This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [56]
After the bloody battles in Virginia in the spring of 1864, when Grant’s army suffered 65,000 casualties in about seven weeks, the Washington directory office was almost overwhelmed with families and friends in search of news. “Never before,” a June 1864 report declared, “has the throng of inquirers been so urgent and anxious…Frequently as early as 6 o clk in the morning have the visitors besieged our rooms and not until eleven at night was it safe to close the doors to obtain the much needed rest before again entering upon the daily routine of relief and consolation.” Three days of slaughter at Gettysburg the year before paled in comparison with the relentless pressure of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor: battles that followed one another without respite as Grant strove to inflict a mortal blow on his outnumbered enemy.21
“Nurses and Officers of the United States Sanitary Commission at Fredericksburg, Virginia, During the Wilderness Campaign, 1864.” Library of Congress.
Most inquiries to directory offices came not through personal visits but in the mail, in letters that survive to provide a window into the heartrending specificity of war’s cost. In March 1863 Peter Williams inquired from Michigan: “It is with the greates Ancitey that I pen a few lines to you to know the ware abouts…of my brother Arthur Williams…I have not heard from him for five month…he may have died sconce pleas answer as soon as you get this.” Susannah Hampton from New York wrote to the Philadelphia directory two months after Gettysburg in search of her son:
will you please to inform me at your earliest convenience whether my son Joseph H. Hampton a member of company A 72 regiment N.Y. State vols Excelsior is alive or dead if alive and wounded please be so kind as to state what his wounds are and where he lies and if cared for and if Dead Oh pray let me know it and relieve my anxiety…I have heard all kinds of rumors about him and his miseries until they have left me in a state bordering on phrensy.22
Amid all these compelling stories, John Bowne found himself especially engaged by the tribulations of a young woman who feared she had been deserted rather than bereaved but had no intention of quietly enduring the injustice she believed she had suffered. “Mrs Biddy Higgins alias Hayes,” a domestic working for a respectable Philadelphia family, wrote in search of her husband, Peter Hayes, alias Higgins—“the latter being his real name”—a member of a New York Artillery regiment:
I was married to him by the name of Higgins by the Priest of the Cathedral, 18th and Logan Square Philadelphia about nine months ago. He was 15 months in the U.S. General Hospital West Philadelphia and was sent away to his Regiment last July, I think, but I never heard from him afterwards at all He never wrote to me, although he knows perfectly well my address, having been here scores of times. This makes me a little suspicious that he might possibly perhaps have been married previously to somebody else, as he acted lovingly towards me and we never had a difference or even angry word at any time, so it is too bad of him to desert me. Now as you are organization to help the poor, I hope you will be kind enough to find out for me 1st Where Peter Hayes comes from and who are his family and friends where he formerly lived before entering the Army, so I may write to them to enquire about him. Perhaps you could ask him this 1st before you ask him 2nd what reason he has for never writing to me or even letting me know where he was, or ever sending me any money at all, although I have been very ill and I do not think he could have been a very steady young man in his morals, and I have always been modest and of excellent character beyond any doubt, never running after the men,