During the second year of the war Dickinson began a correspondence that would prove one of the most important of her life, with a man she came to call her “preceptor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She had inaugurated the exchange in response to an essay he published about aspiring writers in the Atlantic Monthly of April 1862. But Higginson was more than a man of letters. Long an abolitionist, he accepted command of a regiment of black soldiers and early in 1863 departed for South Carolina. Although she would not actually meet him until 1870, Dickinson feared the grief his loss in battle would bring. “Could you, with honor, avoid death, I entreat you, sir—It would bereave Your Gnome”73
Dickinson understood loss, for citizens of her tight-knit Massachusetts town had already been claimed by war. The death of Frazer Stearns, son of the Amherst College president, at New Berne, North Carolina, in March 1862 had cast the whole community into mourning. Emily described her brother Austin as “stunned completely” by the news of his friend’s demise. She had seen young Stearns ride through Amherst with his sword and comrades at his side, and now “crowds came to tell him goodnight, choirs sang to him, pastors told how brave he was…And the family bowed their heads, as the reed the wind shakes.” Her fears about Higginson’s fate grew out of very direct experience with war’s cost.74
Emily Dickinson may have been preoccupied with the theme of death well before the outbreak of conflict, but national conflagration gave her a new language and a new context in which to contemplate its meaning. In writing to Higginson of the war, she herself acknowledged that the loss of friends to death that struck “sharp and early” had created in her “a brittle love—of more alarm, than peace.” And she understood that war placed her own despair in a new relationship to the afflictions of others around her. “Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began; and if the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines.” War provided Dickinson with inexhaustible material for her metaphysical speculations. The worth and meaning of human life were for her defined by death’s cost and promise, just as the war itself constantly demanded a balance sheet of loss and purpose. Her poetry uses the deaths of war to ask timeless questions, but her speculations at the same time engage more timely issues that also tormented her far less gifted contemporaries. She too sought to understand the meaning of war’s carnage, the price of victory and defeat, and the implications of Civil War slaughter for the Christian faith that shaped how most Americans lived their lives.75
Dickinson dwelled, as she wrote, “in Possibility.” In the face of doubt, she searched for “Paradise,” for firm foundations for belief, for signs of immortality to relieve her deep uncertainty. She felt herself isolated from the community of believers and once described her family to Higginson as “religious, except me.” Like so many reflective Americans of her time, she grappled with the contradictions of spirit and matter and with their implications for heaven and for God. Death seemed a “Dialogue between the Spirit and the Dust,” an argument left painfully unresolved. Dickinson wondered where she might find heaven (“I’m knocking everywhere”) and what an afterlife might be (“Is Heaven a place—a Sky—a Tree?”). She speculated too on the possibility of corporeal immortality: “I felt my life with both my hands / To see if it was there.” But she could not resolve her uncertainty and found no sure comfort in a “religion / that doubts as fervently as it believes.” Death remained inexorable.76
All but Death, can be Adjusted—
…….….….……
Death—unto itself—Exception
Is exempt from Change.77
Ironically, it was death, not life, that seemed eternal, for it “perishes—to live anew…Annihilation—plated fresh / With Immortality.” No terrestrial justifications, no military or political purposes balance this loss; victory cannot compensate; it “comes late” to those already dead, whose “freezing lips” are “too rapt with frost / to take it.” Dickinson permits herself no relief or escape into either easy transcendence or sentimentality. Instead she faces death in its horror, as “Piles of solid Moan,” and explores how death challenges God’s presence and benevolence, as it raises questions about her own worth and destiny. “It feels a shame to be Alive—/ When Men so brave—are dead.” She, like Bierce, finds herself “sentenced to life.” Dickinson makes clear that the soul’s internal battle is “of all the battles prevalent—/ By far the Greater One—.” But the circumstances of national conflict illustrated and objectified her inner turmoil and encouraged four years of extraordinary poetic productivity.78
Critics writing about Dickinson, Bierce, and Melville have identified in each of them characteristics associated with “modernity.” The challenge to certainty is an important dimension of this designation; each of these writers grapples with religious doubt, and all adopt an irony that reflects anxiety about deception and delusion. All three seek, to borrow Melville’s word, to “undeceive.” But their doubts affect the form as well as the substance of their work. Melville resorts to poetry from the impossibility of narrative. As Helen Vendler has written, Melville recognizes that the war requires “a new sort of language and rhyme.” No comprehensive understanding is possible; any vantage offers, as he writes in “Armies of the Wilderness,” only “glimpses” and only “hints at the maze of war.”79
Bierce similarly eschews any effort at synthesis or claim to omniscience. He writes only of what “I saw” at Shiloh, offers just “A Little of Chickamauga”—once again “what I saw of it.” He trusts his knowledge only of what he has directly experienced. His short stories are like snapshots. War cannot be understood or communicated as a grand panorama. It is real only in the context of individual lives—and deaths. This individualization undermines war’s coherence and ignores any larger purpose. Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary represents yet another presentation of fragments, within a form that undermines the very essence of its genre. Instead of a compilation of ordered meanings, Bierce offers definitions that challenge—even reject—meaning, with mockery and irony.
