Bowditch was not prepared for the force of grief that overtook him. In Virginia to retrieve Nat’s body he sought “concealment” from others lest they witness the feelings he could not hide. He judged himself “ill fitted to see anyone” and was distressed by his “display of unmanliness.” In its implications of loss of control and of weakness, grief seemed to challenge and erode masculinity. Men would find it especially difficult to acknowledge their sorrow and truly mourn.49
When the solace Bowditch sought in faith and nation proved insufficient to mitigate his sorrow, he seemed bewildered that he was unable to contain his grief. With tears as “my constant companion,” he confessed, “my heart seems almost breaking.” But, he wondered, “why do I complain?” There could not have been “a more noble life or a more noble death.” What more could he have hoped for? But this knowledge was not enough. “My whole nature yearns to see & hear him once again.” For months, Bowditch found, “the full force of…affliction would press itself forwards and my first sorrow would return.” It was in vain that he sought refuge in “other sustaining thoughts” of God and country. Grief was so overpowering that his resolution to return promptly to regular life and work proved impossible. “For months at times I have been unable to work at all.”50
Henry Ingersoll Bowditch at the time of the Civil War. Harvard University Archives.
Bowditch found his feelings reflected in a poem entitled “My Child,” by John Pierpont, a fellow abolitionist, a Unitarian clergyman, and a friend. The poem, Bowditch wrote, “tells the tale far better than I can in prose the real story of my constant thought of my soldier boy” it represented the kind of sharing of sorrow Robinson and Cross had advised, and it offered as well a narrative of redemption from suffering and from death. The poet, like Bowditch, could not believe—could not “realize”—this son’s death. “I cannot make him dead!” the first line proclaimed. He saw his “fair sunshining head,” heard his footfall, expected his arrival, but “he is not there!” Like Bowditch yearning with his whole nature to see his son again, the poet at last accepts his child’s absence and then is free to ask the question that will lead to an alleviation of his pain: “Where is he?” The poem ends with the assurance that “we all live to God!,” that we all will meet “in the spirit land,” and “twill be our heaven to find that—he is there!” Accepting a son’s terrestrial death was the first step toward denial of his death in another realm, a sustaining affirmation that elsewhere he was still alive. Pierpont’s poem aided Bowditch in his effort to move to “Hope rather than Mourning.”51
At the same time Bowditch was struggling spiritually to deal with Nat’s loss, he also undertook actions within the world to express and relieve his grief, as well as to ensure Nat’s continuing presence in memory. Arranging for the body to be embalmed so that “it may be seen on my return to Boston” by Nat’s mother, fiancée, siblings, and friends, who were also in need of solace, Bowditch shared his sorrow with the dozens of mourners who attended Nat’s funeral. “You have not lost him,” Reverend James Freeman Clarke’s sermon comforted them; he was “not dead but alive with a higher life” he was “just the other side of the veil,” where “he says…I wait for you all.”52
Bowditch supplemented the formal rituals of religion with rituals of his own. From a ring given Nat by his fiancée together with a “cavalry button cut from his blood-stained vest,” Bowditch fashioned an amulet that he attached to his watch: “There I trust they will remain until I die.” For Nat’s grave at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Bowditch designed another embodiment of his life, exactly copying his sword in stone to serve as a monument. Unable to overcome his preoccupation with his dead son, Bowditch turned his distress into consoling activity, compiling elaborate memorial volumes and scrapbooks that traced Nat from birth to death, a “collation of the letters, journals &c illustrative of his dear young life.” Bowditch did not complete this extensive and therapeutic effort until 1869. “The labor was a sweet one. It took me out of myself.” Coping with Nat’s death required a transcendence and transformation of self.53
Henry Bowditch undertook another action in relief of his own suffering and in honor and memory of his son. His preoccupation with Nat would serve as a lever at last to get, as he put it, “out of myself” and out of his grief in order once again to embrace his reformist commitments: he made Nat’s death, and the long abandonment on the battlefield without medical care that preceded it, a cause célèbre in the effort to establish adequate ambulance service in the Union army, a goal that was achieved in the last year of the war. Bowditch transformed Nat’s suffering into the salvation of others.
In the twenty-first century Americans considering the impact of death regularly invoke the notion of “closure,” the hope and anticipation of an end to the disruption of loss. Civil War Americans expected no such relief. For hundreds of thousands, the unknown fate of missing kin left a “dread void of uncertainty” that knowledge would never fill. Even for those who had detailed information or, better still, the consolation of a body and a grave, mourning had no easy or finite end. Many bereaved spent the rest of their lives waiting for the promised heavenly reunion with those who had gone before. Wives, parents, children, and siblings struggled with the new identities—widows, orphans, the childless—that now defined their lives. And they carried their losses into the acts of memory that both fed on and nurtured the widely shared grief well into the next century.
But if such devastating loss could not be denied, if it was “realized” and acknowledged, it had to be explained. The Civil War’s carnage required that death be given meaning.
CHAPTER 6
BELIEVING AND DOUBTING
“What Means this Carnage?”
“How does God have the heart to allow it?”
