This Republic of Suffering

by Drew Gilpin Faust

  Survivors sought material evidence that could convince their often “rebellious hearts” of the unfathomable and intolerable news that confronted them. Just two years after James’s death another Palmer son and brother was killed. When bits of his clothing were forwarded to his family, his young widow, Alice, greeted them with relief: “The last lingering hopes have all been crushed. None of us could mistake those pieces of cloth. I thank God that he had on clothes that we knew. Otherwise we never would have felt sure that they were his precious remains.”17

  Alice Palmer was among the fortunate. Hundreds of thousands of wives, parents, children, and siblings of unidentified and missing men would never have what she called the “melancholy satisfaction” of irrefutable evidence to serve as a foundation for emotional acceptance of loss. The intensity with which Civil War Americans sought to retrieve the bodies of their slain kin arose in no small part from this need to make loss real by rendering it visible and tangible. A Union nurse described a young wife after Antietam “whose frantic grief I can never forget.” Told that her husband had been buried two days before she arrived in search of him, she was “unwilling to believe the fact” and “insisted upon seeing him.” His comrades kindly agreed to disinter the body. One glance quieted her frenzy as she sank beneath “the stern reality of this crushing sorrow” and made plans to take the body back to Philadelphia. The “stern reality” represented by a body succeeded in establishing “the fact” of death in her mind, and the new widow began to move from resistance to acceptance of her cruel fate and her new identity.18

  John Saunders Palmer Jr. with his wife of less than a year, Alice Ann Gaillard Palmer. South Caroliniana Library.

  To embody—quite literally—death was one way to make it real. But the effort to render death palpable included as well the creation of visible symbols of grief that could be used to rehearse and enact the new roles the bereaved now occupied. In the mid-nineteenth century respectable Americans, or those who aspired to be considered among their ranks, customarily observed a formal period of bereavement after the death of a spouse or relative. The first ladies of both North and South spent much of the war garbed in mourning, for each endured the loss of a young child, Mary Lincoln’s Willie and Varina Davis’s Joseph, who fell from the porch of the executive mansion in Richmond. Mary Lincoln remained in deep mourning for more than a year after Willie’s death, dressing in black veils, black crape “without the gloss,” and black jewelry. By 1863 she had progressed to half mourning and appeared in lavender, gray, and some purples, with a little white trim visible at the wrist. But after her husband’s assassination, she returned to full mourning for the rest of her life. Men, too, wore tokens of mourning, armbands for lost kin, badges and rosettes, like those displayed by Virginia Military Institute cadets and officers for a month after Stonewall Jackson’s death.19

  Half-mourning dress of Varina Howell Davis. The Museum of the Confederacy.

  By convention, a mother mourned for a child for a year, a child for a parent the same, a sister six months for a brother. A widow mourned for two and a half years, moving through prescribed stages and accoutrements of heavy, full, and half mourning, with gradually loosening requirements of dress and deportment. A widower, by contrast, was expected to mourn only for three months, simply by displaying black crape on his hat or armband. The work of mourning was largely allocated to women. The exigencies of war and, in the South, shortages of clothing and money undermined the rigidity of these expectations. But war’s changed circumstances prompted desire to replace necessity. Even as expectations loosened, women sought the solace they hoped the costumes and customs of mourning could provide. Many women struggled to find the garments that would enable them to participate in this rite of passage and display of respect. Formal observance of mourning created a sense of process, encouraging the bereaved to believe they could move through their despair, which might evolve through stages of grief represented by their changing clothing: from the flat black silks, veils, and crape of heavy mourning, to the white trim and collars acceptable in full mourning, to the grays and lavenders that half mourning introduced, until at last they returned fully to the world and their customary attire.20

  In the South, where 18 percent of white males of military age perished in the war, death was omnipresent, and fabrics and fashions were scarce. As the Daily South Carolinian asked in 1864, “Who has not lost a friend during the war? We are literally a land of mourning.” Confederate women, especially in cities and towns, seem to have done all they could to overcome obstacles to securing appropriate mourning dress, which promised the consolation of visibly shared misery. The southern death toll produced a uniformed sorority of grief. As Lucy Breckinridge of Virginia remarked, “There were so many ladies here, all dressed in deep mourning, that we felt as if we were at a convent and formed a sisterhood.” When the Yankees entered Richmond in April 1865, a New York newspaperman observed, “the women are nearly all dressed in mourning.”21

  Teenaged Nannie Haskins of Tennessee was outraged when a visitor told her how well she looked in black after her brother’s death. “Becomes me fiddlestick,” she wrote. “What do I care whether it becomes me or not? I don’t wear black because it becomes me…I wear mourning because it corresponds with my feelings.” Mourning garb was, to paraphrase language that Saint Augustine used to describe the Christian sacraments, an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible state.22

  “Women in Mourning, Cemetery in New Orleans.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 25, 1863.