Dickinson’s poetry was revolutionary in its departure from the order and logic of prevailing poetic form.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before—
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls—upon a Floor,
she wrote in 1864. Marked by discontinuities, her poems were assailed after their posthumous publication by critics who deplored their travesties of grammar and syntax. But contemporary critics see in these attributes the embodiment of Dickinson’s doubts about the foundations of understanding and coherence. Shira Wolosky has argued that Dickinson’s poetry challenges “the whole question of linguistic meaning and of meaning in general.” This is a crisis of language and epistemology as much as one of eschatology; it is about not just whether there is a God and whether we can know him but whether we can know or communicate anything at all.80
Dickinson’s poems did not appear in print for three decades after the Civil War; Melville’s Battle-Pieces, published in 1866, sold about five hundred copies; Bierce was well known as a journalist but did not begin to publish his writings about the war until nearly twenty years after Appomattox. The significance of these authors’ understanding of war’s destruction does not lie in their influence upon popular thought. Nor can they be seen as representative of widely held views. Their writings instead provide access into one point on the spectrum of possible reactions to the crisis of belief that war presented to mid-nineteenth-century America. Dickinson, Melville, and Bierce transformed the need to grapple with the meaning of national conflagration into broad and lasting questions about the foundations of religion and of human understanding. Each of these authors has been regarded as a way station on the route to the modernist disillusion that would be associated with the even more destructive war that erupted in 1914. That very connection with the future suggests the tenuous relationship that each writer had with the prevailing assumpt
ions and outlook of an earlier time. But the Civil War contributed to the ability of each of these authors to see the world in the framework and images that made his or her work possible. And in mapping the contours of doubt, Dickinson, Melville, and Bierce helped delineate the broader topography of belief and unbelief that grew from the war. It is, in fact, striking to see that their sense of a failure of knowledge and understanding was widely articulated by ordinary Americans.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called the experience of war “incommunicable.” Fellow soldiers felt the same and filled their letters and diaries with declarations of their inability to describe what they had seen. “Language would in no way express the true picture as it really was,” Confederate Reuben Allen Pierson wrote his father after Gaines Mill in 1862, emphasizing in his redundancy both the power and the inaccessibility of his experience. A depiction of Chickamauga, James Suiter of the 84th Illinois wrote in his diary, “would be an absolute impossibility.” Daniel Holt, a Union surgeon, proclaimed battle “indescribable” in its horror. John Casler of the Stonewall Brigade struggled for words to tell his parents about his first experience of combat: “I have not power to describe the scene. It beggars all description.” Like Melville, the soldiers found war beyond narration.81
Women nurses and relief workers responded to the suffering they witnessed at the front with a similar sense of verbal incapacity. In 1862, Cordelia Harvey wrote home from Tennessee to Madison’s Wisconsin State Journal, “There are times when the meaning of words seem to fade away; so entirely does our language fail to express the reality. This fact I never so fully realized as when attempting to depict the suffering, both mental and physical, which I have witnessed within the last ten days.” Confederate Kate Cumming reacted to her entry onto the wards in almost identical terms. “I do not think that words are in our vocabulary expressive enough to present to the mind the realities of that sad scene.” Suffering exceeded language and understanding.82
But even if they could not explain the experience of war, they could not escape it. “A battle is indescribable,” a Union chaplain wrote after Fredericksburg, “but once seen it haunts a man till the day of his death.” Like Bierce, who declared himself possessed “by visions of the dead and dying,” many witnesses to the Civil War could not exorcise the phantoms of war by transforming them into reassuring religious or patriotic narratives of redemptive sacrifice. They remained glimpses, fragments, “visions,” sights not stories, visual rather than explanatory in their effect.83
Civil War carnage transformed the mid-nineteenth century’s growing sense of religious doubt into a crisis of belief that propelled many Americans to redefine or even reject their faith in a benevolent and responsive deity. But Civil War death and devastation also planted seeds of a more profound doubt about human ability to know and to understand. In an environment in which man seemed already increasingly undifferentiated from animals, the failure of the uniquely human capacity of language represented another assault upon the foundations of the self. The Civil War compelled Americans to ask with intensified urgency, “What is Death?” and in answering to find themselves wondering why is death, what is life, and can we ever hope to know? We have continued to wonder ever since.
CHAPTER 7
ACCOUNTING
“Our Obligations to the Dead”
“Such a consecration of a nation’s power and resources to a sentiment, the world has never witnessed.”
