This Republic of Suffering
Page 29
But even as the Civil War brought new humanity—new attentiveness to “sentiment”—in the management of death, so too it introduced a level of carnage that foreshadowed the wars of the century to come. Even as individuals and their fates assumed new significance, so those individuals threatened to disappear into the bureaucracy and mass slaughter of modern warfare. We still struggle to understand how to preserve our humanity and our selves within such a world. We still seek to use our deaths to create meaning where we are not sure any exists. The Civil War generation glimpsed the fear that still defines us—the sense that death is the only end. We still work to live with the riddle that they—the Civil War dead and their survivors alike—had to solve so long ago.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
The following acronyms are used in the notes to refer to archives:
BHL
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
CAH
The Center for American History, The University of Texas, Austin
ESBL
Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Va.
LC
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
LCP
The Library Company of Philadelphia
MAHS
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
MOHS
Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis
NARA
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
NYHS
New-York Historical Society, New York City
NYPL
Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations, New York City
PAHRC
Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historical Research Center, Wynnewood, Pa.
RBMSC
Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
SCHS
South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston
SCL
South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia
SHC
Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
VHS
Virginia Historical Society, Richmond
VMIA
Virginia Military Institute Archives, Lexington
WFCHS
Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society, Winchester, Va.
WHS
Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Madison
PREFACE
1. [Stephen Elliott], Obsequies of the Reverend Edward E. Ford, D.D., and Sermon by the Bishop of the Diocese… (Augusta, Ga.: Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, 1863), p. 8.
2. James David Hacker, “The Human Cost of War: White Population in the United States, 1850–1880,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Minnesota, 1999), pp. 1, 14. Hacker believes that Civil War death totals may be seriously understated because of inadequate estimates of the number of Confederate deaths from disease. Civil War casualty and mortality statistics are problematic overall, and the incompleteness of Confederate records makes them especially unreliable. See Chapter 8 of this book. Maris A. Vinovskis concludes that about 6 percent of northern white males between ages thirteen and forty-five died in the war, whereas 18 percent of white men of similar age in the South perished. But because of much higher levels of military mobilization in the white South, mortality rates for southern soldiers were twice, not three times, as great as those for northern soldiers. James McPherson cites these soldiers’ death rates as 31 percent for Confederate soldiers, 16 percent for Union soldiers. Gary Gallagher believes Vinovskis’s overall death rate for the South is too low; he estimates that closer to one in four rather than one in five white southern men of military age died in the conflict. I have cited the more conservative total. See Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?” in Maris A. Vinovskis, ed., Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 3–7; James M. McPherson, personal communication to author, December 27, 2006; Gary Gallagher, personal communication to author, December 16, 2006.
3. James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3, 177, n. 56.
4. [Francis W. Palfrey], In Memoriam: H.L.A. (Boston: Printed for private distribution, 1864), p. 5; Richard Shryock, “A Medical Perspective on the Civil War,” American Quarterly 14 (Summer 1962): 164; H. Clay Trumbull, War Memories of an Army Chaplain (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898), p. 67. Vital statistics for this period are very scarce, and the most complete cover only Massachusetts. I am grateful to historical demographer Gretchen Condran of Temple University for discussing these matters with me. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Part I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 62–63. On the “untimely death of an adult child” as “particularly painful” in mid-nineteenth-century England, see Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 39.
5. One notable appearance of the image of a harvest of death is in the title given Timothy O’Sullivan’s photograph of a field of bodies at Gettysburg in Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War (1866; rpt. New York: Dover, 1959), plate 36; Kate Stone, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868, ed. John Q. Anderson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1955), p. 264; C. W. Greene to John McLees, August 15, 1862, McLees Family Papers, SCL.
6. [Frederick Law Olmsted], Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863), p. 115.
7. The general literature on death is immense and rich. A few key texts not cited elsewhere in this volume include Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Sandra Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Way We Grieve (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988); Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994); Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963); Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
8. Mrs. Carson to R. F. Taylor, September 14, 1864, Carson Family Papers, SCL. On changing notions of the self, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
9. New York Times, October 20, 1862. See William A. Frassanito, Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978); Franny Nudelman, John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence and the Culture of War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 103–31; and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989). Even as we acknowledge the impact of Civil War photography, it is important to recognize how few Americans would actually have seen Brady’s or other photographs of the dead. Newspapers and periodicals could not yet reproduce photographs but could publish only engravings derived from them, like the many Harper’s Weekly illustrations included in this book.
