Civil War dog tags

The use of dog tags by the military did not come into major use until well after the Civil War. Back then, the families of the killed did not receive a telegram or a knock at the door by military officials. Both sides struggled to come up with a way to let the loved ones back home know that if they were killed, they would somehow be identified so the family could have closure.

These little known “survivors” of the Civil War are actually quite rare and valuable. In May of 1862, Secretary of War Stanton suggested that the Union soldiers be issued identification tags but the appeal was denied. A group known as the U.S. Christian Commission issued 40,000 identification tags that were just small pieces of paper with a grommet for attaching to clothing or any other personal item to record the soldier’s personal and military information. Of course, these paper tags did not hold up well in the battle situations or normal wear and tear.

Many soldiers fashioned their own ID tags from metal coins, wood and other bits of scrap. Some only had pieces of paper that they jotted their information on and put in their pockets. Some soldiers that were lying on the field dying would pull out their family photos to clutch in their hands so that by chance if they were found dead, that someone could identify them through the photos.

One of the interesting identification medallions were made from “sea heart,” which was the hard seed pod of the Entada Gigas vine. It was mostly round with an almost heart shape that was very plentiful in the Gulf coast region and soldiers would carve their info into the seed pods.

Some manufacturers picked up on this need and advertised medallions that the soldiers could order for themselves and were advertised in magazines of the day like Leslie’s or Harper’s. Some were expensive gold, while others were cheaper brass or steel. These collectible relics were most often brought home by survivors as the others were in the graves of the dead.

The identifiers also were sometimes taken off of the dead on the battlefields as souvenirs for the victors. One such example is the fact that a Union ID tag was found in the remains of the H.L. Hunley, a well known Confederate submarine. The name on the tag was of a Union soldier named Ezra Chamberlain. Some have speculated that he was a prisoner or a spy, but more than likely one of the other submariners just had a souvenir in his pocket.

Finally, in 1899, Chaplain Pierce of the Army was able to convince the government to issue aluminum ID tags to all soldiers for use in the Spanish-American War, a good 51 years after Stanton’s first call for some kind of identifier!

These Civil War era ID tags are small works of art and very interesting, each telling its own story. To learn more, go to your local library or favorite search engine. Happy collecting!

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