  Susan Caldwell of Warrenton, Virginia, was eager to wear mourning after the death of her child in the fall of 1864. But her husband, Lycurgus, wrote from the army to forbid it. “You have too many things already to remind you of your bereavement and oppress your spirits—and our pecuniary circumstances will not permit it.” Susan was not worried about being reminded of her grief; she was not likely to forget it, and she longed for a way to express her sorrow. She sadly but dutifully replied, “My dress at present corresponds but little with my mournful aching heart but I am willing to do as you wish me.”23

  Acquiring mourning apparel in the Civil War South required effort, even ingenuity, and often considerable expenditure. After receiving news of the death of her son Romulus in 1862, Margaret Gwyn of Georgia bought some “mourning goods” at the local store and began to sew a black dress. A woman of modest circumstances, she dyed other of her clothes to make them a suitable expression of her grief. As she worked, “my eyes was often filled with tears which is a relief to the troubled mind.” A woman near Fredericksburg could not decide whether to don mourning in 1863, for she was “not willing to leave off col[ors], unless she can procure a handsome outfit in black, and that cannot be had though she is perfectly regardless of expense.” Merchants in southern cities and towns announced successful acquisition of fabric and fashions in newspaper advertisements with a triumphant tone that reflected the scarcity of such goods. The Daily South Carolinian regularly carried notices when shipments arrived, often smuggled through the blockade. In “News for Ladies” the paper whetted appetites by describing in detail the elaborate mourning attire in fashion across the Atlantic.24

  “View of the ‘Burnt District,’ Richmond, Va.” Library of Congress.

  In the North, where the rate of death of men of military age was one-third that in the Confederacy, mourning was less universal, and the goods that made it possible proved more readily available.25 Advertisements in northern papers announced far greater variety and availability of wares both in specialty stores and in more general establishments like New York’s Lord & Taylor, which opened its own mourning department in April 1863. At Besson & Son, Mourning Store, at 918 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, one could find in July 1863—just in time for Gettysburg—a veritable taxonomy of mourning fabrics all but unrecognizable by twenty-first-century Americans:

  Black Crape Grenadines

  Black Balzerines

  Black Baryadere Bareges

 
Black Bareges

  Black Barege Hernani, Silk Grenadines, Challies,

  Summer Bombazines, Mousseline de Laines,

  Tamises, Mourning Silks, Lawns, Chintzes, Alpacas,

  Barege Shawls, Grenadine Veils, English Crapes and

  Veils, Collars, Sleeves &c, &c26

  Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most popular American women’s periodical and the nation’s most important arbiter of fashion, regularly presented drawings of bonnets, collars, sleeves—even breakfast caps—suitable for half or full mourning, as well as illustrations of a variety of mourning dresses for all occasions. Mourning clearly did not dictate seclusion; the fashionable—and wealthy—bereaved woman sought appropriate attire for a wide range of social activities. In 1865 the magazine portrayed a “Promenade Suit for Second Mourning, From the celebrated establishment of Messrs. A T. Stewart & Co. of New York.” The elaborate dress and shawl were of white organdy, dotted in black and violet and bordered in slightly different shades of the same. Each issue of Godey’s featured a full-page hand-tinted portrait of a group of ladies, usually five, modeling a variety of the latest fashions—a “walking costume,” a dinner dress, an evening dress, a “visiting dress,” a “bridal toilet,” or perhaps a “reception dress.” One of these ladies was always dressed in mourning. In June 1862, for example, the figure at the far left of the illustration wore a black silk and French grenadine “costume for a watering-place, and suitable for half mourning,” together with a Leghorn hat, trimmed with black velvet and black plume, as she stood beside her companions in dinner dress, walking costume, and riding habit; May 1864 brought an evening dress for second mourning complemented by a coiffure adorned in black velvet and lavender daisies.27

  Lady on far left fashionably dressed in half mourning. “Godey’s Fashions for June 1862.” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, June 1862.

  Like the formal mourning period, the funeral provided the opportunity for survivors to enact—and thus in some measure assuage—their grief, as well as to honor the deceased. A community of friends and relatives shared this ritual affirmation of loss and marked the new status of each mourner, now deprived of husband, father, brother, or son. Many Civil War funerals were also occasions for displays of patriotism, especially during the early months of the conflict when soldiers’ deaths were novel and often marked with elaborate public ceremony. In May 1861, Boston greeted three Massachusetts soldiers killed in secessionist rioting in Baltimore with a procession to the Common, accompanied by a band and crowds of weeping citizens, men and women alike. When Charleston’s dead were returned after First Bull Run in July 1861, business was suspended throughout the city, and three cavalry companies escorted the bodies from the railroad station to City Hall, where they lay in state until more than a thousand soldiers accompanied them first to St. Paul’s Church for divine services and then to Magnolia Cemetery.28

  “Women in Mourning at Stonewall Jackson’s Grave, circa 1866.” Virginia Military Institute Archives.

