6. Special Order no. 132 in “Report of Captain J. M. Moore,” in Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives During the First Session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, 1865–66 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1866), vol. 3, pp. 264–66; James M. Moore to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, July 3, 1865, M619 208Q 1865, Roll 401, NARA. See also Requests received by Colonel James Moore, 1863–66, RG 92 E581, Requests for Information Relating to Missing Soldiers 1863–67, RG 92 E582, and Letters Received by Tommy Baker, Clerk of Office of Burial Records, 1862–67, RG 92 E580, all in NARA.
7. On Andersonville see William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
8. Clara Barton, Journal, July 8, July 12, August 5, August 6, and August 17, 1865; Clara Barton to Edmund Stanton, n.d.; all in Clara Barton Papers, LC; Pryor, Clara Barton, p. 138.
9. Barton, Journal, August 5–8, and 17, 1865, Clara Barton Papers, LC; see Requests for Information, NARA; Pryor, Clara Barton, pp. 138–42; Monro MacCloskey, Hallowed Ground: Our National Cemeteries (New York: Richards Rosen Press, 1968), p. 32; “Report of Captain J. M. Moore,” in Executive Documents, 1865–66, vol. 3, pp. 264–66. See also John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), and Edward Steere, “Genesis of American Graves Registration, 1861–1870,” Military Affairs 12 (Autumn 1948): 149–61. See Edmund Whitman Papers, 1830–1876, Schoff Civil War Collection, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Class of 1838 Class Book, call #HUD238.714, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass.; “1838: Whitman, Edmund Burke,” Biographical File, call #HUG300, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass.
10. Earnshaw quoted in Monro MacCloskey, Hallowed Ground: Our National Cemeteries (New York: Richard Rosens Press, 1968), p. 34.
11. Meigs quoted in Whitman, “Remarks on National Cemeteries,” in W. T. Sherman et al., The Army Reunion (Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co., 1869), p. 227.
12. E. B. Whitman to Thomas Swords, February 13, 1867, in Whitman, Final Report; Circular, January 24, 1866, in E. B. Whitman, Letter Press Book, vol. 1, RG 92 A-1 397A, NARA; Whitman, Final Report.
13. Whitman, Final Report; A. T. Blackmun to E. B. Whitman, n.d. [1865]; John H. Castle to Whitman, January 24, 1866, both in Letters Received, RG 92 A-1 397A, NARA.
14. E. B. Whitman, Report, May 5, 1866, Cemeterial Reports and Lists, RG 92 A-1 397A, NARA; Whitman, Final Report.
15. Whitman to Donaldson, June 26, 1866, in Whitman, Letter Press Book, vol. 1;E. B. Whitman, Daily Journal, vol. 2, RG 92 E-A1-397A, n.p., both in NARA; Whitman, “Remarks on National Cemeteries,” p. 229.
16. Lieutenant Thomas Albee to Thomas Van Horne, November 28, 1865; Donaldson to Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, December 9, 1865; Barger to E. B. Whitman, February 24, 1866; all in Whitman, Letters Received; [Whitman], Journal of a Trip Through Parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia Made to Locate the Scattered Graves of Union Soldiers [1866], vol. 1, p. 93, RG 92 E685, NARA.
17. Whitman, Appendix, Final Report; Whitman, Cemeterial Movement; clipping, April 4, 1866, Letters and Reports Received Relating to Cemeteries, RG 92 E569, NARA.
18. Donaldson to Colonel M. D. Wickersham, April 17, 1866, Whitman, Letters Received; Dana, Remarks of the Quartermaster General, May 26, 1866, Cemetery Reports and Lists RG 92 A-1 397A; all in NARA.
19. See Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
20. Whitman, Final Report; U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on the Memphis Riots, Memphis Riots and Massacres, 1866 (1866; rpt. Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969).
