, D.C., in 1864, this new unit, under Assistant Quartermaster James Moore, succeeded in identifying every Union body and recording every grave. But during the final operations of the war, men were not spared to serve in registration units, and the effort was abandoned. It represented nevertheless a new departure and, together with the establishment of the beginnings of