(part two of two)
I’m talking with historian Brian Steel Wills, author of one of my favorite Civil War books from last year, Inglorious Passages: Noncombat Deaths in the American Civil War. Inglorious Passages received the Harwell Award at the Atlanta Civil War Roundtable for the best book of 2017, and it was a finalist for the 2017 Emerging Civil War Book Award.
Yesterday, we talked about the sheer quantity of information Wills had to manage as he compiled the book. There were other research challenges, too.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Chris Mackowski: You’d mentioned in the book that there’s just sort of a fundamental problem with the record keeping that made it impossible to compare apples to apples when you were trying to track down causes of death and the stories behind them.
Brian Steel Wills: We all know that the records are very sporadic. You might have some records that give you far more information, you might have some that only give you this very cursory view, and you may have no ability to know anything with precision at all. If the records were never taken, or kept, or destroyed, or lost, there may be no way to take the full picture and have precise numbers to go with it. That’s always been a difficulty, with the Confederates especially, on all the sides, the civilian side, the North and the South. Continue reading →
Most of our readers have probably heard of the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office which is preserved, interpreted, and operated by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Located in Washington D.C., this small apartment is where the now-famous battlefield nurse spent post-war years trying to discover the fates of missing soldiers.