21. Whitman to Donaldson, March 26, 1866, in Whitman, Letter Press Book, vol. 1; Whitman, Cemeterial Reports and Lists; Whitman to Donaldson, March 26, 1866; Whitman to Donaldson, April 18, 1866, Letter Press Book, vol. 1; [Whitman], Journal of a Trip; Whitman to Donaldson, March 26, 1866.
22. Whitman to Donaldson, April 29, 1866, in Whitman, Letter Press Book, vol. 1.
23. Whitman, “Remarks on National Cemeteries,” p. 229; Whitman to Donaldson, April 30, 1866, in Whitman, Letter Press Book, vol. 1.
24. Whitman to Donaldson, May 24, 1866, Letter Press Book, vol. 1; Whitman to Brigadier General H. M. Whittlesey, May 15, 1866, Letter Press Book, vol. 1; Whitman to Donaldson, May 24, 1866, Letter Press Book, vol. 1.
25. Dana, Remarks of the Quartermaster General.
26. Whitman to Donaldson, June 26, 1866, Letter Press Book, vol. 1; [Whitman], Journal of a Trip, vol. 2, p. 26.
27. [Whitman], Journal of a Trip, vol. 1, pp. 218, 240; vol. 2, p. 26.
28. Ibid.; vol. 2, p. 26.
29. On Charleston observances, see David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 68–71.
30. Whitman to Donaldson, June 19, 1866; Whitman to Donaldson, June 26, 1866; both in Letter Press Book, vol. 1.
31. Whitman to Donaldson, June 26, 1866, Letter Press Book, vol. 1; E. B. Whitman, Speech Draft, n.d., Miscellaneous Records, RG 92 A-1 397A, NARA.
32. Clara Barton to Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, October 1865, Clara Barton Papers, LC.
33. On gender and contract in this period, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Drew Gilpin Faust, “‘The Dread Void of Uncertainty’: Naming the Dead in the American Civil War,” Southern Cultures 11 (Summer 2005): 7–32. This emerging sense of national obligation represented a development in the history of human rights. See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
34. James F. Russling, “National Cemeteries,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 33 (August 1866): 311, 312, 321.
35. Ibid., p. 322.
36. Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” online at www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.htm.
37. Whitman to Donaldson, October 1, 1866, Letter Press Book, vol. 1; Thomas quoted in Whitman, Final Report.
38. Whitman to Donaldson, September 23, 1866, Letter Press Book, vol. 1; Whitman, Final Report.
39. Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess., February 15, 1867, p. 1374.
40. Whitman, Final Report; Meigs statement of December 22, 1868, quoted in Congressional Globe, 42nd Cong., 2nd sess., May 8, 1872, p. 3220.
41. See www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/poplargrove/poplargrovehist.htm; New York Times, July 8, 1866, p. 4.
42. “The National Cemeteries,” Chicago Tribune, January 23, 1867, p. 2; Steven R. Stotelmyer, The Bivouacs of the Dead (Baltimore: Toomey Press, 1992), p. 22.
43. “Report of the Quartermaster General,” Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives During the Second Session of the Forty-second Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), vol. 2, pp. 135–66; “Report of the Quartermaster General, Secretary of War,” Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives During the Third Session of the Forty-first Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1871), vol. 2, p. 210; “Civil War Era National Cemeteries,” online at www.va.gov/facmgt/historic/civilwar.asp, total cost from Charles W. Snell and Sharon A. Brown, Antietam National Battlefield and National Cemetery, Sharpsburg, Maryland: An Administrative History (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1986), p. 29; Leslie Perry, “The Confederate Dead,” clipping from New York Sun [1898] in RG 92 585, NARA. See plats of national cemeteries in Whitman, Final Report. Sara Amy Leach, Senior Historian, National Cemetery Administration, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, letter to author, October
5, 2004, gives details of African American burials. She notes that segregated burials seem to have been undertaken by custom rather than by explicit regulation. For forms, see “Weekly Report of the Number of Interments,” July 28, 1866, Letters and Reports Received Relating to Cemeteries, RG 92 E569, NARA.
