HIST 221 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Southern Historical Society
29 Jan 2016
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Reading 1: numbers on top of numbers the state. Counting and naming of the dead was an essential part of war as well as an obligation of. North and south military did not formally notify family members of wounded or dead: no dog tags, official identification or records. National cemetery: after gettysburg there was a policy to identify and rebury the union dead effort to honour the soldiers. Americans had failed to accurately count the dead soldiers. Whitman wrote: countless graves of the infinite dead . Commanders were required to submit lists of the captured, killed, wounded and missing. Union colonial thomas wentworth higginson regards the failure to keep records of the dead an inevitable outcome of the war as the scale of the conflict was unanticipated. Numbers became a language to express and measure challenges and achievements of battles. Casualty lists were not compiled to account for individual lives: counting who was still alive, known as strength reports .
