This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [55]
Dedicated to order and system, the Sanitarians created a bureaucracy to meet the growing demand. Late in 1862 the commission established a Hospital Directory through which it hoped to “supply a greatly needed want” by centralizing information on the name and condition of every soldier admitted to a Union military hospital. On the third floor of the commission’s office in downtown Washington, D.C., three full-time clerks copied data from the daily reports of dozens of hospitals into large ledgers. The directory began to advertise in order to announce its new services to the public. “Having seen your notice in the paper of your establishment of information of missing sogers,” John Herrick of Michigan declared, “I now write to find out what has become of my brother which I hav not heard from since august last.” Herrick thought he might have been “wounded at the battle of bullrun or antietam,” and he urged the directory to investigate.17
By March 1863 three additional bureaus had been established in Philadelphia, New York, and Louisville to divide responsibility for all 233 army general hospitals. Commission officers did not simply wait for patients to arrive in hospitals; “as soon as the roar of the battle had ceased,” Sanitary agents accompanied relief workers onto the field in order to make lists of the dead and wounded. “While bodily suffering was relieved by one class of agents, every effort was made by the other to cheer and encourage the sufferer by an assurance that his friends at home should know, at once, his exact condition.”18
During the directory’s first year, some 13,000 specific inquiries were submitted and 9,203 answered. By early 1865 more than a million names had been recorded in office ledgers. Gathering information about all these men was no small feat. On July 4, 1863, for example, John Bowne of the Washington directory office left for Gettysburg to procure names of casualties from what he already knew had been a momentous battle. But five days later he complained that “the returns are coming provokingly and sadly slow.” Survivors were more concerned with caring for the wounded and burying the dead than with reporting on their fate. Bowne had found “by experience it is only when in a state of rest that the officers notice my communications.” Nearly two weeks after the battle Bowne had eight thousand names of Gettysburg’s fallen entered into his ledgers, but he observed that the directory’s records had never been “so confused…and so unsatisfactory from their want of fullness.” Reports from field hospitals were riddled with errors and omissions, often lacked dates, and were frequently illegible, “written with the faintest lead pencil.” Directory officials hired extra help and even “encroached on the Lord’s Day” to accomplish their task, for it seemed a permissible “work of mercy.” But the scale of death at Gettysburg challenged the fledgling directory’s capacity, and six weeks after the battle, the register of dead and wounded remained woefully incomplete.19
Many requests for information went unanswered, with the two words “not found” marked on the letter of inquiry. But sometimes the directory was able to transmit wonderfully comforting news. Richard Deering responded himself when his regiment was asked to provide information about him, and he jovially reported that he was “alive and kicking.” Often, however, directory officials relieved “harrowing suspense” with replies that were devastating in their “painful certainty.” The superintendent of the Washington office described the daily scene of applicants arriving in person for news: “A mother has not heard anything of her son since the last battle; she hopes he is safe, but would like to be assured—there is no escape—she must be told that he has fallen upon the ‘federal altar’ an agony of