This Republic of Suffering

by Drew Gilpin Faust

  31. Banner of Light, May 31, 1862, p. 5; Sweet, Speaking Dead, pp. 11, 12, 3.

  32. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1896) pp. 96, 97, 98, 127, 128; Helen Sootin Smith, “Introduction,” Phelps, The Gates Ajar (1868; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. xxxiv. See Barton Levi St. Armand, “Paradise Deferred: The Image of Heaven in the Work of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,” American Quarterly 29 (Spring 1977): 55–78; Ann Douglas, “Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830–1880,” American Quarterly 26 (December 1974): 496–515; Lisa Long, “The Corporeity of Heaven: Rehabilitating the Civil War Body in The Gates Ajar,” American Literature 69 (December 1997): 781–811; and Carol Farley Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982).

  33. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar, in Three Spiritualist Novels pp. 5, 32. See Mark Twain’s “burlesque” of The Gates Ajar, perhaps the ultimate testimony to its cultural impact, Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  34. Phelps, Gates, pp. 41, 110, 42.

  35. Ibid., p. 50.

  36. Ibid., pp. 65, 64.

  37. Ibid., pp. 10–11.

  38. Catherine Edmondston, Journal of a Secesh Lady: The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860–1866, ed. Beth G. Crabtree and James W. Patton (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1979), p. 461;J. Michael Welton, ed., “My Heart Is So Rebellious”: The Caldwell Letters, 1861–1865 (Warrenton, Va.: Fauquier National Bank, 1991), pp. 240, 241; Clara Solomon Diary, entry for June 7, 1861, Louisiana State University; Anne Darden, Diary, entry for July 20, 1861, North Carolina Department of Archives and History. See Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 190–95. On both Job and “Though thou slay us,” see Peyton Harrison Hoge, Moses Drury Hoge: Life and Letters (Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1899), pp. 235–37.

  39. Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,” November 19, 1863, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865 (New York: Library of America, 1989), p. 536.

  40. Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” in Speeches and Writings, pp. 686–87.

  41. Stephen Elliott, Ezra’s Dilemna [sic]: A Sermon (Savannah, Ga.: Power Press of George N. Nichols, 1863), p. 17; Stephen Elliott, Gideon’s Water-Lappers: A Sermon (Macon, Ga.: Burke, Boykin & Co., 1864), p. 20. On providentialism see Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 75–94. On religion and nationalism, see Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), pp. 22–40. With thanks to Katy Park for Latin assistance.

  42. Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” p. 687.

  43. Horace Bushnell, “Our Obligations to the Dead,” in Building Eras in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), pp. 322, 327.

  44. Horace Bushnell, Reverses Needed: A Discourse Delivered on the Sunday After the Disaster of Bull Run, in the North Church, Hartford (Hartford, Conn.: L. E. Hunt, 1861); Bushnell, “Obligations,” pp. 331, 333, 332, 341, 353. See William A. Clebsch, “Christian Interpretations of the Civil War,” Church History 30, no. 2 (1961): 212–22.

  45. Bushnell, “Obligations,” p. 350; Elliott, Gideon’s Water-Lappers, p. 20; Bushnell, “Obligations,” p. 355. See also Horace Bushnell, The Vicarious Sacrifice, Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation (New York: Charles Scribner & Co., 1866).

  46. Bushnell, “Obligations,” p. 353.

  47. Mary Ann Harris Gay, Life in Dixie During the War (Atlanta: Constitution Job Office, 1892), p. 195; Henry Timrod, “Ethnogenesis,” online at www.poemhunter.com/quotations/famous.asp?people=Henry%20Timrod; also quoted in Malvina Waring, “A Confederate Girl’s Diary, March 9, 1865,” in Mrs. Thomas Taylor et al., eds., South Carolina Women in the Confederacy (Columbia, S.C.: State Co., 1903), vol. 1, p. 280.

  48. Presbytery and Ford quoted in Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 26–27; Mary Greenhow Lee Diary, April 15, 1865, WFCHS.

