This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Faust expands on the theme of an incomplete death by citing the statistic that “men—more than 40 percent of deceased Yankees and a far greater proportion of Confederates—perished without names” (1687).

Well into the first half of the war, neither the North nor the South was equipped to handle the sheer number of dead with a sufficient record-keeping apparatus. The author lists a couple of instances of mistaken identity that resulted in a family member’s rejoicing at the unexpected good news that the supposedly-dead soldier was alive. One particularly poignant example is of a Northern soldier who, because he lent his canteen to another soldier who was later found dead, was himself listed as a casualty and assigned a grave. The author writes, “After the war ended, Struble sent flowers every Memorial Day to decorate his own grave, to honor the unknown soldier it sheltered and perhaps to acknowledge that there but for God’s grace he might lie” (1746-48).

As mentioned previously, letters home to loved ones of fallen soldiers were common. This chapter expands on that idea by including details about the woeful performance of the mechanisms designed to connect letter-writers to the people meant to receive those letters. In desperation, some volunteer organizations stepped into the breach and took on this task.