Peaceful acceptance of God’s will, even when it brought death, was an important sign of one’s spiritual condition. But if resignation was necessary for salvation, it was not sufficient. Condolence letters detailed evidence of sanctified behavior that absent relatives had not been able to witness. When Henry Bobo, a Mississippi private, died of wounds received near Richmond in the summer of 1862, his cousin wrote from the field to assure Henry’s parents that their son had a better chance of getting to heaven than they might think. There had been, he reported, a “great change” in Henry’s “way of living” in the months just before his death. Although he had never actually become a professed Christian, Henry had quit swearing and had begun to lead a Christian life. I. B. Cadenhead’s sergeant tried similarly to reassure the soldier’s widow after her husband’s death outside Atlanta in the summer of 1864. “I have had several conversations with him upon the subject of death he sayed to me their was one thing that he was sorry for & that [was] he had not united himself with the church before he left home.” When Asahel Nash was killed in the fall of 1862, his parents wrote their nephews, who had served in the First Ohio with their son, to secure information about his life as well as his death. “We want you to write all you can about Asahel…How were his morals?” The army, they feared, was “a poor place to improve good habits.”38
Perhaps Walter Perry had succumbed to the temptations of camp life, for his brother Frank reported that the soldier expressed great anxiety about his past behavior as he lay dying after Antietam. Frank wrote his family in Georgia that Walter at first “said that he hoped he was prepared to meet his God in a better world than this,” but he knew “he had been a bad, bad, very bad boy.” Frank hastened to assure the dying man that Christ had come to save such sinners. And when Walter failed to mention any of the family by name in his last hours, Frank emphasized that he had nonetheless addressed them implicitly by repeating “Good by, Good by to you all.” Striving to fit his brother’s life and words into the model of the Good Death, Frank Perry consoled his family with a report of Walter’s expressed hope to “meet us all in Heaven.” But hope in this case seemed to fall considerably short of certainty.39
In a letter to his wife informing her of her brother George’s death in 1864, Frank Batchelor worked hard to transform the deceased into a plausible candidate for salvation. Batchelor admitted that George “did not belong to the visible body of Christ’s Church,” but cited his “charity,” “his strong belief in the Bible,” and his rejection of the sins of “envy hatred and malice” to offer his wife hope for her brother’s fate. Batchelor confirmed himself “satisfied” that George was “a man of prayer” and had no doubt at last “found the Savior precious to his sole” before he died. “This being so,” Batchelor happily concluded, his wife could comfort herself with the knowledge she would meet her brother again “in the green fields of Eden.”40
Just as the bereaved looked for persuasive evidence of salvation, so too were they eager for last messages from dying kin. Reports of parting communications to loved ones appeared in almost every condolence letter. Sanford Branch wrote his mother in Georgia after the First Battle of Bull Run to say his brother John’s last words were “about you.” After Private Alfred G. Gardner of Rhode Island was shot at Gettysburg, he charged his sergeant to tell his wife he died happy. T. J. Spurr of Massachusetts expired uttering the word “Mother” Wiley Dorman “asked for his Mother the last word he spoke.” Fathers often exhorted children to complete their education, help their mothers, and say their prayers. With these words dying soldiers brought the names and spirits of absent loved ones to their deathbeds and left their survivors with wishes and instructions that outlived their source. For those at home, news of these final messages reinforced the sense of connectedness to lost kin. Neither family nor soldier was left entirely alone, for these deathbed invocations of absent loved ones worked in some measure to overcome separations. Home and battlefront collaborated in the work of managing the unprecedented realities of Civil War death.41
Soldiers’ efforts to provide consolation for their survivors altered the traditions of the ars moriendi. New kinds of death required changed forms and meanings for consolation. When Civil War condolence letters enumerated evidence of the deceased’s Christian achievements, designed to show his eligibility for salvation, the writer often included details of the soldier’s military performance, his patriotism, and his manliness. “Tell my mother,” one soldier said, “I have stood before the enemy fighting in a great and glorious cause.” In a letter to the widow of a comrade who had died the preceding day, T. Fitzhugh reported all the customary information: her husband had been resigned to death, was conscious of his fate, and sent his love to his wife and children. But he also added that the soldier had “died a glorious death in defense of his Country.”42
The image of the Christian soldier encompassed patriotic duty within the realm of religious obligation. But in some instances patriotism and courage seemed to serve as a replacement for evidence of deep religious faith. After Ball’s Bluff, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. lay severely wounded, wondering if his religious skepticism was going to put him “en route for Hell.” A “deathbed recantation,” he believed, would be “but a cowardly giving way to fear.” With willful profanity, he declared, “I’ll be G-d’d if I know where I’m going.” But he urged his physician to write home in case of his death to say that he had done his duty. “I was very anxious they should know that.”43