EDMUND B. WHITMAN
Only a little more than three months had passed since Appomattox when Horace Bushnell addressed the annual reunion of Yale alumni in July 1865. Asked to honor those Yale graduates who had lost their lives in the conflict, Bushnell insisted he could not and should not distinguish fellow collegians from the legions of those who had perished. Instead he spoke of all the Union dead, calling for the nation to acknowledge its debt to the fallen. Bushnell’s oration, “Our Obligations to the Dead,” sought to define the war’s meaning as inseparable from its human cost. In effect, he submitted to the reunited nation a bill on behalf of those who had paid the ultimate price during four years of conflict. In a language of gain and loss, of earning, buying, paying, and owing, Bushnell called Americans to account, demanding that the hundreds of thousands of lives lost be rendered purposeful, worth their expense of blood and suffering.1
Bushnell was far from alone in invoking and extolling the dead in the weeks after southern surrender. Just a few days before Bushnell’s Yale oration, for example, James Russell Lowell had stood before a parallel gathering of Harvard graduates in Cambridge to read a lengthy ode—more than four hundred lines—written to commemorate lost classmates. Twentieth-century novelist and critic Richard Marius once remarked that “on a hot summer day in Cambridge, this wretched poem must have been only slightly less painful than battle itself.” Romantic, sentimental, replete with rhetorical flourishes and classical and biblical references, Lowell’s ode hailed northern victory and mourned those missing from the assembly of graduates. “In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, / Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, / Dark to the triumph which they died to gain.” But Lowell’s empyrean salute to the “sacred dead” contrasted sharply with Bushnell’s pragmatic recognition that the living bore specific obligations to those who had perished. Bushnell’s remarks appealed to a widespread desire to translate commemoration into concrete action and to address what were seen as the enduring needs of the slain.2
The war’s work of killing was complete, but the claims of the dead endured. Many soldiers lay unburied, their bones littering battlefields across the South; still more had been hastily interred where they fell, far from family and home; hundreds of thousands remained unidentified, their losses unaccounted for. The end of combat offered an opportunity to attend to the dead in ways war had made impossible. Information could now flow freely across North and South; military officials would have time to augment and scrutinize incomplete casualty records; bodies scattered across the defeated Confederacy could be located and identified; the fallen could be honored without encroaching on the immediate and pressing needs of the living.
Clara Barton eagerly embraced these new possibilities. The necessities of war seemed to her to evolve logically into the demands of peace. Her care for wounded soldiers had always included supplying information to families about the men she treated at the front, and the end of hostilities seemed to bring only an increase in the numbers of letters she received in search of lost husbands and sons. Deeply sympathetic to “the distressed class of sufferers all through our land waiting, fearing, hoping, watching day by day for some little tidings of the loved and lost,” Barton determined to develop a way to relieve what she described as the “intense anxiety…amounting in many instances almost to insanity” of these petitioners.3
In the spring of 1865 she founded the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army to serve as an information clearinghouse. Bypassing the tangled federal bureaucracy, she turned directly to the soldiers themselves for information about their slain or surviving friends. She would publish the names submitted by those in search of kin in hopes of soliciting news about them. As she explained at the top of one printed list: “I appeal to you to give such facts relative to the fate of these men as you may recollect or can ascertain. They have been your comrades on march, picket or raid, or in battle, hospital, or prison; and, falling there, the fact and manner of their death may be known only to you.” Within days of her announcement Barton had received several hundred letters, and communications soon poured in by the thousands to the tiny third-floor room at Seventh and E streets in Washington that served, as its sign announced, as the “Missing Soldiers Office.” Lincoln had endorsed her efforts before his death, and in response to her persistent inquiries, President Andrew Johnson agreed to subsidize the dissemination of her lists. By mid-June she had published the names of 20,000 men; by the time she finally closed the office in 1868, she reported that it had received and answered 6
8,182 letters and had secured information about 22,000 missing soldiers.4
For the military, war’s end permitted the systematic assessment of losses that the unrelenting pressures of conflict had prohibited. In July 1865 Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered every Union commander to submit a report of “all interments registered during the war.” These records became the basis for the Roll of Honor, lists of names and burial places of “soldiers who died in defence of the American Union” that Meigs would print in twenty-seven installments, constituting eight bound volumes, as officers executed his order over the course of the next six years. But wartime records listed only 101,736 registered burials, fewer than a third of the estimated total of Union fatalities. It was clear that hundreds of thousands of northern soldiers lay in undocumented locations, their remains untended and even unmarked, their deaths unknown to their families as well as to military record keeping.5
Clara Barton, circa 1865. Photograph by Mathew Brady. Clara Barton National Historic Site/National Park Service.
Official policy toward the dead evolved slowly over the next several years, but immediate action seemed imperative, as a matter of both decency and expediency. The longer bodies were left without proper burial, the more vulnerable they became to depredation and the less likely they were to be identifiable. Military commanders improvised in the face of need and opportunity. In June 1865 Captain James Moore, an assistant quartermaster who had been active in fledgling graves registration efforts during the war, was ordered to the Wilderness and Spotsylvania “for the purpose of superintending the interments of the remains of Union soldiers yet unburied and marking their burial-places for future identification.” Moore found hundreds of unmarked graves, as well as skeletons that had been left for more than two years without the dignity of burial. “By exposure to the weather,” he reported, “all traces of their identity were entirely obliterated.” Summer heat and “the unpleasant odor from decayed matter” prevented him from removing all bodies to a central location, but he made sure all were carefully interred, with remains appropriately “hidden from view.” On these two fields he estimated that he oversaw the burial of fifteen hundred men, although the scattering of so many bones made an exact count impossible. Soldiers of the U.S. Colored Troops, not yet mustered out of service, did the often repellent work. Moore reported that 785 tablets were erected over named graves, and he submitted a list of the officers and men he had identified.6
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