  49. John Adger, “Northern and Southern Views of the Province of the Church,” Southern Presbyterian Review 16 (March 1866): 410, quoted in Noll, Civil War as a Theological Crisis, p. 78; Hoge, Moses Drury Hoge, pp. 235–37, quoted in Stowell, Rebuilding Zion, p. 40.

  50. Grace Brown Elmore, A Heritage of Woe: The Civil War Diary of Grace Brown Elmore, 1861–1868, ed. Marli F. Weiner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 119, 99; Cornelia Peake McDonald, A Woman’s Civil War: A Diary, with Reminiscences of the War, from March 1862, ed. Minrose C. Gwin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 241.

  51. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), pp. x, 4. See Oliver Wendell Holmes, Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1861–1864, ed. Mark DeWolfe Howe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946). The pathbreaking study of these issues was George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

  52. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 7; “Mother, Come Your Boy Is Dying” [sheet music] (New York: H. DeMarsan, n.d.); “Bless Me, Mother, Ere I Die” (New York: H. DeMarsan, n.d.); “Who Will Care for Mother Now?” (New York: Charles Magnus, n.d.); “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother,” in A Storm in the Land: Music of the 26th North Carolina Regimental Band, C.S.A. (New York: New World Records, 2002).

  53. “Mother Would Comfort Me” (New York: H. DeMarsan, n.d.), Wolf 1472, words and music online at freepages.music.rootsweb.com/~edgmon/cwcomfort.htm; “Mother Would Wallop Me” (New York: H. DeMarsan, n.d.), Wolf 1470; John C. Cross, “Mother on the Brain” (New York: H. DeMarsan, n.d.), Wolf 1473, all from the American Song Sheet Collection, LCP. See southern editions: “Who Will Care for Mother Now?” (Macon and Savannah, Ga.: J. C. Schreiner & Son, 186–); “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother” (Richmond, Va.: C. Nordendorf, 1863); “Mother, Is the Battle Over?” (Columbia, S.C.: B. Duncan, 1863).

  54. Twain, Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.

  55. Bierce quoted in Roy Morris Jr., Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 182; Bierce quoted in Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 183; Bierce quoted in Morris, Ambrose Bierce, p. 137. See Lara Cohen, “‘A Supper of Horrors Too Long Drawn Out’: Ambrose Bierce’s Literary Terrorism and the Reinstatement of Death,” B.A. paper (University of Chicago, 1999), courtesy of Lara Cohen; Cathy N. Davidson, The Experimental Fictions of Ambrose Bierce: Structuring the Ineffable (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).

  56. Bierce quoted in Morris, Ambrose Bierce, p. 205; Ambrose Bierce, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce, ed. Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 161.

  57. Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh,” in Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period, p. 103.

  58. Ambrose Bierce, “A Tough Tussle,” in Ernest Jerome Hopkins, comp., The Civil War Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 39.

  59. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 622.

  60. Bierce, “Tough Tussle,” pp. 39, 41.

  61. Ibid., pp. 41, 43, 44.

  62. Bierce quoted in Morris, Ambrose Bierce, p. 205;
Bierce, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period, p. 21.

  63. Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” in Civil War Stories of Bierce, pp. 45–52; Robert C. Evans, ed., Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” An Annotated Critical Edition (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 2003).

  64. Bierce quoted in Morris, Ambrose Bierce, p. 205; Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary, p. 34.

  65. Ambrose Bierce, The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1911), vol. 8, p. 347.

  66. Herman Melville, “The Armies of the Wilderness,” in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War: Civil War Poems (1866; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 103; Melville quoted in Lee Rust Brown, “Introduction,” ibid., p. viii. See also Robert Penn Warren, “Melville’s Poems,” Southern Review 3 (Autumn 1967): 799–855.

