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Lists frequently included statements acknowledging the inadequacy of their information. As a Confederate newspaper stated in 1863, “Of Company I, 38 men were lost in action. 31 of these are accounted for as prisoners. The remaining seven,” the article conjectured, “must have been killed.” Sons or brothers listed as “slightly wounded” often turned out to be dead, and husbands reported as “killed in action” later appeared unharmed. “I have known so many instances where families have been held in agonised suspense for days by the report of relatives being dangerously wounded when they were not,” one Confederate wrote to an anxious mother in South Carolina. Mathew Jack Davis of the 19th Mississippi kept his family in suspense for four years. “I had been reported killed on the day I was captured,” he related. “I read my own obituary.” Joseph Willett of New York hastened to reassure his sister after the Battle of the Wilderness, “You may have heard before you read this that I was killed or wounded but allow me to contradict the report.” Journalist Henry Raymond, founder of the New York Times, rushed to Virginia in 1863 in response to news of his brother’s death. He engaged an embalmer but could not locate the body, so he went to army headquarters to inquire. Instead of answering his query, an aide produced his brother, quite alive and well. Yankee private Henry Struble was not only listed as a casualty after Antietam but assigned a grave after his canteen was found in the hands of a dead man he had stopped to help. After the war ended, Struble sent flowers every Memorial Day to decorate his own grave, to honor the unknown soldier it sheltered and perhaps to acknowledge that there but for God’s grace he might lie. Recipients of bad news repeated and cherished such narratives, hoping that a different story with a happier ending might emerge, and denying as long as possible the reality and finality of death.8

More reliable and certainly more consoling than casualty lists were the personal letters that custom required a dead soldier’s closest friends and immediate military superiors to write to his relatives. But months often passed before soldiers in the field found time, circumstance, or strength to write. These communications were, moreover, dependent upon the vicissitudes of the postal service, which, in the Confederacy, grew increasingly unreliable. Southerners complained that by 1864 so many of the postal clerks in Richmond had been conscripted into the army that the mail between the Virginia theater and the home front had entirely broken down.9

Voluntary organizations worked to fill the void left by the failure of military and governmental officials to provide information to families. In the North both the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission, the two most significant Union-wide charitable efforts to grow out of the war, came to regard communication with families as central to their efforts. The Christian Commission proclaimed its commitment in words printed at the top of each page of the stationery it distributed to soldiers at the front: “The U.S. Christian Commission send this sheet as a messenger between the soldier and his home. Let it hasten to those who wait for tidings.” In just three months during the spring of 1864 the commission reported that it had supplied 24,000 quires of paper and envelopes to the Army of the Potomac, and in the days after large battles it transported hundreds of letters from military hospitals and camps to nearby post offices. After Sherman’s army reached Savannah in December 1864, the commission delegates who had been following his troops rented rooms and installed fifty writing desks, where soldiers produced three hundred letters a day.10

In cases of soldiers’ grave illness or death, commission delegates—the unpaid volunteers upon whom the work of the organization rested—wrote in their behalf, composing letters “for soldiers still lingering” or “to carry ‘last