SIDNEY LANIER
What is Death?” Reverend John Sweet asked “a large assemblage” of mourners dressed in “somber black” who had gathered at services for Edward Amos Adams of the 59th Massachusetts in July 1864. Adams had died ten days after being wounded at Petersburg, a victim in the series of bloody assaults that Grant had launched in the effort to dislodge Lee’s army from its position some twenty miles south of Richmond. Age twenty-four, a member of Billerica’s Baptist church, a seaman turned teacher, Adams took his place in a long line of losses suffered by his community and his state. “Once again,” Sweet observed, “we are in the house of mourning.” Another soldier killed; another family bereaved; another funeral observed: “There is not a household exempt from the universal lamentation which ascends from a grief stricken people.” More than three years into the conflict Sweet turned to what had become a central question, even preoccupation, for many Americans of both North and South. Where had all those young men gone? Friends and relatives who rushed to battlefields in the effort to locate their bodies undertook what was in some sense just the first step in the search for the missing. Even if their material remains could be retrieved and decently buried, the fate of the self and the soul, as well as the meaning of the departed life, remained unknown. Survivors like those gathered on a New England midsummer’s day in 1864 asked with new war-born urgency what happened when life on earth ceased.1
Americans on the eve of civil war found their traditional systems of belief both powerfully challenged and fervently reaffirmed. Although the United States had been established as a secular state by founders wary of religious influences upon government, religion defined the values and assumptions of most mid-nineteenth-century Americans. Nearly four times as many attended church every Sunday in 1860 as voted in that year’s critical presidential election. Overwhelmingly Christian and Protestant, Americans were also increasingly evangelical, committed to the hope of salvation, and eager to seize their own responsibility for any future beyond the grave. Calvinist notions of predestination that had characterized much of American Christianity in the colonial era had yielded to waves of nineteenth-century revivals, culminating in widespread religious enthusiasm in the 1850s. Historian Richard Carwardine
has concluded that by midcentury “over 10 million Americans, or about 40 percent of the population, appear…to have been in close sympathy with evangelical Christianity. This was the largest, and most formidable, subculture in American society.” With its concerted attention to salvation, evangelicalism made the afterlife the focus of American religious belief and practice.2
Still, reflective Christians in this nineteenth-century age of progress faced troubling questions about the foundations of their faith. New historical and philological scholarship and new forms of textual criticism had raised doubts about the literal truth of the Bible. As southerners amassed evidence of scriptural support for slavery, antislavery northerners sought and found different meanings. These divisions in interpretation marked more than just sectional disagreement; they represented a new uncertainty about the undisputed and indisputable power of the Bible itself, an unsettling contingency that struck at the very bases of conviction.
Even more disturbing than issues of biblical interpretation were the questions that science posed for religious belief. Geological discoveries about the vast age of the Earth discredited scriptural accounts of creation, suggesting a much diminished and distanced role for any divine creator. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in the early 1830s, challenged the veracity of Genesis by demonstrating that the Earth was millions of years old, not the six or seven thousand postulated by Scripture. Darwin’s theories of evolution, shared and discussed in preliminary form with American scientists well before the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, further challenged biblical literalism and replaced notions of divine teleology and benevolence with the heartless mechanisms of natural selection.3
Nevertheless, traditional religious arguments from design, which understood God to be the prime mover behind all scientific processes, rationalized persisting faith in a divine presence; most Americans continued to regard science and religion as in alliance rather than in conflict well into the late nineteenth century. But this reconciliation required intellectual effort and left its adherents with a universe in which the place of both humans and God had changed. The possibility and plausibility of scientific explanation strengthened the claims of the rational and worldly against the force of the transcendent. Humans had been moved into the realm of animals, and God threatened a distressing indifference to the fall of every sparrow.4
Rather than emphasizing the compatibility of new discoveries with older beliefs, some Americans sought to fuel skepticism about revealed religion. The intellectual ferment of New England Transcendentalism challenged many accepted religious truths. As early as the 1830s Ralph Waldo Emerson announced in a lecture at Harvard Divinity School that he no longer believed in the divinity of Christ. “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of Redemption absolutely incredible.” Freethinkers like Robert Owen and Fanny Wright argued for a materialism that reduced human consciousness to nothing more than brain function, a position reinforced by widely hailed, if still controversial, neurological discoveries about cerebral localization. Phrenology, the belief that character and personality could be derived from the shape and contours of the head, brought these ideas to a wide popular audience. Poet James Russell Lowell described how this growing materialism had begun to define the age:
This nineteenth century with its knife and glass
That make thought physical.
Uncertainty about the relationship of biology and consciousness, of body and soul, troubled even the most devout, who speculated about the definition of the human spirit and the justification for belief in immortality.5
Into this environment of cultural ferment, the Civil War introduced mass death. For an increasingly humanitarian age, such suffering could not help but raise disturbing questions about God’s benevolence and agency. But this was more than an abstract intellectual issue for the hundreds of thousands of Americans bereaved by the war. Loss demanded an explanation that satisfied hearts as well as minds.
