This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [61]
The New York Daily News ran regular columns of original notices and copied others from Richmond papers. In February 1864 William Racer of Madison County, Virginia, sought information that would “relieve the suspense of…[a] distressed father” about his son, who had been reported wounded at Gettysburg seven months before. Southerner William Smith responded to an inquiry from a northern relative that a Mobile paper had copied from the New York Daily News. “We are all well. Brother Sam died in Vicksburg the 17th of July, of a wound and typhoid fever. My love to all.” Newspaper columns substituted for the personal letter that was unlikely to make its way through military lines. Ever hopeful, the “friends of Sergeant walter farnan, Jr., Company M. Fifteenth U.S. Infantry” sought an end to uncertainty by publishing a request to “the authorities At Richmond” to please confirm if he was indeed the W. Farnham reported to have died in a Virginia hospital two weeks before.38
Desperate families both North and South traveled by the hundreds to battlefields to search in person for missing kin. Observers described railroad junctions crowded with frantic relatives in pursuit of information about loved ones. When Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. rushed to Maryland fearing his son dead after Antietam, he described the combination of hope and terror that must have been shared by many who traveled to the front in search of kin. When in spite of his worst fears he found the young captain alive, the father characterized his shifting expectations as in some profound sense a shifting reality: “Our son and brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.” The boundary between life and death seemed at once permeable and infinite.39
Many of those who sought their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons did not enjoy Holmes’s happy outcome. Fanny Scott of Virginia began a search for her son Benjamin after more than three months of silence following the battle of Antietam in September 1862. She wrote to Robert E. Lee early in 1863. He forwarded her letter across the lines to Union general Joseph Hooker, who promised to have the U.S. surgeon general survey the hospital lists from Maryland. Lee enclosed Hooker’s letter in a reply to Mrs. Scott and expressed his hopes “that you may hear good news of your son.” But two months later Lee forwarded a letter sent him through a Flag of Truce that reported, “Diligent and careful inquiry has been made concerning the man referred to in the enclosure and no trace of him can be discovered in any hospital or among the records of the rebel prisoners.” Within days Fanny Scott submitted to Lee a request for a pass through Union lines to herself search for Benjamin. But evidently the effort proved fruitless, for at the end of the war she was still seeking information. Union general E. A. Hitchcock, responsible for war-end exchanges of prisoners, gently responded to Scott’s July 15, 1865, request: “From the length of time since the battle of Antietam and you not having heard from your son during all this time, I am very sorry to say that the presumption is that he fell a victim to that battle. If he were still living I cannot understand why he should not have found means of making the fact known to you.”40
The Scott incident illustrates several significant aspects of the problem of the missing of the Civil War. First, it demonstrates the possibility of an individual’s being entirely