5. Sutherland, Seasons of War, p. 76.
6. A. P. Meylist to Edmund B. Whitman, June 10, 1868, Edmund B. Whitman, Letters and Reports Received, Record Group 92 E A1–397A, NARA; H. Clay Trumbull, War Memories of a Chaplain (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898), p.209. See especially “Soldiers Graves and Soldier Burials,” pp. 203–32.
7. General Orders of the War Department, Embracing the Years 1861, 1862 & 1863 (New York: Derby & Miller, 1864), vol. 1, pp. 158, 248. See also James E. Yeatman, [Sanitary Commission,] “Burial of the Dead,” printed circular, September 20, 1861, William Greenleaf Eliot Collection, MOHS; Erna Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army: A History of the Corps, 1775–1939 (Washington, D.C.: United States Army, 1989), p. 464.
8. Horace H. Cunningham, Field Medical Services at the Battles of Manassas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1968), p. 48; Regulations for the Army of the Confederate States, 1862 (Atlanta: James McPherson & Co., 1862).
9. Report of Colonel Henry A. Weeks, 12th New York Infantry, May 28, 1862, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884), ser. 1, vol. 11/1, p. 725; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 28, 1863, p. 366; Christian Recorder, May 21, 1864, p. 83; Richard F. Miller and Robert F. Mooney, The Civil War: The Nantucket Experience: Including the Memoirs of Josiah Fitch Murphey (Nantucket: Wesco Publishing Co., 1994), p. 107.
10. Many descriptions of Antietam assert that the dead were buried by the 21st, but Holt’s observations contradict this. Daniel M. Holt, A Surgeon’s Civil War: The Letters and Diary of Daniel M. Holt, M.D., ed. James M. Greiner, Janet L. Coryell, and James R. Smither (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994), p. 28; Mrs. H. [Anna M. E. Holstein], Three Years in Field Hospitals in the Army of the Potomac (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1867), p. 11.
11. James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4; W. D. Rutherford to Sallie Rutherford, May 21, 1864, William Drayton Rutherford Papers, SCL. (This example is not from Antietam, as are all others in this section, but from Spotsylvania in 1864.) See also Steven R. Stotelmyer, The Bivouacs of the Dead: The Story of Those Who Died at Antietam and South Mountain (Baltimore: Toomey Press, 1992), p. 10.
12. Stotelmyer, Bivouacs of the Dead, pp. 9, 5.
13. Gregory A. Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg, the Aftermath of a Battle (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995), p. 313; Gerard A. Patterson, Debris of Battle: The Wounded of Gettysburg (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1997), p. 28; Coco, Strange and Blighted Land., pp. 60, 64. On lack of tools, see also Richard Coolidge to Major General W. A. Hammond, September 4, 1862, Papers of George A. Otis, RG 94 629A, NARA.
14. W. B. Coker to his Brother, July 28, 1861, in Mills Lane, ed., “Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me. If I Get Killed, I’ll Only Be Dead”: Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1990), p. 40; Official Records, ser. 1, vol. 27, p. 79, cited in Gerard A. Patterson, Debris of Battle: The Wounded of Gettysburg (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1997), p. xi; Theodore Fogel to his parents, September 28, 1862, in Lane, ed., Dear Mother, p. 190.
15. John A. Wyeth, With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1914), p. 254; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 14, 1863, p. 124; Frank Oakley’s reactions described in Cynthia to My Dear Father, August 22, 1862, Frank Oakley Papers, WHS.
16. Quotes from Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves, “Seeing the Elephant”: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 122.
17. Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, p. 89; Stotelmyer, Bivouacs of the Dead, p. 4; Frank and Reaves, “Seeing the Elephant,” 123; Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, p. 127; Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), p. 41; Cyrus F. Boyd, The Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa Infantry 1861–1863, ed. Mildred Throne (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Co., 1953), pp. 41–42; H. Clay Trumbull, War Memories of an Army Chaplain (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898), p. 209; Robert Zaworski, Headstones of Heroes: The Restoration and History of Confederate Graves in Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery (Paducah, Ky.: Turner Publishing Co. 1997), p. 7.
18. New York Herald, September 7, 1862; James Eldred Phillips Diary, entry for May 1863, p. 16, VHS. On hogs see for example Sutherland, Seasons of War, pp. 193, 228; William D. Rutherford to Sallie Fair, August 26, 1861, Rutherford Papers, SCL.
