A young Civil War soldier gazes back at me from a carte-de-visite, a playing card-sized photograph I recently purchased. He has a steely look, and his right hand grasps the lapel of his military dress coat. His left hand, in his lap, wears a ring. A small fur cap, a winter luxury, sits atop his head. I don’t know who he is. He’s unidentified. And when I look at him, I wonder if he posed for the photograph to let someone special back home know the fur cap had arrived in camp. If so, they never got the message. Because this photograph, like thousands of others, bears the characteristic marks—an identifying number written in red ink and the traces of brass mounting clips—of having ended up in the Dead Letter Office.
During the Civil War years, hundreds of thousands of young men left home for the front lines, traveling out of their state or hometown for the first time in their lives. Unaccustomed to the separation and the sometimes-stifling loneliness of war, they wrote home. But many were poorly educated or had never even addressed a letter, and the recipient’s name and address on the envelopes were undecipherable. Sweeping changes to recent postage requirements and the interruption of mail in the seceded states also heavily impacted the delivery of letters. Those letters that could not be delivered, for whatever reason, were processed by the Dead Letter Office.
Established in 1825, the Dead Letter Office, located in Washington, D.C., was designated to investigate undeliverable mail, with the intent of getting it to its intended recipient. DLO clerks were exclusively granted by Congress the ability to open mail to examine its contents for further clues as to the proposed destination. Still, regulations allowed clerks to read only the bare minimum to try to parse out names, locations, or other identifying information. These clerks needed a keen knowledge of geography and colloquial use of language to aid them in their pursuit.