  Deaths soon became too numerous to warrant such public demonstrations for any but the most prominent figures. Stonewall Jackson’s death in 1863, however, provided the occasion for an outpouring of grief across the Confederacy, for the combination of his legendary piety with his military successes rendered him the ideal embodiment of the Christian Soldier. Lee would indeed have reason to mourn his loss in the campaigns to come, but in marking his death the Confederate nation also asserted its claims to religious superiority. Such a man as Jackson, the observances underlined, would fight only for a cause that had God on its side. Jackson had died in Guiney’s Station, Virginia, on Sunday, May 10, 1863, from pneumonia contracted after the amputation of his arm, injured by accidental fire from his own men a week before. Virginia’s governor dispatched a railroad car to bring Jackson’s remains to Richmond, forty-five miles away. Crowds gathered along the route, and all business in the Confederate capital was suspended. Black crape hung throughout the city; black even decorated the mastheads of the local newspapers; church bells tolled; and thousands assembled to accompany the coffin in a hearse pulled by two white horses to the governor’s mansion. Jefferson Davis and other dignitaries paid their respects, though Lee dared not leave his post at the front. Later that night Jackson’s body was embalmed and a death mask made of his face. The next day soldiers, Confederate statesmen and cabinet officials, judges, and additional crowds formed a funeral cortege that paraded two and a half miles through central Richmond before depositing Jackson’s metal coffin in the Confederate House of Representatives, where twenty thousand filed past well into the night.

  The next morning the trip to Jackson’s home and burial site in Lexington, Virginia, began. Through two train trips and a final leg on a packet boat, the general’s remains were greeted by artillery salutes, the tolling of church bells, garlands of spring flowers, and throngs of grieving admirers. Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson had taught before the war, was ready to receive its son, placing him to lie in state in his old lecture room, then honoring him with a parade of VMI cadets and faculty, local officials, recovering soldiers from a nearby hospital, religious worthies, and a squadron of Confederate cavalry who happened to be passing through town.

  By this time, the ceremonies marking his death had gone on for so long that his imperfectly embalmed body began to show signs of deterioration, suggesting that a prompt end to the observances might be in order. The VMI cadet who served as officer of the day later remembered, “His body was said to be embalmed, but of no avail. Decomposition had already taken place, in consequence of which his face was not exposed to view as the features were said not to be natural.” Brief funeral services were performed at the Presbyterian church where Jackson had been a deacon. His pastor, William White, offered a Bible reading and a sermon based on Corinthians 1:15: “O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” The congregation sang “How Blest the Righteous When He Dies.” For this Christian soldier, death was cast as his greatest triumph.29

  Two springs later another outpouring of grief gripped a segment of Americans quite different from the white southerners who had mourned Jackson. Once again religion and patriotism united in the ritual observance of the passing of one who embodied popular hopes and sacrifices. Lincoln died on Good Friday, less than a week after Lee’s surrender, just as the war’s killing promised to end. His death was the ultimate death—and became in many ways emblematic of all the losses of the war. A national outpouring of grief represented an aggregation of the war’s woe. It was, in the words of one popular song sheet, the “National Funeral.” Lincoln’s death was at once each soldier’s death and all soldiers’ deaths, but it also served purposes beyond catharsis. The parallels between Lincoln and Christ were powerful and unavoidable, reinforcing belief in the war’s divine purpose, realized through the sacrifice of the one for the many. When Congregational clergyman Leonard Swain proclaimed in an Easter Sunday sermon in Providence that “one man has died for the people, in order that the whole nation might not perish,” he invoked the Christian narrative of redemption as well as the very words of Lincoln himself, uttered two years earlier at Gettysburg. Lincoln’s death had both broadly transcendent and specifically national significance, tying American purposes to those of God.30

  Funeral observances for the president acknowledged and intensified his connection with the American people. Twenty-five thousand men and women filed by his open casket as it lay in state in the East Room of the White House. The service itself, by invitation only, was attended by six hundred, not including Mary Lincoln, who was too distraught to appear. A funeral procession of soldiers and dignitaries accompanied Lincoln’s hearse, drawn by six gray horses, to the Capitol, where the president lay in state as lines of mourners passed. Across the nation a variety of observances marked the funeral day: a procession of twenty thousand in Memphis, a large gathering in San Francisco, an address by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Massachusetts, and throughout the northern states, as the New York Herald reported, “uni
versal suspension of ordinary avocations and a closing of places of business.”31

  From the Capitol, Lincoln’s body was taken to the railroad station to begin the seventeen-hundred-mile journey to Springfield, Illinois, and his grave. At each stop—Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago—mourners paid homage to the slain president. In Philadelphia his coffin lay in Independence Hall, while a column of people three miles long waited to view his remains. In New York the Herald estimated that 75,000 marched with his cortege while ten times that number watched from sidewalks and rooftops. Everywhere black Americans seemed to manifest particular sorrow—weeping along the routes of his cortege, marching in proud units of U.S. Colored Troops in processions that accompanied his hearse, writing poems and essays in the African American press, and proclaiming from the pulpit. “We, as a people,” declared the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Troy, New York, “feel more than all others that we are bereaved. We had learned to love Mr. Lincoln…We looked up to him as our saviour, our deliverer.”32