19. “Burials,” Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1, no. 20 (August 15, 1864): 623; R. A. Wilkinson to M. F. Wilkinson, July 8, 1862, Wilkinson-Stark Family Papers (mss. 255), The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans; Hardin quoted in Frank and Reaves, “Seeing the Elephant,” p. 122.
20. William Corby, Memoirs of Chaplain Life: Three Years Chaplain in the Famous Irish Brigade, “Army of the Potomac” (Notre Dame, Ind.: Scholastic Press, 1894), p. 91; Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, p. 119; Wyeth, With Sabre and Scalpel, p. 248; Holt, Surgeon’s Civil War, pp. 190, 103.
21. William Gore, February 25, 1865, BV Gore, William B., NYHS. Edgar Allan Poe wrote frequently about the fear of being buried alive in his widely popular short stories. See, for example, “The Premature Burial” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Stephen Peithman, ed., The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981). See also Timothy Trend Blade, “Buried Alive!” American Cemetery, September 1991, pp. 34–54.
22. Gregory A. Coco, Killed in Action: Eyewitness Accounts of the Last Moments of 100 Union Soldiers Who Died at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1992), p. 34.
23. Cate, ed., Two Soldiers, p. 93; Houghton quoted in Coco, Killed in Action, pp. 44–45; Fannie A. Beers, Memories: A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1888), p. 83.
24. Trumbull, War Memories of a Chaplain, p. 219.
25. J. W. McClure to My Dearest Kate, August 17, 1864, McClure Family Papers, SCL.
26. Sutherland, Seasons of War, pp. 160–61; Charles Kerrison to My Dear Sister, May 19, 1864, Kerrison Family Papers, SCL; George R. Gauthier, Harder Than Death: The Life of George R. Gauthier, an Old Texan (Austin, Tex.: n.p., 1902), p. 15; Oliver Wendell Holmes, “My Hunt After ‘The Captain,’” Atlantic 10 (December 1862), p. 743.
27. Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers While Prisoners of War in the Hands of Rebel Authorities, Being the Report of a Commission of Inquiry, Appointed by the United States Sanitary Commission (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1864), p. 159; Holt, Surgeon’s Civil War, p. 63.
28. Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, p. 49. On death and Civil War horses, see Drew Gilpin Faust, “Equine Relics of the Civil War,” Southern Cultures 6 (Spring 2000): 23–49.
29. Hollywood Cemetery, Records, 1847–1955, VHS; Mary H. Mitchell, Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1985), p. 48.
30. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
31. John Thompson, “The Burial of Latané,” online at www.civilwarpoetry.org/confederate/officers/latane.htm. See Drew Gilpin Faust, “Race, Gender and Confederate Nationalism: William D. Washington’s Burial of Latané,” in Faust, Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), pp. 148–59.
32. Faust, “Race, Gender and Confederate Nationalism,” pp. 149–51.
33. Harper’s Weekly, October 11, 1862, p. 655; Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, p. 11; John W. Schildt, Antietam Hospitals (Chewsville, Md.: Antietam Publications, 1987), p. 14.
34. Flora McCabe to Dearest Maggie, January 26, 1862, Flora Morgan McCabe Collection, LC. On fear of getting the wrong body, see also Friedrich Hartmann to Sarah Ogden, September 10, 1863, Sarah Ogden Corr
espondence and Ephemera, GLC6559.01.114, Gilder Lehrman Collection, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, NYHS.
35. Patterson, Debris, p. 173; see also, “Yorktown,” New York Herald, April 30, 1862; Robert E. Denney, Civil War Medicine: Care and Comfort of the Wounded (New York: Sterling Publishers, 1994), p. 58; W. White to Dear Parents, June 21, 1862, William White Papers, PAHRC.
36. See Pennsylvania State Agency, December 10, 1863, Record Book, November 1863–December 1864, NYHS; New England Soldiers Relief Association Papers, RG 94, p. 800, NARA. On Central Association, see T. N. Dawkins to J. W. McClure, December 4, 1864, McClure Papers, SCL; Louisiana Soldiers Relief Association and Hospital (Richmond, Va.: Enquirer Book and Job Office, 1862), p.30. On support from a single community, see Robert V. Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”: Death and Society in an American Community, 1750–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 129.
