This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [101]
The war’s work of killing was complete, but the claims of the dead endured. Many soldiers lay unburied, their bones littering battlefields across the South; still more had been hastily interred where they fell, far from family and home; hundreds of thousands remained unidentified, their losses unaccounted for. The end of combat offered an opportunity to attend to the dead in ways war had made impossible. Information could now flow freely across North and South; military officials would have time to augment and scrutinize incomplete casualty records; bodies scattered across the defeated Confederacy could be located and identified; the fallen could be honored without encroaching on the immediate and pressing needs of the living.
Clara Barton eagerly embraced these new possibilities. The necessities of war seemed to her to evolve logically into the demands of peace. Her care for wounded soldiers had always included supplying information to families about the men she treated at the front, and the end of hostilities seemed to bring only an increase in the numbers of letters she received in search of lost husbands and sons. Deeply sympathetic to “the distressed class of sufferers all through our land waiting, fearing, hoping, watching day by day for some little tidings of the loved and lost,” Barton determined to develop a way to relieve what she described as the “intense anxiety…amounting in many instances almost to insanity” of these petitioners.3
In the spring of 1865 she founded the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army to serve as an information clearinghouse. Bypassing the tangled federal bureaucracy, she turned directly to the soldiers themselves for information about their slain or surviving friends. She would publish the names submitted by those in search of kin in hopes of soliciting news about them. As she explained at the top of one printed list: “I appeal to you to give such facts relative to the fate of these men as you may recollect or can ascertain. They have been your comrades on march, picket or raid, or in battle, hospital, or prison; and, falling there, the fact and manner of their death may be known only to you.” Within days of her announcement Barton had received several hundred letters, and communications soon poured in by the thousands to the tiny third-floor room at Seventh and E streets in Washington that served, as its sign announced, as the “Missing Soldiers Office.” Lincoln had endorsed her efforts before his death, and in response to her persistent inquiries, President Andrew Johnson agreed to subsidize the dissemination of her lists. By mid-June she had published the names of 20,000 men; by the time she finally closed the office in 1868, she reported that it had received and answered 68,182 letters and had secured information about 22,000 missing soldiers.4
For the military, war’s end permitted the systematic assessment of losses that the unrelenting pressures of conflict had prohibited. In July 1865 Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered every Union commander to submit a report of “all interments registered during the war.” These records became the basis for the Roll of Honor, lists of names and burial places of “soldiers who died in defence of the American Union” that Meigs would print in twenty-seven installments, constituting eight bound volumes, as officers executed his order over the course of the next six years. But wartime records listed only 101,736 registered burials, fewer than a third of the estimated total of Union fatalities. It was clear that hundreds of thousands of northern soldiers lay in undocumented locations, their remains untended and even unmarked, their deaths unknown to their families as well as to military record keeping.5
Clara Barton, circa 1865. Photograph by Mathew Brady. Clara Barton National Historic Site/National Park Service.
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