10. Maude Morrow Brown Manuscript, z/0907.000/S, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss.; on nineteenth-century science and the changed meaning of death, see Adam Phill
ips, Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
CHAPTER 1. DYING
1. Chesnut cited in James Shepherd Pike, The Prostrate State (New York: D. Appleton, 1874), pp. 74–75.
2. Letter to Mattie J. McGaw, May 5, 1863, McGaw Family Papers, SCL. For a consideration of the size of the Revolutionary army and its mortality, see Charles H. Lesser, The Sinews of Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 84–86, and Howard H. Peckham, The Toll of Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). On the size of Civil War armies, see James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 306n.
3. Alonzo Abernethy, “Incidents of an Iowa Soldier’s Life, or Four Years in Dixie,” Annals of Iowa, 3rd ser. 12 (1920): 411; William A. Hammond, “Medical Care, Battle Wounds, and Disease,” online at www.civilwarhome.com/civilwarmedicine.htm; George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York: H. Schuman, 1952), pp. 222, 242, 125. On diarrhea and dysentery in the Confederate army, see Horace Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), p. 185; Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–1865 (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1968), p. 14. Camp Sink quote in U.S. Sanitary Commission, Two Reports on the Condition of Military Hospitals (New York: W. C. Bryant, 1862), p. 6. See also Joseph Janner Woodward, Outlines of the Chief Camp Diseases of the United States Armies as Observed During the Present War (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1863); Robert E. Denney, Civil War Medicine: Care and Comfort of the Wounded (New York: Sterling, 1994); John W. Schildt, Antietam Hospitals (Chewsville, Md.: Antietam Publications, 1987); Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care During the American Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); James I. Robertson Jr., Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 145–69. See also Lisa Herschbach, “Fragmentation and Reunion: Medicine, Memory and Body in the American Civil War,” Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University, 1997).
4. The Sentinel: Selected for the Soldiers No. 319 (Petersburg, Va.: n.p., 1861), p. 1.
5. E. G. Abbott to Mother, February 8, 1862, Abbott Family, Civil War Letters, MS Am 800.26(5), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
6. A. D. Kirwan, ed., Johnny Green of the Orphan Brigade: The Journal of a Confederate Soldier (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956), p. 93.
7. John Weissert to Dearest wife and children, October 17, 1862, Box 1, Correspondence Sept.–Oct. 1862, John Weissert Papers, BHL.
8. Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (London: R. Royston, 1651); Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (London: Francis Ash, 1650); Sister Mary Catherine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), pp. 11, 208. See also L. M. Beier, “The Good Death in Seventeenth Century England,” in Ralph Houlbrooke, ed., Death, Ritual and Bereavement (New York: Routledge, 1989); Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Ralph Houlbrooke, “The Puritan Death-Bed, c. 1560–c. 1600,” in C. Durston and J. Eales, eds., The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), pp. 122–44; M. C. Cross, “The Third Earl of Huntingdon’s Death-Bed: A Calvinist Example of the Arts Moriendi,” Northern History 21 (1985): 80–107; R. Wunderle and G. Broce, “The Final Moment Before Death in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 20 (1989): 259–75; David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
9. Frances Comper, ed., The Book of the Craft of Dying and Other Early English Tracts Concerning Death (London, 1917); Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the Ars Moriendi in England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (London: R. Royston, 1651). At least eight editions of Holy Dying appeared in London in the first half of the nineteenth century; editions were printed in Boston in 1864 and 1865; in Philadelphia in 1835, 1859, 1869; New York, 1864. On conceptions of ars moriendi included in advice and conduct books, see Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), pp. 200–208. For an example of a sermon, see Eleazer Mather Porter Wells, Preparation for Death…Trinity Church, Boston (n.p., 1852). On popular health, see the many American editions of John Willison, The Afflicted Man’s Companion (Pittsburgh: Luke Loomis & Co., 1830), which was reprinted again by the American Tract Society of New York in 1851. So popular was Dickens’s serialized The Old Curiosity Shop that New Yorkers lined the quay for the arrival of the installment that would reveal Little Nell’s fate. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling American book of the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (London, 1841); William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1844–45); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1851). See also the rendition of death in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady (London: Published for S. Richardson, 1748).