  67. Herman Melville, “The March into Virginia,” in Battle-Pieces, p. 23; Melville, “On the Slain Collegians,” ibid., p. 159. See also Stanton Garner, The Civil War World of Herman Melville (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); Warren, “Melville’s Poems,” p. 809; Joyce Sparer Adler, War in Melville’s Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1981); Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and His Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

  68. Hawthorne quoted in Lee Rust Brown, “Introduction” to Melville, Battle-Pieces, p. iv; Aaron, Unwritten War, p. 88.

  69. Melville, “Armies of the Wilderness,” pp. 101, 102; Melville, “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight,” in Battle-Pieces, p. 62.

  70. Melville, “Shiloh,” in Battle-Pieces, 63; “Armies of the Wilderness,” p. 103; Melville, “Shiloh,” p. 63.

  71. Emily Dickinson, “My Triumph lasted till the Drums,” #1227, and “They dropped like Flakes—,” #409 in Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960). See Robert Milder, “The Rhetoric of Melville’s Battle-Pieces,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 44 (September 1989), pp. 173–200; Maurice S. Lee, “Writing Through the War; Melville and Dickinson After the Renaissance,” PMLA 115 (October 2000): pp. 1124–28.

  72. David Higgins, Portrait of Emily Dickinson, The Poet and Her Prose (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967); Thomas W. Ford, “Emily Dickinson and the Civil War,” University Review—Kansas City 31 (Spring 1965): 199. For the most systematic exploration of the importance of war to Dickinson, see Shira Wolosky, Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Daniel Aaron relegates Dickinson to Supplement 4, a page and a half, in The Unwritten War and emphasizes the personal nature of her experience, although at the same time he shows the impact of war imagery on her poetry, pp. 355–56.

  73. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, June 8, 1862, and [n.d.] 1863, in Mabel Todd Loomis, ed., Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894), vol. 2, pp. 304, 310.

  74. Emily Dickinson to Fanny Norcross and Loo Norcross, April 1862, Letters of Dickinson, vol. 2, p. 243; William A. Stearns, Adjutant Stearns (Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1862), p. 106. See also Roger Lundin, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 122–23. The death of another Amherst neighbor at Antietam “in Scarlet Maryland” prompted Dickinson’s “When I was small, a Woman died,” later the same year, #596 in Complete Poems of Dickinson.

  75. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, [n.d.] 1863, in Letters of Dickinson, vol. 2, p. 309; Emily Dickinson to Fanny Norcross and Loo Norcross, April 1862, ibid., p. 243.

  76. Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility,” #657, Complete Poems of Dickinson; Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 26, 1862, in Letters of Dickinson, vol. 2, p. 302; “Death is a Dialogue between,” #976; “At least—to pray—is left—is left,” #502; “We pray—to Heaven—” #489; “I felt my life with both my hands,” #351; “Ourselves we do inter with sweet derision,” #1144, all in Complete Poems of Dickinson.

  77. “All but Death, can be Adjusted,” #749, in Complete Poems of Dickinson.

  78. “Suspense—is Hostiler than Death—,” #705; “Victory comes late—,” #690; “My Portion is Defeat—today—,” #639; “It feels a shame to be Alive,” #444; “The Battle fought between the Soul,” #594, all in Complete Poems of Dickinson. See Maria Magdalena Farland, “‘That Tritest/Brightest Truth’: Emily Dickinson’s Anti-Sentimentality,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53 (December 1998): 364–89. Barton Levi St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), portrays her as less doubting and more conventional.

