This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Faust includes statistics about the numbers of dead, dying, and diseased throughout the narrative. Here, in the last chapter, this data gets more attention. She writes, “In face of the inadequacy of words, counting seemed a way to grasp the magnitude of sorrow, to transcend individual bereavement in order to grapple with the larger meaning of loss for society and nation” (3949-51).

One of the difficulties involved in this counting was that arithmetic was not yet commonplace nor necessary for much of the population. Once the idea of statistics and the possibility of reporting those numbers caught on, it offered a modicum of control amid chaos, a life raft in a sea of despair. Counting—of anything—gave people something to do to try to make sense of the senseless deaths and killing. Yet in Walt Whitman’s words, the dead were “countless.” This was true for a variety of reasons. One was the sheer enormity of the task at hand. The number of dead that had to be identified, tracked, and dispatched to parts known or unknown was overwhelming. Another reason was that armies didn’t exactly prioritize such things. Faust writes, “At the end of an engagement, commanders usually had more compelling concerns than compiling lists of casualties” (3972-73). Given the need to move on, in some cases quite quickly, from one field of battle to the next, commanders on both sides put their surviving men first. As with other elements of this war, technology outstripped society. According to the author, “Mass modern warfare had not brought with it the bureaucratic apparatus appropriate to its unanticipated scale” (3980). This is why Edmund Whitman, Clara Barton, and others had to invent a means of keeping track of all of these issues of mortality.

Despite protests of officers like the one who complained about the red tape, commanders of both armies liked to know their numbers. After a battle, a general found it useful to know how many men he had left, so he could adequately plan the next troop movements. Conversely, Confederate General Robert E. Lee used numbers to under-report his casualties, in an effort to convince the enemy that the losses were not so great. This served a propaganda purpose, but not an actuarial one; further, it made it all the more difficult for modern and contemporary statisticians alike to report with any sort of accuracy the true number of killed, wounded, and missing from a battle.

Echoing previous chapters, the author returns to a discussion of the financial divide between the North and South. She cites the ability of the North’s expanding bureaucracy to address a high body count, whereas the South, with its already limited resources depleted to next to nothing by the attrition of the war, had little hope of doing the same. Even with its bureaucratic superiority, the North struggled to count the dead.

Another reason for having an accurate body count was to determine the identities of the dead. As discussed in an earlier chapter, it was important for an insurance company to have a death certificate so that the company could release the payment of a death benefit to a survivor. Some death benefits included the pension that the retired soldier would otherwise have gotten, so proof of death was paramount for those seeking such benefits. To this end, the Federal government created the Compiled Military Service Records, which eventually included Southern soldiers as well.

Such records were incomplete, especially in the South. The chaotic end of the Confederate army and government made for an equally chaotic record-keeping system in all areas, not only in the tracking of dead soldiers.