10. William Corby, Memoirs of Chaplain Life (Notre Dame, Ind.: Scholastic Press, 1894), p. 184. Memorials to this moment are located at Notre Dame and on the field at Gettysburg. It has been estimated that Catholics constituted about 7 percent of Union armies. They would have been a far smaller percentage of Confederate soldiers. See Randall M. Miller, “Catholic Religion, Irish Ethnicity, and the Civil War,” in Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 261.
11. Bertram Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1951), p. 59; D. DeSola Pool, “The Diary of Chaplain Michael M. Allen, September 1861,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 39 (September 1949): 177–82; L. J. Lederman, letter to parents of David Zehden upon his death, quoted in Mel Young, Where They Lie: The Story of the Jewish Soldiers… (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991), p. 149; Rebecca Gratz, Letters of Rebecca Gratz, ed. Rabbi David Philipson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1929), pp. 426–27. See From This World to the Next: Jewish Approaches to Illness, Death and the Afterlife (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1999), and Jack Riemer, ed., Jewish Insights on Death and Mourning (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), pp. 309–53. On ecumenism see Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War, p. 59; Warren B. Armstrong, For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying: Union Chaplains in the Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 53–54; Kurt O. Berends, “‘Wholesome Reading Purifies and Elevates the Man’: The Religious Military Press in the Confederacy,” in Miller, Stout, and Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War, pp. 134, 157; Peter Paul Cooney, “The War Letters of Father Peter Paul Cooney of the Congregation of the Holy Cross,” ed. Thomas McAvoy, Records of the American Catholic Historical Society 44 (1933): 223, 164; Louis-Hippolyte Gache, A Frenchman, a Chaplain, a Rebel: The War Letters of Louis-Hippolyte Gache (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1991), pp. 176–77, 118–19; Sara Trainer Smith, ed., “Notes on Satterlee Hospital, West Philadelphia,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society 8 (1897): 404. On limitations to that ecumenism, see Gache, Frenchman, pp. 190–91.
12. Once to Die (Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 186–), p. 3; see also Karl S. Guthke, Last Words: Variations on a Theme in Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 36.
13. Confederate States Christian Association for the Relief of Prisoners (Fort Delaware), Minutes, March 31, 1865, Francis Atherton Boyle Books, 1555 Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (hereafter SHC); James Gray to Si
ster, June 12, 1864, in Mills Lane, ed., Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me. If I Get Killed, I’ll Only Be Dead: Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1990), p. 300. See also William Stilwell to Molly, September 18, 1862, in Lane, Dear Mother, p. 185; letter to Mollie J. McGaw, May 5, 1863, McGaw Family Papers, SCL; Desmond Pulaski Hopkins Papers, July 17, 1862, CAH. Statistics on locations of deaths from Robert V. Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors”: Death and Society in an American Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 195.
14. [Frederick Law Olmsted], Hospital Transports (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863), p. 80. Disruptions of African American family ties through the slave trade to the southwestern states was, of course, another matter—in its coerciveness, in its permanence. See Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
15. Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 2. The English queen’s own lengthy bereavement after Albert’s death in 1861 focused additional attention on death as a defining element in Anglo-American family and cultural life.
16. The Dying Officer (Richmond, VA.: Soldiers’ Tract Society, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 186–), p. 6; Hiram Mattison quoted in Michael Sappol, “A Traffic in Dead Bodies”: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 31. See statement on meaning of last words in Susie C. Appell to Mrs. E. H. Ogden, October 20, 1862, Sarah Perot Ogden Collection, GLC 6556.01.106, Gilder Lehrman Collection, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, NYHS. Materials quoted courtesy of the Gilder Lehrman Institute may not be reproduced without written permission. See discussion of significance of last words in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, December 7, 1861, p. 44.