37. On the U.S. Sanitary Commission, see “Burials,” Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1, no. 20 (August 15, 1864): 623; “Rev. Mr. Hoblitt on Nashville Hospitals,” Sanitary Reporter, 1, no. 5 ( July 15, 1863): 34; “The Commission on the James River and the Appomattox,” Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1, no. 18 ( July 15, 1864): 567. On Sanitary Commission and burials, see [Holstein], Three Years in Field Hospitals, p. 71; J. S. Newberry, “Report of the Hospital Directory,” Sanitary Reporter 1, no. 11 (October 15, 1863): 81.
38. Chattanooga, Tenn., Disinterments from March to September 1864, Telegrams from January to July 1864, ms. vol. bd., Box 284.1, folder 3, p. 119, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL.
39. Mary C. Brayton, October 15, 1864, J. S. Moore, November 2, 1864, Chattanooga, Tenn., Orders for Disinterment and Removal of Bodies, September 1864–February 1865, Box 284.1, folder 5, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL.
40. “Soldiers’ Cemetery at Belle Plain Va May 23 1864,” Box 192.3, folder 4; “Plot of Soldiers’ Cemetery, Port Royal Va 28 May 1864,” Box 192.3, folder 5, U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, NYPL.
41. Cornelius quoted in Christine Quigley, The Corpse: A History ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1963), p. 55. See Cain and Cornelius Ledger, 1859, 1862, RBMSC.
42. “The Terrible Telegram,” March 18, 1863; Henry I. Bowditch to My Own Sweet Wife [Olivia Yardley Bowditch], March 19, 1863, both in Manuscripts Relating to Lieutenant Nathaniel Bowditch, vol. 2, pp. 98, 92, Nathaniel Bowditch Memorial Collection, MAHS.
43. Henry I. Bowditch, A Brief Plea for an Ambulance System for the Army of the United States (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863), pp. 6, 15.
44. Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, pp. 114–15, 110; order in Christian Recorder, August 1, 1863, p. 1.
45. Alexander quoted in Kent Masterson Brown, Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics and the Pennsylvania Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 50; see also pp. 371–72, 381.
46. Receipt, August 15, 1862, Goodwin Family Papers, MAHS; Alvin F. Harlow, Old Waybills: The Romance of the Express Companies (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), p. 299. See also Stillman King Wightman, “In Search of My Son,” American Heritage 14 (February 1963), pp. 64–78.
47. Stotelmyer, Bivouacs of the Dead, p. 15.
48. Staunton Transportation Company, “Transportation of the Dead!” (Gettysburg, Pa.: H. J. Stahle, 1863), broadside, LCP.
49. Robert W. Habenstein and William M. Lamers, The History of American Funeral Directing (Milwaukee: Bulfin Printers, 1955), pp. 330–35.
50. On Ellsworth, see Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, June 1, 1861, pp. 40–41. On embalming, see also Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
51. Charlotte Elizabeth McKay, Stories of Hospital and Camp (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1876), p. 47.
52. Richmond Enquirer, June 2, 1863, p. 2; December 4, 1863, p. 3; Charles R. Wilson, “The Southern Funeral Director: Managing Death in the New South,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 67 (Spring 1983): 53.
53. Habenstein and Lamers, History of American Funeral Directing, pp. 330, 334. See also Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Towards Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), and Karen Pomeroy Flood, “Contemplating Corpses: The Dead Body in American Culture, 1870–1920,” Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 2001).
54. George A. Townsend, Rustics in Rebellion: A Yankee Reporter on the Road to Richmond, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), pp. 121–22, 153–54.
55. Hardie to Provost Marshal General, City Point, November 23, 1864, M619, 2195, S1864 Roll 309, NARA; Turner and Baker Files, November 8, 1864, 363-B, M797, Roll 130, NARA; R. Burr to Brig. Gen. M. R. Patrick, November 21, 1864, M619 2195 S1864 Roll 309, NARA.
56. War Department, Quartermaster General’s Office, Compilation of Laws, Orders, Opinions, Instructions, Etc. in Regard to National Military Cemeteries (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1878), p. 5. See also Monro MacCloskey, Hallowed Ground: Our National Cemeteries (New York: Richard Rosens Press, 1968), p. 24.
57. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
58. Trumbull, War Memories of a Chaplain, p. 209.59. Bowditch, Brief Plea, p. 15.
CHAPTER 4. NAMING
1. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (1882; rpt. Boston: David Godine, 1971), p. 60.