Holmes’s worried acknowledgment of his failure to conform to expected belief and behavior ironically affirms the cultural power of the prevailing Christian narrative. Some nonbelievers hoped that patriotism would substitute for religious conviction in ensuring eternal life. A dying Confederate asked a friend, “Johnnie if a boy dies for his country the glory is his forever isn’t it?” He would have found the views of David Cornwell of the Eighth Illinois reassuring. “I couldn’t imagine,” he mused, “the soul of a soldier who had died in the defense of his country being consigned to an orthodox hell, whatever his opinion might be of the plan of salvation.”44
Cornwell’s views, widely held in both armies, seemed to many Protestant clergy an unwarranted theological departure generated by earthly needs rather than transcendent truths. As the Army and Navy Messenger, published in Virginia by the interdenominational Evangelical Tract Society, warned in 1864, patriotism was not piety. “It is not the blood of man, but ‘the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanseth from all sin.’”45
Despite clerical efforts, the boundary between duty to God and duty to country blurred, and dying bravely and manfully became an important part of dying well. For some soldiers it almost served to take the place of the more sacred obligations of holy living that had traditionally prepared the way for the Good Death. Letters comforting Wade Hampton after his son Preston was killed in the fall of 1864 emphasized this juxtaposition of military and Christian duty and sacrifice. William Preston Johnston urged Hampton to remember that his son’s “heroism has culminated in martyrdom,” which should serve as a “consolation for the years he might have lived.” James Connor’s letter to Hampton structured the imperatives of Christianity, military courage, and masculinity into a hierarchy of solace. “Your best consolation will I know my dear Genl,” he wrote, “be drawn from higher than earthly sources[;] still some alleviation of the sorrow is to be drawn from the reflection that Preston died as he had lived, in the path of duty and honor. Young as he was he had played a man’s part in the war.”46
Although Christian principles remained paramount, considerations of courage and honor could also offer “some alleviation of the sorrow” and thus came to play a significant role in Civil War conceptions of holy living and holy dying. A letter written from North Carolina in 1863 to inform William K. Rash that “your son R. A. Rash is no more” is striking in its deviation from the conventional model. It includes no mention of God or religion, simply reporting the ravages of “the Grim monster Death.” All the more significant, then,
is its invocation of the only comfort available in the absence of appeal to the sacred: “But one consolation he died in full discharge of his duty in the defence of his home & Country.” Patriotism and piety converged in what was at once a newly religious conception of the nation and a newly worldly understanding of faith.47
A Bad Death. “The Execution of the Deserter William Johnson.” Harper’s Weekly, December 28, 1861.
For some, even the reassurance of manly duty bravely accomplished remained unavailable. Commanding officers, chaplains, nurses, and friends did all within their power to cast each death as good, to offer grounds for hope to the bereaved. As one postwar chronicler explained, the Catholic Sisters of Mercy who nursed eighteen-year-old David Brant “wrote to his father the least painful account possible of the poor son’s death.” Indeed, attendants of the dying may not have simply waited to report a Good Death but worked instead to compel it by demanding courage and calmness from the moribund or even, as Catholic nurses and chaplains frequently reported, winning consent for last-minute baptisms. These observers were struggling to manage and mitigate some of the horror of the slaughter they encountered daily.48
But sometimes what one Confederate chaplain called “fond and comforting hope” was all but impossible. Hugh McLees, a missionary to South Carolina regiments, noted that “the deathbed of an impenitent and unpardoned sinner is a very awful place yet it is the one where I have been often called to stand.” To stand—but not to describe, for there was little motivation to communicate such distressing information to survivors. But depictions of Bad Deaths could serve as “edifying” examples. Reports of painful, terrifying deaths offered powerful warnings. Father Louis-Hippolyte Gache, a Confederate chaplain, found Freemasons especially likely to die badly, obstinate in rejecting faith to the end. Gache described a man who cursed both him and the church in his “last agony” and thus left his family with a “twofold bereavement: they mourned his physical, and with much more grief, his spiritual death.”49
Perhaps the most widespread version of the Bad Death appeared in the narratives of soldiers’ executions that can be found not only in newspapers and religious publications but in almost every surviving soldier’s diary and every substantial collection of soldiers’ letters. Punishment for desertion or for crimes like murder or rape, executions were more frequent in the Civil War than in any American conflict before or since. They were rituals customarily staged before assemblies of troops and were designed to make a powerful impression and serve a distinct disciplinary purpose. The Charleston Mercury described soldiers seized by “uncontrollable emotion” as their division formed three sides of a square to witness the execution of ten deserters. Soldiers who sat on their coffins as they awaited the firing squad or stumbled up the steps to the gallows served as an unforgettable warning to those who would die well rather than in shame and ignominy. An execution compelled its witnesses literally to confront death and to consider the proper path toward life’s final hour. In the case of execution of deserters, the ceremony offered a particularly pointed contrast between the Good Death in combat and the disgraceful end meted out to those seeking to escape battle’s terrors.50
