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to be accompanied by proof of death. Military record keeping was so imperfect that, as the superintendent of claims for Alabama put it, “frequently the fact and date of death cannot be ascertained” because “repeated orders of the Adjutant and Inspector General have not been fully appreciated and complied with.” Most often a “final statement” procured from the company commander of the deceased soldier had to substitute for absent documentation. In the North, passage of an 1862 act providing pensions for widows as well as dependent sisters and mothers of dead soldiers made similar evidence necessary for those wishing to claim these benefits. Securing required documentation was no easy task, and families with the means often turned to agents who proffered themselves as experts in negotiating the Union or Confederate army bureaucracies.29

Even when information was accurate and available—through newspaper casualty lists or the offices of a charitable organization or from a paid agent—it was often not delivered until long after the event. Weeks or months of waiting were common. In South Carolina, for example, the first casualty lists from the Wilderness appeared in the newspapers ten days after the battle. No wonder a Confederate officer took advantage of rank and privilege—and the fortuitous residence of his family near a telegraph line—to send a telegram home after every engagement reporting simply, “I am well.”30

“I am well.” Telegram from William Drayton Rutherford to Sallie Fair Rutherford, July 6, 1862. South Caroliniana Library.

His decision to take the matter of providing information into his own hands typified the behavior of many Civil War participants, who devised a variety of means to ensure that their fate would be reported. Although no official identification badges were issued by either army, soldiers, aided in some cases by enterprising civilians, devised their own precursors to the dog tag. A Union burial party working late on the night of July 4, 1863, to inter the Gettysburg dead came across the body of a boy of about nineteen. In his pocket they found “a small silver shield with his name, company, and regiment engraved upon it.” They copied the information onto a wooden headboard for his grave and forwarded the shield to his father. Soldiers in the Union army could purchase badges from sutlers in the field or from a variety of establishments on the home front that advertised regularly in the press. The badges seem to have been far less commercially available in the South, but Confederate soldiers invented their own substitutes. A pocket Bible inscribed with name and address and even instructions about notification of kin served quite effectively. Many Union soldiers adopted such informal methods as well. Josiah Murphey of Nantucket made sure always to have a used envelope addressed to him “somewhere about me so that if killed in battle my friends might know what became of me.”31

Advertisement for soldiers’ identification badges. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 10, 1864.

Stories have become legendary of soldiers scribbling their names on bits of paper and pinning them to their uniforms before engagements they expected to be especially bloody—such as Meade’s planned attack on Lee’s field fortifications at Mine Run in 1863 or Grant’s suicidal assault at Cold Harbor the next year. After Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was shot at Antietam and taken to a field hospital in a nearby house, he was afraid he would faint or die and be left nameless, so he wrote on a slip of paper, “I am Capt. O. W. Holmes 20th Mass. V Son of Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D. Boston.” Holmes recovered and kept the paper for the rest of his life. These soldiers’ terror that their identities would be obliterated expressed itself with a grim and almost dispassionate practicality. They confronted the enormity of death with ingenious attempts to control at least one of its particulars. If a soldier could not save his life, he hoped at least to preserve his name.32

“I am Capt O W Holmes, 20th Mass V, Son of Oliver