This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [121]
The military’s purposes in counting the dead had also influenced the reliability of military records. Casualty lists were not compiled because of concern about accounting for the individual lives lost, as the absence of any formal procedure for notifying kin made apparent. Counting the dead had been largely an issue of assessing military resources, of seeing who was left alive to fight. A commander needed to know his military strength. Union general George McClellan had been famously obsessed with both his own numbers and those of his enemy, consistently overestimating the number of Confederates arrayed against him by two-or threefold and essentially incapacitating himself through this statistical fixation. For William Tecumseh Sherman, a man of action and decision rather than crippling reflection, numbers became a language in which to express and assess battle’s challenges and achievements. In his postwar memoirs he accompanied his description of each engagement with a summary of losses presented in the form that the War Department had prescribed for casualty reports. After his discussion of the Battle of Atlanta, for example, Sherman filled several pages with detailed numbers of losses and concluded, “I have no doubt that the Southern officers flattered themselves that they had killed and crippled of us two and even six to one…but they were simply mistaken, and I herewith submit official tabular statements made up from the archives of the War Department, in proof thereof.” For Sherman, as literary scholar James Dawes has observed, counting represented “the epistemology of war.” He could best understand the war and explain his military virtuosity by translating his experience into numbers of dead.5
But if a general needed to know his own strength, so too he hoped to conceal it from the enemy, and these tactical misrepresentations could distort the permanent historical record. In May 1863 General Robert E. Lee had issued a general order criticizing prevailing custom in reporting casualties for encouraging “our enemies, by giving false impressions as to the extent of our losses.” Inflated estimates and a tendency to report minor wounds as casualties, he believed, had resulted from commanders’ pride in losses as “an indication of the service performed or perils encountered.” After Gettysburg Lee himself pursued quite a different strategy but one equally inimical to the accurate reporting of losses: he seems to have quite systematically and intentionally undercounted his casualties in order to conceal the battle’s devastating impact on his army.6
After the war, as the immediacy of death receded, the pride in sacrifice that Lee had identified as a source of dangerously inflated numbers grew even stronger. “Claims to gallant conduct,” William Fox complained, “are very apt to be based upon the size of the casualty list.” Regiments competed for having sustained the greatest losses and thus, by implication, for having exhibited the greatest valor. Fox found that “there have been too many careless, extravagant statements made regarding losses in action. Officers have claimed losses for their regiments, which are sadly at variance with the records which they certified as correct at the close of the war.” In this postwar battle for glory, deaths became a measure not of defeat but of victory.7
The effort to compile definitive death statistics became a preoccupation in the years after Appomattox. But as with the reinterment movement, Yankees and Confederates possessed very different resources to direct to the task. Northerners would employ the expanding bureaucracy of the triumphant nation-state not just to rebury the dead but to count them. The census of interments requested by the quartermaster general at the end of the war made its contribution, ultimately resulting, as we have seen, in the reburial movement and in the twenty-seven installments of the Roll of Honor, which in their enumerations of graves provided one approximation of the totals of Union dead. Military officials had also ordered that before disbanding