This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [125]
Americans counted in order to define the emerging notion of the Civil War Dead as a describable and shared national loss that transcended individual bereavements. They counted to establish the dimensions of the war’s sacrifice and the price of freedom and national unity. They counted because numbers offered an illusion of certitude and control in the aftermath of a conflict that had transformed the apparent limits of human brutality. They counted, too, because there were just so many bodies to count. Numbers seemed the only way to capture what was most dramatically new about this war: the very size of the cataclysm and its human cost.
But as numbers solved some problems of understanding, so they presented others. William Fox worried that the sheer magnitude of the war’s death toll rendered it incomprehensible. “As the numbers become great,” he wrote, “they convey no different idea, whether they be doubled or trebled.” His proffered solution was to reduce the numbers to what he regarded as a more human scale, by considering casualties on the level of the regiment. “It has a well known limit of size, and its losses are intelligible.” Fox urged his readers not to “grow impatient at these statistics.” The numbers, he assured them, were not “like ordinary figures” but instead were “statistics every unit of which stands for the pale, upturned face of a dead soldier.” These were not cold abstractions but numbers that literally, he argued, possessed a human face.20
The muster roll that served as the source for his statistical analysis was an aggregation, but its lists, Fox found, offered far more than just numbers. Its brief entries invoked “sad pictures” of individual deaths and lives. A world lay behind every name. “There are no war stories that can equal the story of the muster-out roll,” he insisted:
“Killed, May 3, 1863 at Marye’s Heights;” and the compiler lays down his pencil to dream again of that fierce charge which swept upward over the sloping fields of Fredericksburg.
“Wounded and missing, May 6, 1864, at the Wilderness,” suggests a nameless grave marked, if at all, by a Government head-stone bearing the short, sad epitaph, “Unknown.”
“Killed at Malvern Hill, July 1, 1862;” and there rises a picture of an artilleryman lying dead at the wheels of his gun…
“Died of fever at Young’s Point, Miss.,” reminds one of the campaigns in the bayous and poisonous swamps, with the men falling in scores before a foe more deadly and remorseless than the bullet.21
Fox offered his readers some of the most “curious” of his discoveries from the rolls, demonstrating the startling variety of ways soldiers managed to die: Lorenzo Brown of the 112th Illinois, “kicked to death by a mule” J. A. Benedict, Fifth New York Cavalry, “died from amputation resulting from the bite of a man on his thumb” Jacob Thomas of the 38th Ohio, “killed…by the falling of a tree” A. Lohman of the Eighth New York, “died of poison while on picket, by drinking from a bottle found at a deserted house.” With this list of curiosities, Fox demonstrated that behind the “full and exhaustive statistics” of Regimental Losses lay the highly particular—and even peculiar—deaths of hundreds of thousands of individual men.22
Fox articulated a dilemma that lay at the heart of the effort to understand Civil War death: how to grasp both the significance of a single death and the meaning of hundreds of thousands. Joseph Stalin would later remark, with both experience and insight, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” A half century earlier Fox made a similar observation. “It is hard,” he wrote, “to realize the meaning of the figures…It is easy to imagine one man killed; or ten men killed; or, perhaps, a score