44. Whitman, “Remarks on National Cemeteries,” p. 225.
45. John Trowbridge, “The Wilderness,” Atlantic Monthly, 17 ( January 1866), 45, 46.
46. “Burial of the Rebel Dead,” New York Times, January 30, 1868, p. 4; Russell F. Weigley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M. C. Meigs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 308–10.
47. Examiner quoted in Mary H. Mitchell, Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1985), p. 64.
48. “To the Women of the South,” in Daily Richmond Enquirer, May 31, 1866, clipping in Hollywood Memorial Association Collection, ESBL.
49. Oakwood Ladies Memorial Association, Minutes, April 19, 1866, Oakwood Memorial Association Collection, ESBL.
50. Minute Book, 1867, Hollywood Memorial Association Collection.
51. Henry Timrod, “Ode,” in The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry, ed. Richard Marius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 418. On Memorial Day, see Blight, Race and Reunion, pp. 70–73; online at www.usmemorialday.org/order11.htm. See also William Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 44–76.
52. Downing cited in Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the
Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 234.
53. Ibid., p. 235; Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead, pp. 146–48. On women and politics in the Civil War, see Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 207–19.
54. “Virginia—Dedication of the Stonewall Cemetery—Feeling of the Southern People—Miscellaneous Incidents,” New York Times, October 29, 1866, p. 8. On Ashby, see Confederated Southern Memorial Association, History of the Confederated Memorial Associations of the South (New Orleans: Graham Press, 1904), p. 149.
55. Confederated Southern Memorial Association, History, p. 92; Rubin, Shattered Nation, p. 236. See also Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 36–46.
56. Abram J. Ryan, “Lines Respectfully Inscribed to the Ladies Memorial Association of Fredericksburg, Virginia,” December 31, 1866, VHS; Abram J. Ryan, “March of the Deathless Dead,” Poems: Patriotic, Religious (Baltimore: Baltimore Publishing Co., 1885), p. 39. See Robert K. Krick, Roster of the Confederate Dead in the Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery (Fredericksburg, Va.: published by the author, 1974).
57. Mary J. Dogan to John S. Palmer, July 1, 1869; Dogan to Palmer, June 16, 1870; both in Louis P. Towle, ed., A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 628, 650.
58. Dogan to Palmer, June 16, 1870, February 25, 1871, ibid., p. 686.
59. Gregory A. Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg; The Aftermath of a Battle (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995), p. 136. On Confederate dead at Antietam and the 2,240 bodies reinterred in Washington Cemetery in Hagerstown, see Steven R. Stotelmyer, The Bivouacs of the Dead: The Story of Those Who Died at Antietam and South Mountain (Baltimore: Toomey Press, 1992), and Snell and Brown, Antietam National Battlefield and Cemetery. Confederate dead also remained in the North at the site of prisoner-of-war camps. See, for example, “Confederate Dead. Cemeteries. Elmira,” Confederate Dead Collection, ESBL.
60. Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, p. 134.
61. See Confederate Memorial Day at Charleston, S.C. Re-interment of the Carolina Dead from Gettysburg (Charleston, S.C.: William C. Maczyck, 1871); Mary H. Mitchell, Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine (1985; rpt. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1999), pp. 83–92. See also Correspondence Regarding Gettysburg Dead, 1872–1902, and Correspondence and Memoranda Regarding Weaver’s Claim, 1871–73, Hollywood Memorial Association Collection, ESBL.
62. Coco, Strange and Blighted Land, pp. 143–48; “Ghost of Gettysburg,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 24, 1996, Dixie Living, p. 3.
63. See David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
CHAPTER 8. NUMBERING
1. Kate Campbell to Mattie McGaw, May 1, 1863, McGaw Family Papers, SCL.
2. Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 205. I. B. Cohen, The Triumph of Numbers: How Counting Shaped Modern Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Alain DeRosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
3. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, in Whitman, Complete Prose Works (New York: Appleton, 1910), pp. 114–15.
4. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Massachusetts in the Army and Navy During the War of 1861–65 (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1896), vol. 1, pp. viii, ix.
5. William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 607. For a brilliant consideration of Sherman and Civil War casualty figures generally, see James Dawes, “Counting on the Battlefield: Literature and Philosophy After the Civil War,” in The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), quote on p. 29. On McClellan see George B. McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story (New York: C. L. Webster & Co., 1887), and Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988).
6. On Lee see William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861–1865 (Albany, N.Y.: Albany Publishing Company, 1889; rpt. 2002), p. 559. On Lee’s manipulation of casualty statistics after Gettysburg, see Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 2: From Fredericksburg to Meridian (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 578.
7. William F. Fox, “The Chances of Being Hit in Battle,” Century Illustrated Magazine 36 (May 1888): 94; Fox, Regimental Losses, p. 7.
8. Fox, Regimental Losses, p. 57.
9. John William De Forest, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (New York: Harper, 1867), pp. 482–83. See also John W. De Forest, A Volunteer’s Adventures: A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil War, ed. James H. Croushore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), p. 151. On the unreliability of Confederate rolls, see W. H. Taylor to J. E. Hagood, January 13, 1863, Hagood Papers, SCL. On inaccuracies of casualty statistics, see George C. Rable, Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 288–89.
10. J. J. Woodward, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Part I, Vol. I: Medical History (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870), pp. xxx, xxxi; Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861–65, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901), p. 6; “Notes on the Union and Confederate Armies,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: Century, 1889), pp. 767–68. On pensions see Megan McClintock, “Civil War Pensions and the Reconstruction of Union Families,” Journal of American History 83 (September 1996): 456–80; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); William H. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1918).
11. Mabel E. Deutrich, Struggle for Supremacy: The Career of General Fred C. Ainsworth (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1962), pp. 46, 91. The Compil
ed Military Service Records (CMSR) has become an indispensable tool for Civil War researchers and genealogists. A printed index is now available with a useful introduction by Silas Felton that explains the origins of the CMSR and includes a bibliography of all state rosters. See Janet B. Hewett, ed., The Roster of Union Soldiers, 1861–1865 (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot, 1997). Robert Krick introduces Janet B. Hewett, ed., The Roster of Confederate Soldiers, 1861–1865 (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot, 1995), and similarly includes a survey and bibliography of state efforts.
12. Samuel P. Bates, History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–1865, (Harrisburg, Pa.: B. Singerly, 1869–71), vol. 1, pp. iv–v.
13. Higginson, Massachusetts in the Army and Navy, vol. 1, p. 568; Silas Felton, “Introduction,” in Hewett, ed., Roster of Union Soldiers, vol. 1, p. 29.
14. A recent study by James David Hacker identifies other problems in Confederate records, arguing that southern deaths from diarrhea and dysentery have been seriously undercounted and that total numbers of war deaths should be increased from 258,000 to 282,600. Hacker, “The Human Cost of War: White Population in the United States, 1850–1880,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Minnesota, 1999), pp. 41–43. Hacker seems to me far too sanguine in his acceptance of figures for both Union and Confederate battle deaths as “reasonably accurate”(p. 15). Battles and Leaders of the Civil War concluded in 1889 that “no data exist for a reasonably accurate estimate” of Confederate losses. See “Notes on the Union and Confederate Armies,” in Johnson and Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 4, p. 768). Note too Robert Krick’s comment on the “nonchalant Confederate approach to military record keeping,” in his introduction to Roster of Confederate Soldiers, p. 4.
15. A. S. Salley Jr., comp., South Carolina Troops in Confederate Service (Columbia, S.C.: R. L. Bryan Co., 1913), pp. v, vi, vii, viii. The Roll of the Dead prepared by a Confederate widow from Rives’s notebooks remained unidentified in the National Archives until 1993. It has now been published as Roll of the Dead: South Carolina Troops in Confederate State Service (Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1994).
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