  79. Helen Vendler, “Melville and the Lyric of History,” in Melville, Battle-Pieces, pp. 262, 265.

  80. “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind,” #937, in Complete Poems of Dickinson; Wolosky, Emily Dickinson, p. xv. See also David T. Porter, Dickinson: The Modern Idiom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 39, 98, 120. On Amy Lowell’s judgment that Dickinson was a uniquely “modern” voice in nineteenth-century American poetry, see S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), p. 295. Historian Michael O’Brien has argued that Mary Chesnut’s Civil War diary, refashioned in the 1880s but unpublished during her lifetime, reflects these same modernistic tendencies. A South Carolina aristocrat who survived on wit and irony as she watched her world disintegrate around her, Chesnut has been well known since the appearance of bowdlerized versions of her writings early in the twentieth century. At last in 1981 historian C. Vann Woodward published a carefully edited version of the 1880s manuscript that recognized it as a literary construction—and reconstruction—not a series of daily jottings from the midst of war. Chesnut’s effort might be seen to have much in common with those of Bierce, Melville, and Dickinson. Chesnut eschews narrative for voices and fragments, reflecting in her chosen form the substance of her own disbelief—in God, in science, in her society, in herself. O’Brien connects her with Virginia Woolf, suggesting a continuum of doubt and dislocation from an American war to a European conflagration a half century later. Michael O’Brien, “The Flight Down the Middle Walk: Mary Chesnut and the Forms of Observance,” in Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, eds., Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), pp. 109–31.

  81. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Occasional Speeches, comp. Mark DeWolfe Howe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 82; Reuben Allen Pierson in Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish, eds., Brothers in Gray: Civil War Letters of the Pierson Family (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), p. 101; James P. Suiter quoted in Earl Hess, Union Soldier in Battle, p. 20; Daniel M. Holt, A Surgeon’s Civil War: Letters and Diaries of Daniel M. Holt, M.D., ed. James M. Greiner, Janet L. Coryell, and James R. Smither (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994), p. 100; John O. Casler, Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade (1906; rpt. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), p. 37.

  82. Cordelia Harvey, letter from Memphis dated December 6, 1862, published in Wisconsin Daily State Journal, December 30, 1862, Cordelia Harvey Papers, WHS, online at www.uwosh.edu/archives/civilwar/women/harvey/harvey6.htm; Kate Cumming, Journal of a Confederate Nurse, ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), p. 15. See the almost identical remark by northern nurse Cornelia Hancock in Hancock, South After Gettysburg, ed. Henrietta Stratton Jaquette (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1956), p. 7. On the unspeakability of suffering, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Paul Fussell writes of the incommunicability of World War I and the failure of language it generated in The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 139, as does Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5. Thomas Leonard writes of the Civil War that “in some ways the most important legacy…was silence.” Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War Making
in America from Appomattox to Versailles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 25. See also Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 52, 62.

  83. David T. Hedrick and Gordon Barry Davis Jr., eds., I’m Surrounded by Methodists: Diary of John H. W. Stuckenberg, Chaplain of the 145th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995), p. 44.

  CHAPTER 7. ACCOUNTING

  1. Horace Bushnell, “Our Obligations to the Dead, July 26, 1865,” Building Eras in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1881), pp. 322, 327, 321, 340. On Bushnell, see Conrad Cherry, “The Structure of Organic Thinking: Horace Bushnell’s Approach to Language, Nature and Nation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40 (March 1972): 3–20, and Daniel Walker Howe, “The Social Science of Horace Bushnell,” Journal of American History 70 (September 1983): 305–22.

  2. James Russell Lowell, “Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865,” in Richard Marius, ed., The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry: From Whitman to Walcott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 372, 380.

  3. Clara Barton to Brigadier General D. C. McCallum, April 14, 1865; Barton to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, draft letter, October 1865, final version dated November 27, 1865, Clara Barton Papers, LC.

  4. “To Returned Soldiers and Others” [1865], Clara Barton Papers, LC; Elizabeth B. Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 154.

  5. On general orders, see Brevet Brigadier General J. J. Dana to Brevet Major General J. L. Donaldson, March 19, 1866, in Whitman, Letters Received, RG 92 E-A-1 397A, and E. B. Whitman, Cemeterial Movement, in Final Report, 1869, RG 92 E646, both in NARA; “Civil War Era National Cemeteries,” online at www.va.gov/facmgt/historic/civilwar.asp. See also U.S. War Department, Quartermaster General’s Office, Compilation of Laws, Orders, Opinions, Instructions, etc. in Regard to National Military Cemeteries (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1878); Roll of Honor: Names of Soldiers Who Died in Defence of the American Union, 27 nos. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1865–71).