Executions provided more than just negative examples. The condemned served in many cases as exemplars of hope, for chaplains worked to save these unfortunates from “the second death” and to use them to transmit a compelling educational message. Calm resignation, last-minute expressions of repentance, the enactment of elements of the Good Death even at the foot of the gallows, sometimes even an address from the prisoner urging his fellow soldiers to “beware of his untimely fate”—all provided indelible messages about both good living and good dying, ones that witnesses took very much to heart. These deaths, remarked Catholic chaplain William Corby, “were harder on the nervous system than the scenes witnessed in the middle of a battle, where there is rattle, dash, and excitement to nerve one up for the occasion.” As a Confederate private remarked in a letter to his wife, seeing a man die this way was “awful”—at once horrible and inspiring of awe. Almost any soldier could have written the words penned by one witness to an execution in 1863: “I don’t think I shall ever forget the scene.”51
Military executions made a forceful statement about the need to be prepared to die. As the condemned prisoner scrambled to change his eternal fate with a last-minute conversion or repentance, he reinforced the centrality of readiness to the Good Death. Spiritual preparedness was of course the essence of dying well, but men often demonstrated readiness in more temporal ways. Many popular renditions of the ars moriendi emphasized the importance of settling one’s worldly affairs. A man who arranged for a burial plot on a furlough home was clearly contemplating his mortality, disposing of earthly preoccupations so that his death might bring a satisfactory conclusion to life’s narrative.
Many soldiers recognized their precarious situation by composing wills. “Knowing the uncertainty of life & the uncertainty of death,” Private Edward Bates of Virginia proceeded to arrange for the disposition of his twenty-five dollars of personal property. David Coe of Clarke County, Virginia, composed a will at the very occasion of his enlistment at the Berryville Post Office in June 1861. Calling for pen, ink, and paper, he conscripted postal patrons to serve as witnesses. “As I am about to leave home in these war of the Sothren Confedersey, I leave all I am worth…to my wife.” Thomas Montfort of Georgia found it “sad and melancholy” to see men before battle “preparing for the worst by disposing of their property by will” at the same time the surgeon sharpened his instruments, soldiers readied lint for bandages, and men scattered sand around artillery emplacements, “not for health or cleanliness, but to drink up human blood.” As his unit awaited a Union attack on Savannah’s Fort Pulaski, Montfort passed his time “witnessing wills” for comrades.52
Although the affluent were more likely to prepare wills, many soldiers of lesser means also sought to specify the distribution of their assets, perhaps to try to exert some control over a future in which they would play no part. Attendants in military hospitals often solicited oral declarations from dying soldiers in order to know what to do with their effects. John Edwards’s dying wishes, recorded as his “Noncuptative Will,” by Mr. Hill at the hospital of the 53rd Virginia in April 1862, requested that the forty dollars in his possession be sent to his sister because he knew he was “bound to die.”53
Soldiers’ personal possessions often took on the character of memento mori, relics that retained and represented something of the spirit of the departed. Burns Newman of the Seventh Wisconsin Volunteers undertook the “painful duty” of informing Michael Shortell’s father of his son’s death near Petersburg the preceding evening. “Enclosed,” he continued, “send you some trinkets taken from his person by my hand. Think you will prize them as keepsakes.” A Bible, a watch, a diary, a lock of hair, even the bullet with which a son or a brother had been killed could help to fill the void left by the loved one’s departure, and could help make tangible a loss known only through the abstractions of language.54
In a more figurative sense, condolence letters reporting the details of soldiers’ deaths served as memento mori for kin working to understand wartime loss. Survivors rewrote these narratives of Good Deaths using the condolence letter as a rough draft for a range of printed genres designed to impose meaning and purpose on war’s chaos and destruction. Obituaries often replicated the structure and content of condolence letters, frequently even quoting them directly, describing last moments and last words and assessing the likelihood of a deceased soldier’s salvation. William James Dixon of the Sixth Regiment of South Carolina Volunteers, his obituary reported, had not entered the army as a believer, though he had always “maintained a strictly moral character.” Several battles, however, impressed him with “the mercy of God in his preservation,” so that before his death at Chancellorsville he had “resolved to lead a new life.” His loved ones could, the Daily South Carolinian assured them, safely “mourn not as those who have no hope�
� and could be certain “that their loss is his eternal gain.”55
Civil War Americans worked to construct Good Deaths for themselves and their comrades amid the conditions that made dying—and living—so terrible. As war continued inexorably onward and as death tolls mounted ever higher, soldiers on both sides reported how difficult it became to believe that the slaughter was purposeful and that their sacrifices had meaning. Yet the narratives of the ars moriendi continued to exert their power, as soldiers wrote home about comrades’ deaths in letters that resisted and reframed war’s carnage.
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