2. Caroline Alexander, “Letter from Vietnam: Across the River Styx,” New Yorker, October 25, 2004, p. 44. See also Michael Sledge, Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury, and Honor Our Military Fallen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
3. Mark Crawford, Encyclopedia of the Mexican-American War (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1999), p. 68, cites 13,768 U.S. deaths out of 104,556 who served. Only one in eight of these deaths was battle-related; the others were from disease.
4. U.S. War Department, General Orders of the War Department (New York: Derby & Miller, 1864), vol. 1, pp. 158, 248; “Return of Deceased Soldiers” and “Field Returns,” paras. 451, 452, 453, in Regulations for the Army of the Confederate States, 1862 (Atlanta: James McPherson & Co., 1862); Samuel P. Moore, August 14, 1862, in Wayside Hospital, Charleston, Order and Letter Book, SCL; Charleston Mercury, January 27, 1864; Edward Steere, The Graves Registration Service in World War II, Quartermaster Historical Studies no. 21, Historical Section, Office of the Quartermaster General (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1951), pp. 4–5. On inadequacies of Confederate casualty reporting in the Peninsula Campaign, see The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901) ser. 1, vol. 11, pt. 2, pp. 559, 760, 775, 501–2.
5. Sarah J. Palmer to Harriet R. Palmer, September 5, 1862, Palmer Family Papers, SCL; F. S. Gillespie to Mrs. Carson, July 5, 1864, Carson Family Papers, SCL.
6. Elvira J. Powers, Hospital Pencillings: Being a Diary While in Jefferson General Hospital (Boston: Edward L. Mitchel, 1866), p. 19. On chaplains, see Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), p. 134n98, quoting an 1864 order from the assistant medical director of the Department of the Cumberland. Chaplain figures in Steven E. Woodworth, While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), p. 148.
7. Daily South Carolinian, June 16, 1864.
8. Daily South Carolinian, July 22, 1863; F. S. Gillespie to Mrs. Carson; Mathew Jack Davis Narrative, “War Sketches,” CAH; Joseph Willett to Dear Sister, June 6, 1864, Misc. Mss. Cummings, NYHS; Henry W. Raymond, ed., “Extracts from the Journal of Henry J. Raymond II,” Scribner’s Monthly 19 ( January 1880): 419–20; Steven R. Stotelmyer, The Bivouacs of the Dead (Baltimore: Toomey Press, 1992), p. 17.
9. On mail see W. D. Rutherford to Sallie Fair Rutherford, June 5, 1864, William Drayton Ru
therford Papers, SCL.
10. J. W. Hoover to Mr. Kuhlman, September 8, 1864, J. W. Hoover Papers, WHS; Reverend Lemuel Moss, Annals of the United States Christian Commission (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1868), pp. 411, 506. On letters after Gettysburg, see Andrew Boyd Cross, “The Battle of Gettysburg and the Christian Commission,” in Daniel J. Hoisington, ed., Gettysburg and the Christian Commission ([Roseville, Minn.]: Edinborough Press, 2002), p. 59. A quire is a set of twenty-four or twenty-five sheets of paper of the same size and stock.
11. Moss, Annals, pp. 512, 487–88, 563, 475. See U.S. Christian Commission, Record of Letters Written for Soldiers, Army of the Potomac, 1865, RG 94 E 746, and U.S. Christian Commission, Abstracts of Letters Written for Sick and Wounded Soldiers, Army of the Potomac, 1864–65, RG 94 E745, NARA.
12. Moss, Annals, pp. 409, 439–40. See U.S. Christian Commission, Letters Received, Individual Relief Department, 1864–65 RG 94 E748, NARA; U.S. Christian Commission, Record of Inquiries, Central Office, 1864–65 RG 94 E743, NARA.
13. U.S. Christian Commission, Death Register, 1864–65, October 6, 1864; October 9, 1864; October 8, 1864; September 19, 1864; October 3, 1864; November 3, 1864; October 18, 1864, RG 94 E797, NARA.
14. Moss, Annals, pp. 508, 439. U.S. Christian Commission, Record of the Federal Dead Buried from Libby, Belle Isle, Danville and Camp Lawton Prisons and at City Point and in the Field Before Petersburg and Richmond (Philadelphia: J. B. Rodgers, 1866). See U.S. Christian Commission, Correspondence Concerning “Record of the Federal Dead,” RG 94 E795, NARA.
15. Charles J. Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1868), p. 451; George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), chap. 7; Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000); Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); William Quentin Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956).
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