And that feeling percolated back to plantations as well and to the home fronts of the South, in the sense that there was racial violence.

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There was considerable racial violence across the South as the slaves challenged masters in ways that they had not dared do before the war made the possibility of freedom seem a reality. The conflicts also were expressed in ways that led to retribution against slaves, especially when black men tried to escape and ran off to the Union army.  Plantation owners often punished the wives and families that were left behind. There are numbers of examples of violence that just seem almost illogical and so extreme as to represent a kind of rage and disruption that is very startling. For instance, there’s the example of an African-American woman in South Carolina who yelled “Hurray, the Yankees are coming” when she heard that Union troops were nearby, and a group of whites got together and hanged her in response. Then there was a very severe set of punishments that essentially killed any slave woman who had pointed out to the Yankees where a family’s silver had been buried. An effort, I think, that speaks of a desire to retain control in a situation that was completely out of control for white Southerners and then precipitated them into being themselves out of control

Was there one particular story of a person or individual that stuck with you as you were working on this?

Some of the stories of families either looking for lost loved ones or dealing with loss were the stories that lingered most strongly for me, partly because you could see how that would extend over decades, and the sense of ongoing loss. I think of two families in particular.

One was the family of Henry Bowditch, a Harvard professor. He was here in Boston when his son Nathaniel was killed in the spring of 1863. Henry Bowditch was told he’d been severely wounded, and he got on a train to go down to Virginia to see what had happened. Then when he got off the train, filled with hope that perhaps Nathaniel might recover, he was greeted by someone who said he was dead. He was taken to the army camp, met with Nathaniel’s comrades, talked to them and was told how good a soldier his son had been.

Henry Bowditch struggled with emotion. He was not used to emotion—he didn’t know how to handle it, he kept apologizing for it, he kept trying to find ways to channel it and to turn his loss into something he could handle. Watching him go through that period of mourning and try to come to terms with Nathaniel’s death is very moving.  He did two things in particular that are worth noting. One is put together the most extraordinary series of scrapbooks and memorial volumes—now in the Massachusetts Historical Society—that recorded much about Nathaniel’s life and his death. But what I think they record most vividly is Henry Bowditch needing to act in some way that connected him with his son, and memorializing Nathaniel in this way provided him that. Secondly Bowditch became a very active advocate of improved ambulance service for soldiers. He felt that his son had died needlessly, that if medical care had been brought to him more quickly, he might have been saved. An ambulance service was somewhere between poor to nonexistent in most of the Union army in that time. And Bowditch changed that. He used his position of influence within the medical profession, his passion about his son’s death and his sense of mourning and grief to introduce a revolutionary improvement in the ambulance service in the Union army by the end of the war.

Another was the story of Henry Taylor from Wisconsin, who died as a prisoner of war in the South. His father and mother spent months trying to figure out where he’d gone and what had happened to him. He’d been in prison in Richmond, and then he was moved to South Carolina. Taylor’s parents weren’t sure whether he was alive or dead. They finally figured out that he had died, and his father spent years trying to get at the circumstances of Taylor’s death. I was very struck by a letter written in the 1890s by his father to one of Henry’s comrades, still asking for details of his death. The comrade has clearly not been thinking about the Civil War for quite some time, but here’s the father still obsessed with the need to know about his child’s last moments.

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