This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [44]
During a six-month period in 1864 the Chattanooga office handled thirty-four requests for disinterments, chiefly though not exclusively the bodies of officers. In October Mary Brayton, a Sanitary Commission worker in Cleveland, wrote in search of Henry Diebolt of Company A, 27th Ohio, who had been killed May 28 in Dallas, Georgia. “The grave is about 11/2 miles from Dallas near the cemetery & has a headboard properly marked,” she explained. “Metallic case preferred. Forward soon as possible.” The family of George Moore of Illinois had more specific and personal requests. “Have the undertaker secure a lock of his hair as a memento,” the commission agent wrote. “Let his face be uncovered, and inform us when the body is shipped.”39
When armies moved operations, commission agents often made records of camp graveyards so that soldiers’ bodies might at some future point be reclaimed. Orange Judd gathered details of burials when the Union army undertook a “change of base” from Belle Plain, Virginia, in May 1864, and he assembled them into an elaborate map. The graves had been marked with headboards made of cracker boxes and inscribed with penciled names, but Judd feared these might easily be “obliterated by storm or by the enemy” if the ground changed hands. His effort, he hoped, would “enable friends to find the bodies indicated.” He outlined twenty-six graves, mostly with names and regiments attached. Six bodies remained unknown, but he offered descriptions that he thought might prove useful. “About 23; Black hair, Intelligent Countenance, Buried May 15.” In nearby Port Royal commission records of another cemetery mapped twenty-three graves, including three plots occupied by soldiers who had arrived in ambulances “with their pockets cut off and all records gone.” They had been robbed of both their possessions and their identities while they lay on the field. With the departure of Union troops from the vicinity imminent, the commission agent reported, “the graves were put under the guard of george Smith A colored man who lives just south of the ground & who will do all he is allowed to do to keep them in order.”40
The resources of the Sanitary Commission stretched only so far, however. For the most part the bereaved were forced to rely upon themselves and upon the emerging network of embalmers, undertakers, and private “agents,” who followed the armies, finding work and profit for themselves in assisting grieving families who had little idea of how to find or retrieve their lost husbands, brothers, and sons. Undertaker W. R. Cornelius, who worked regularly with the Sanitary Commission in Tennessee, also offered his services to families directly. He reported that he “shipped colonels, majors, captains and privates by the carload some days,” sending them both to the Union and to the Confederacy. Sometimes families procured friends to locate missing loved ones and arrange for the return of bodies; sometimes they set off themselves, often arriving at the battlefield unsure whether they had come to nurse a wounded man or to transport his body home.41
In March 1863 Henry Bowditch left Boston by train as soon as he received a telegram reporting that his son Nathaniel had been wounded. “dangerous. come at once,” a cousin and fellow soldier had wired. “It was like a dagger in my heart when I first heard the horrible news,” the father wrote. But in the course of the trip Bowditch grew hopeful and “bought books and papers calculated to amuse a wounded man.” When he descended onto the platform