Death and the American Civil War

That's the subtitle of Drew Gilpin Faust's acclaimed 2008 book This Republic of Suffering. (And yes, I know I've already posted on it once!) For genealogists in particular it is interesting to know that the war began without any systematic plan for reporting casualties and deaths.

Today it's taken for granted that a warmaking government is responsible to account for the dead to their survivors. "But in 1861, neither the Union nor the Confederate government recognized this as a responsibility." {103} And in practice the plans that were improvised left many thousands of dead never specifically accounted for. Faust writes, "It was in some sense information as much as individuals that was 'missing' in Civil War America." Read the whole thing.

Bookends: Lest we forget

Something for genealogists working with mid-19th-century US ancestors to keep in mind (emphasis added):

"The Civil War matters to us today because it ended slavery and helped to define the meanings of freedom, citizenship, and equality," writes Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering. "It established a newly centralized nation-state and launched it on a trajectory of economic expansion and world influence. But for those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War, the texture of the experience, its warp and woof, was the presence of death." {xiii}