This Republic of Suffering (35 page)

The Pennsylvania legislature, for example, had authorized the creation of a comprehensive roster of soldiers in 1864, but the project was not launched until 1866. Samuel Bates, Pennsylvania state historian, found his assignment no easy task, at first locating only a partial file of muster rolls in the state adjutant general's office as a basis for his work. His “only recourse,” he recognized, was to contact individual officers and interrogate them about the history of their units.
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Massachusetts made two separate efforts to assemble a complete list of soldiers' service and their fates. Rosters kept by the state adjutant general's office were printed in 1868 and 1869, but twenty years later the legislature created the post of State Military and Naval Historian and directed its first incumbent, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to compile an index list of Massachusetts soldiers and sailors that would incorporate the more accurate information that had been collected by the federal pension office. Together with lists of men, Higginson published statistical summaries of casualties by unit and engagement. Massachusetts, he concluded, had sent 113,835 men to the war and had lost a total of 13,498. Higginson's skepticism about history's precision seems to have been well founded: a 1997 compilation of Massachusetts soldiers based on records in the National Archives counts 146,738.
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Confederates, who after 1865 had no nation-state, no government bureaucracy, and no expectation of federal pensions, turned state and private resources to a similar effort to document and honor soldiers' lives and deaths. But the incompleteness of Confederate records posed special challenges. The figure of 258,000 Confederate military deaths commonly cited by historians today can at best be regarded as an educated guess. The disintegration of the Confederate army made the collection of comprehensive data at war's end impossible, and the movement of the Confederate Archives between the evacuation of Richmond, their capture in Charlotte, North Carolina, and their eventual acquisition by the U.S. War Department meant that a significant number of regimental casualty lists and other official records are missing. There are, for example, almost no muster rolls at all of Alabama troops, and all records after the end of 1864 are very fragmentary. Nevertheless, in the South as well as the North, most states tried to compile and publish rosters of those who had served and those who had died, and these volumes continued to appear into the second decade of the twentieth century.
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In 1862 the South Carolina legislature had passed a measure calling for a comprehensive Record Book “as a token of respect” to Carolina's dead. The report that resulted was riddled with errors. In 1864 Professor William Rives of South Carolina College was appointed to undertake a second effort, and he struggled with military devastation, interruptions of mail service, and inadequate financial support. By advertising in newspapers for information, scanning obituaries, interviewing veterans, enlisting the help of tax collectors, and filling notebooks of “coarse brown paper” with data, he had by 1870 collected the names of twelve thousand South Carolina soldiers who had died in Confederate service. But, he stated, “I could not complete the work to my satisfaction.” In 1912 the Historical Commission of South Carolina took up the task once again, and A. S. Salley, commission secretary, published three volumes covering five infantry regiments in 1913.
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In North Carolina, John W. Moore overcame obstacles presented by the incomplete and erroneous data available within the state by turning to Confederate records that were in the hands of the U.S. War Department. But he found these official reports inadequate as well. “Scarcely one had full account of the casualties,” he wrote. “Unlettered orderly sergeants” produced “spelling that was really wonderful” although likely, he feared, to astonish those whose names were so creatively rendered. Nevertheless, Moore was confident that the four volumes he published in 1882 represented the most accurate presentation of North Carolina statistics possible.
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Other southern initiatives extended beyond individual states and addressed explicitly sectionalist purposes. The newly formed Southern Historical Society, established in 1869 and committed to “vindicate the truth” of Confederate history, sought to provide an accurate count of southern losses. In 1869 its secretary, the distinguished physician Joseph Jones, shared his estimate of casualties with the former Confederate adjutant general Samuel Cooper. Jones believed that one-third of all men actively engaged on the southern side had died in the conflict. Cooper affirmed that these numbers were “nearly…correct” but believed that a fuller search of Confederate records now in the hands of the federal government would provide greater detail and accuracy. For both Cooper and Jones, establishing the totals of troops North and South and documenting the extensive Confederate losses promised to provide an explanation—and justification—for the defeat as well as irrefutable evidence of the Confederate soldier's “resolution, unsurpassed bravery and skill.”
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Private citizens in the North also set to counting wartime casualties and deaths. Frederick Phisterer, a German immigrant who had received the Medal of Honor for heroism at Stones River in 1862, published a
Statistical Record of the Armies of the United States
in 1883 as a supplement to Scribner's popular series of thirteen volumes entitled
Campaigns of the Civil War.
Phisterer's work included chapters on “Losses” and “Officers Deceased While in Service.” William Fox claimed that his monumental
Regimental Losses in the American Civil War,
published in 1889, offered “full and exhaustive” numbers from both Union and Confederate units. Thomas Livermore, who had served as a major in the New Hampshire volunteers, attempted to amplify and correct Fox's conclusions in
Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America,
which grew from an essay read before the Military History Society of Massachusetts in 1897 into a book that appeared in 1900. Frederick Dyer undertook an even more comprehensive effort in what became his 1908
Compendium of the War of the Rebellion
in 1,796 pages, based, he assured his readers, on “authentic information from all reliable and available sources.” The government's
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion,
begun in 1874 and ultimately published in 128 volumes, was, Dyer proclaimed, “woefully deficient,” thus rendering his work imperative. Dyer's first volume opens with a summary of Union enlistments and losses that lists the number of those killed in action and those dying of wounds, disease, suicide, and even sunstroke. But Dyer perpetuated errors in government data that Fox had corrected nearly two decades earlier.
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Americans North and South, in official capacities and as private citizens, proliferated enumerations of the war dead but remained far from establishing a definitive count. The specificity, rather than the accuracy, of these totals attracted Americans seeking consolation in the comprehensive and comprehensible character of numbers. A figure might begin to grasp the entirety of so many dead and communicate the enormity of war's toll.

