This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [124]
Other southern initiatives extended beyond individual states and addressed explicitly sectionalist purposes. The newly formed Southern Historical Society, established in 1869 and committed to “vindicate the truth” of Confederate history, sought to provide an accurate count of southern losses. In 1869 its secretary, the distinguished physician Joseph Jones, shared his estimate of casualties with the former Confederate adjutant general Samuel Cooper. Jones believed that one-third of all men actively engaged on the southern side had died in the conflict. Cooper affirmed that these numbers were “nearly…correct” but believed that a fuller search of Confederate records now in the hands of the federal government would provide greater detail and accuracy. For both Cooper and Jones, establishing the totals of troops North and South and documenting the extensive Confederate losses promised to provide an explanation—and justification—for the defeat as well as irrefutable evidence of the Confederate soldier’s “resolution, unsurpassed bravery and skill.”17
Private citizens in the North also set to counting wartime casualties and deaths. Frederick Phisterer, a German immigrant who had received the Medal of Honor for heroism at Stones River in 1862, published a Statistical Record of the Armies of the United States in 1883 as a supplement to Scribner’s popular series of thirteen volumes entitled Campaigns of the Civil War. Phisterer’s work included chapters on “Losses” and “Officers Deceased While in Service.” William Fox claimed that his monumental Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, published in 1889, offered “full and exhaustive” numbers from both Union and Confederate units. Thomas Livermore, who had served as a major in the New Hampshire volunteers, attempted to amplify and correct Fox’s conclusions in Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, which grew from an essay read before the Military History Society of Massachusetts in 1897 into a book that appeared in 1900. Frederick Dyer undertook an even more comprehensive effort in what became his 1908 Compendium of the War of the Rebellion in 1,796 pages, based, he assured his readers, on “authentic information from all reliable and available sources.” The government’s Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, begun in 1874 and ultimately published in 128 volumes, was, Dyer proclaimed, “woefully deficient,” thus rendering his work imperative. Dyer’s first volume opens with a summary of Union enlistments and losses that lists the number of those killed in action and those dying of wounds, disease, suicide, and even sunstroke. But Dyer perpetuated errors in government data that Fox had corrected nearly two decades earlier.18
Americans North and South, in official capacities and as private citizens, proliferated enumerations of the war dead but remained far from establishing a definitive count. The specificity, rather than the accuracy, of these totals attracted Americans seeking consolation in the comprehensive and comprehensible character of numbers. A figure might begin to grasp the entirety of so many dead and communicate the enormity of war’s toll.
Yet even as they counted, Americans speculated about what the numbers they so eagerly amassed actually meant. Joseph Jones counted soldiers and their deaths both to demonstrate southern valor and to explain the defeat of the hopelessly outnumbered Confederacy. Regimental commanders counted to tell the story of “how well [their unit had] stood” and to be remembered among those whose losses, and thus whose courage, was greatest. States in