Religion remained the most readily available explanatory resource, even as it was challenged by rapid cultural and intellectual change. Reverend John Sweet’s all-too-timely query, “What is Death?” had long served as a foundation and central concern of Christian doctrine. Sweet’s answer, “It is the middle point between two lives,” reveals much of the substance and the solace of belief. In the face of war’s slaughter, mid-nineteenth-century religion promised that there need be no death. Only a willful failure to believe could bring humans to the dread “second death” that cast them into hell. “Turn ye! Turn ye! for why will ye die?” a chaplain’s powerful sermon demanded of Confederate soldiers; “Why Will You Die?” a widely distributed Confederate tract reiterated. Death was a matter of choice and could be consciously rejected in favor of immortality. Soldiers need not be victims; even if their earthly destiny was beyond their control, they remained the masters of their more important eternal fate.6
Such convictions, as we have seen in the ritual of the Good Death, made both dying and mourning easier. Some historians have argued that, in fact, only the widespread existence of such beliefs made acceptance of the Civil War death tolls possible, and that religion thus in some sense enabled the slaughter. Confidence in immortality could encourage soldiers to risk annihilation. Civil War Americans themselves would not have questioned what one Confederate chaplain called the “military power of religion.” It is hard to imagine today a letter like the one a northern nurse sent from the front to a friend in 1864: “I should hardly think it worthwhile,” she remarked, “for Rebecca to grieve much for a dead person for she certainly will soon be with them in heaven.” Firm conviction could yield confidence that bordered on heartlessness and, in some cases, behavior that approached recklessness. But the long tradition of Christian soldiery would have cast religion’s contributions to war more positively, emphasizing faith as a fundamental motivation to religious and patriotic duty. Evangelical tracts and preachers, for example, repeatedly invoked the word “efficiency” in their communications to the troops. The Christian soldier, these preachers and exhorters explained, would be an efficient soldier because he would execute his obligations “conscientiously” and would not be afraid to die.7
Thomas B. Hampton of southwest Virginia became an exemplar of such a man, filling his letters to his wife, Jestin, with professions of his steadily growing religious faith as his regiment passed through the trials of Chickamauga, Resaca, and Atlanta. When the Confederate army was convulsed by religious revivals from the fall of 1862 onward, Hampton increasingly looked toward refuge in a “heaven where wars & rumors of wars are no more.” His company, he reported, held prayer meetings “nearly every night…a beautiful and sublime sight.” War, he found, was weaning him “from the things of this world.” His anticipations of death as relief from the horrors of battle focused his mind on what preachers like John Sweet offered as a second life beyond the grave: “although I may fall by the sword or by the missiles of the enemy I will fear no evil for I verily believe that my sole will be loosed from this prision of mortality to traverse the regions of the celestial skies of Glory I may fall by some of the monsters Disease of camp but still I will put my trust in the Lord for he knoweth all things and doth all things aright.”8
For hundreds of thousands of soldiers, some believers before their enlistment but many converted by revivals that swept armies of both North and South, death became a fixation. But often it was not so much as a fear but as a promise—of relief, of salvation from war and suffering, and of an escape into a better world. “I rather believe,” Thomas Hampton wrote, “if my friends knew the hardships that is incumbent on a soldier that they would scarsely begrudge a withdrawal from this Tabernacle of Mortality to that of Immortal Glory for which I often long to see.” Death offered these devout men a “change” but not an ending; the celestial skies of Glory became more alluring than the bloody fields of Georgia or Virginia. Spared the direct experience of combat, civilians were less likely to
acknowledge death’s attractions, but they too found in religious doctrine the means to diminish its horror and to manage the losses war inflicted upon them. As Hampton’s wife explained, “I suffer all the time about you. Not half So much as I should if I knew you were not prepared. That is the greatest comfort of all believing if you fall by the hand of the enemy or disease you will rest in heaven…if it was not for the great hope I have I never could bear up under the present distress.”9
Thomas Hampton survived until the very last month of the war, when he was mortally wounded near Bentonville, North Carolina. His obituary reported that he died “in the full triumphs of faith.” Hampton sent word to Jestin “not to greave for him for he was going to be far better off than…in this troublesome world.” He would see her again in “Bright mansions above.”10
There has been much discussion in our own time of the denial of death, of the refusal of contemporary American culture to confront or discuss it. In widely read books and essays published in the 1970s and early 1980s, historian Philippe Ariès accused Western Europe and the United States of making death “invisible.” Modern dying, he argued, had been medicalized; mourning was regarded as “indecent.” Death had become as unmentionable as pornography.11 In the Civil War death was hardly hidden, but it was nevertheless, seemingly paradoxically, denied—not through silence and invisibility but through an active and concerted work of reconceptualization that rendered it a cultural preoccupation. Redefined as eternal life, death was celebrated in mid-nineteenth-century America. But its centrality, in popular culture as well as religious discourse, suggested that great effort was required to control and repudiate its terrors. Songs, poems, and stories struggled to answer the same question Reverend Sweet had posed to his afflicted congregation. “My God! What is all this For?” the title on one songsheet demanded:
This Republic of Suffering Page 18