Yet even as they counted, Americans speculated about what the numbers they so eagerly amassed actually meant. Joseph Jones counted soldiers and their deaths both to demonstrate southern valor and to explain the defeat of the hopelessly outnumbered Confederacy. Regimental commanders counted to tell the story of “how well [their unit had] stood” and to be remembered among those whose losses, and thus whose courage, was greatest. States in both North and South enumerated the dead to honor the slain. A name upon a list was like a name upon a grave, a repository of memory, a gesture of immortality for those who had made the supreme sacrifice. And the hundreds of thousands of Civil War dead who remained unnamed could at least be counted. Names might remain unknown, but numbers need not be.
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Americans counted in order to define the emerging notion of the Civil War Dead as a describable and shared national loss that transcended individual bereavements. They counted to establish the dimensions of the war's sacrifice and the price of freedom and national unity. They counted because numbers offered an illusion of certitude and control in the aftermath of a conflict that had transformed the apparent limits of human brutality. They counted, too, because there were just so many bodies to count. Numbers seemed the only way to capture what was most dramatically new about this war: the very size of the cataclysm and its human cost.

But as numbers solved some problems of understanding, so they presented others. William Fox worried that the sheer magnitude of the war's death toll rendered it incomprehensible. “As the numbers become great,” he wrote, “they convey no different idea, whether they be doubled or trebled.” His proffered solution was to reduce the numbers to what he regarded as a more human scale, by considering casualties on the level of the regiment. “It has a well known limit of size, and its losses are intelligible.” Fox urged his readers not to “grow impatient at these statistics.” The numbers, he assured them, were not “like ordinary figures” but instead were “statistics every unit of which stands for the pale, upturned face of a dead soldier.” These were not cold abstractions but numbers that literally, he argued, possessed a human face.
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The muster roll that served as the source for his statistical analysis was an aggregation, but its lists, Fox found, offered far more than just numbers. Its brief entries invoked “sad pictures” of individual deaths and lives. A world lay behind every name. “There are no war stories that can equal the story of the muster-out roll,” he insisted:

“Killed, May 3, 1863 at Marye's Heights;” and the compiler lays down his pencil to dream again of that fierce charge which swept upward over the sloping fields of Fredericksburg.

