This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [122]
Union officer–turned–writer John W. De Forest suggests reason for some skepticism. In his popular 1867 novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, he provided a vivid portrait of the challenges one officer faced in completing the muster rolls at the end of the war. Dulled by “clouds of fever and morphine” and confronted by “a mass of company records,” Captain Edward Colbourne nevertheless struggles to do his assigned duty within the three days allotted before the troops disband. He is, he observes, the only man in his unit who has been present since its origin and thus is the only one with the requisite memory. At the end of a long night of labor, he submits the completed document to others to copy, faints, and is confined to bed for forty-eight hours. One cannot but wonder if William Fox ever read De Forest’s novel or recognized that his own data rested on such contingencies of memory and circumstance.9
Between 1865 and 1870 the War Department acknowledged the deficiencies in its records, issuing reports that presented three different—and ever-increasing—numbers of Union losses. In 1866 the Final Report of the Provost Marshal General to the Secretary of War counted 279,689 dead, but in early 1869 the adjutant general revised that number to 294,416 and then a year later, in response to an inquiry from the surgeon general, reported a total of 303,504. In 1885 Joseph Kirkley, who held the newly established post of statistician of the War Department, offered a further revision, reporting 359,528 Union deaths. A small subsequent adjustment, deriving from new information about deaths in Confederate prisons, added 694 to this sum, yielding what has come to be the most widely accepted count of 360,222.10
These constant revisions resulted in large part from information gradually brought forward by individuals seeking back pay of deceased kin or applying for federal pension and survivors’ benefits, which were established in 1862 and expanded steadily through the rest of the century. The creation of this extensive pension system for Union veterans made systematic and accurate data about military service necessary. The array of muster rolls, strength reports, hospital records, and casualty lists kept during the war did not create a coherent personnel record for any individual soldier and thus left no easily accessible file to support a pension claim. To rectify this situation, the federal government worked to create from the mass of wartime documentation a set of records that would detail the experiences of individual men. These came eventually to be known as the Compiled Military Service Records, and after 1903 they included Confederate as well as Union soldiers. Ultimately nearly thirty million northern and more than six million southern entries—each documenting the appearance of a name on a muster roll, a hospital census, a casualty list, or other official form—were inscribed on index cards and sorted into individual soldiers’ files. The scale of the effort required a small army of clerks, and the literal weight of this history inflicted its own postwar casualties. In 1893 the overcrowding of workers and documents in offices in the ill-fated Ford’s Theatre—the site of Lincoln’s assassination twenty-eight years earlier—caused two floors to collapse and kill twenty-two employees.11
But both public and private efforts to account for the dead preceded and paralleled those specifically related to pension claims. Almost every state in the North and many in the South had endeavored to produce counts and