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Hospital nurses and visitors, Whitman best known among them, tried to notify kin of soldiers' fates, and an entrepreneurial cohort of paid agents emerged in the Union and the Confederacy offering to find missing soldiers for a fee. But family members often had to take matters into their own hands, running personal advertisements or--like Whitman initially did in search of his brother George-- traveling to hospitals and battlefields in desperate hope of news. By the middle of the war, the United States Sanitary Commission began to organize the work of information collection and dissemination, not to mention of handling the dead, for those in the North--a harbinger of death's bureaucratic and state- building manifestations. Yet for all this, as Faust poignantly observes, it was quite possible for an individual soldier to be "entirely lost--a circumstance many civilians found difficult to fathom."
II.
Most of the soldiers who died during the Civil War succumbed to disease rather than to battle wounds. Still, the body counts (killed and wounded) after battles and campaigns seem staggering and ever escalating: 3,600 at the First Bull Run, 20,000 at Shiloh, 30,000 during the Seven Days, 23,000 at Antietam, as many as 51,000 at Gettysburg, almost 70,000 during the Virginia campaigns in the spring of 1864. Greater firepower and accuracy, chiefly through the advent of muzzle-loading rifles, help to explain the new lethality of battle; so, too, do the intimacy and ferocity of the battlefields, where soldiers fought and shot their way through woods, thickets, and scrub at relatively close range. The overwhelming majority of those killed or wounded (more than 90 percent, Faust tells us) were hit by mini-balls, some shot from the rifles of sharpshooters who gained reputations as cold-blooded murderers. Although many soldiers struggled with the necessity of killing--this was part of the "work" of death, too, demanding, as Orestes Brownson put it, "the harder courage" and posing a number of cultural problems (and there is some evidence of soldiers failing to discharge their weapons), "vengeance came to play an ever more important role, joining principles of duty and self-defense in legitimating violence."
