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lost—a circumstance many civilians found difficult to fathom. As we have seen, the scale of the war presented unprecedented challenges of record keeping, so that undoubtedly many of those never identified were bodies that could not be connected with names. But another aspect of Civil War death contributed to the large numbers of unidentified—and would contribute even more dramatically to the nameless ranks of World War I dead. The Civil War sometimes obliterated not just names but entire bodies, often leaving nothing behind to identify or bury. A Union chaplain described in the aftermath of Gettysburg “little fragments so as hardly to be recognizable as any part of a man.” Another soldier wrote in horror of comrades literally “blown to atoms.” Many Civil War soldiers actually vanished, their bodies vaporized by the firepower of this first modern war. This may have been the fate of Benjamin Scott. Civilians found this outcome incomprehensible, but soldiers who had witnessed the destructiveness of battle understood all too well the reality of men instantly transformed into nothing. The implications of bodily disintegration for the immortality of both bodies and souls was troubling, and the disappearance of bodies rendered the search for names all the more important.41

Fanny Scott’s story demonstrates as well the unifying power of death even amid the divisive forces of war. General Lee was not above concerning himself with the fall of an individual sparrow—though one assumes that Scott was no ordinary soldier but one whose family had some larger claims of class and connection on Lee’s compassion. But the intimacy of this all-American war displays itself strikingly here, as Lee readily corresponded with his Yankee counterpart, who himself acted promptly and decisively to honor his enemy’s request. Even as they contemplated the spring campaign that would produce their bloody confrontation at Chancellorsville, Lee and Hooker found themselves on the same side as Mrs. Fanny Scott in her desperate pursuit of information about her son. Killing enemy soldiers was the goal of both generals and both armies, yet bereavement could unite them in common purpose.42

Fanny Scott’s 1865 request for information about a son who had by then been gone almost three years suggests the depth and tenacity of the need to secure accurate information about the fate of missing men. General Hitchcock’s letter to Scott seems to reflect a certain incredulity that she had not yet resigned herself to a grim conclusion that he regarded as both undeniable and unavoidable. Yet Fanny Scott’s story demonstrates not just the nationally unifying power of death but also the intensity and persistence of its hold upon the bereaved, especially in circumstances of continuing uncertainty. Nine years after the end of the war Mrs. R. L. Leach was still seeking information about what had happened to her son after he was sent to a hospital ship in Virginia. Unable to admit he must be dead, she confessed, “we think sometimes that he is in Some Insane Hospital.” Without further information she lived in “suspense,” even as she acknowledged “to know he was dead would be better.” Jane Mitchell had received a letter after the Battle of Gettysburg from a soldier who described burying a corpse he found rolled in a blanket with her son’s name pinned to it. But she never saw the body or found the grave and was never convinced it was really her son. “I would like to find that grave,” she wrote. “It was years before I gave up the hope that he would some day appear. I got it into my head that he had been taken prisoner and carried off a long distance but that he would make his way back one day—this I knew was very silly of me but the hope was there nevertheless.” The absence of identifiable bodies left these women with abiding uncertainty and fantastical hopes, illusions that for them made the world endurable.43

The power and longevity of hope manifested themselves dramatically in the responses that Union quartermaster general Montgomery Meigs received when he decided in 1868 to publish