“Wounded and missing, May 6, 1864, at the Wilderness,” suggests a nameless grave marked, if at all, by a Government head-stone bearing the short, sad epitaph, “Unknown.”

“Killed at Malvern Hill, July 1, 1862;” and there rises a picture of an artilleryman lying dead at the wheels of his gun…

“Died of fever at Young's Point, Miss.,” reminds one of the campaigns in the bayous and poisonous swamps, with the men falling in scores before a foe more deadly and remorseless than the bullet.
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Fox offered his readers some of the most “curious” of his discoveries from the rolls, demonstrating the startling variety of ways soldiers managed to die: Lorenzo Brown of the 112th Illinois, “kicked to death by a mule” J. A. Benedict, Fifth New York Cavalry, “died from amputation resulting from the bite of a man on his thumb” Jacob Thomas of the 38th Ohio, “killed…by the falling of a tree” A. Lohman of the Eighth New York, “died of poison while on picket, by drinking from a bottle found at a deserted house.” With this list of curiosities, Fox demonstrated that behind the “full and exhaustive statistics” of
Regimental Losses
lay the highly particular—and even peculiar—deaths of hundreds of thousands of individual men.
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Fox articulated a dilemma that lay at the heart of the effort to understand Civil War death: how to grasp both the significance of a single death and the meaning of hundreds of thousands. Joseph Stalin would later remark, with both experience and insight, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” A half century earlier Fox made a similar observation. “It is hard,” he wrote, “to realize the meaning of the figures…It is easy to imagine one man killed; or ten men killed; or, perhaps, a score of men killed…but even…[the veteran] is unable to comprehend the dire meaning of the one hundred thousand, whose every unit represents a soldier's bloody grave. The figures are too large.” Yet understanding the vastness of what had happened in those four years of war seemed imperative.
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Walt Whitman engaged this same tension. He was fascinated with the war's magnitude, which was for him one measure of its democratic reach. Statistics offered a vivid means of displaying the conflict's dimensions and impact, and it was to numbers that he readily turned to present the war “summ'd up” when the fighting ceased. He defined his own experience by estimating the sick and wounded he had visited (“80,000 to 100,000”). But to capture and characterize the war, he invoked the numbers of the dead: conjecturing how many lay entirely unburied, how many in “hitherto unfound localities,” and finally, and most important, how many gravestones carried “the significant word Unknown.” Even as he tried to imagine these “countless” dead—“The Million Dead,” he designated them—he claimed each one as his own. They were at once “infinite” and intimate: “all, all, all, finally dear to me.” Every soldier was to Whitman “a man as divine as myself” each was
“my loving comrade,”
even if he lay unheralded and unknown. These singular soldiers represented for Whitman “the real war,” the true meaning of the devastating conflict. His abstraction from the one to the many and his embodiment of the many in the one served as both political and poetical synecdoche. To understand even “an inkling of this War,” Whitman believed, it was necessary to try always to “multiply…by scores, aye hundreds,” the particular “hell scenes” of battle and the individual soldiers he had watched suffer and die.
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This problem of the one and the many challenged northerners and southerners alike and served as a central theme in the war's popular culture. How could the meaning of so many deaths be understood? And conversely, how could an individual's death continue to matter amid the loss of so many? “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight,” a song claimed and sung by both Union and Confederacy, focused with irony upon the dismissal of a single soldier's death as unworthy of notice. “'Tis nothing,” it said, in the face of the lengthy casualty lists that have become commonplace: “a private or two now and then will not count in the news of the battle.” Yet the work of the song was to reclaim the importance of this individual life, the husband and father who was just as dead in this night of “quiet” as if he were one of the thousands who had perished in the din of dramatic battle. He was a man, the song insisted, who counts, even if he was not counted.
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