Dying as an art characterized the earliest years of the nineteenth century. As Shai J. Lavi points out in his book, The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States, “Methodists, the largest organized religious community in early nineteenth-century America, taught Americans how to die. More than any other religious group, Methodists were concerned throughout life with forming the proper disposition regarding death. They would gather around the deathbeds of neighbors and relatives to view the final departure and to meticulously document the hour of death.” Lavi goes on to point out that the Methodists expected the dying person to face the final hours “like a fearless soldier ready to die a triumphant death. It is precisely this way of dying that the most celebrated of all New England Puritans, Cotton Mather, termed ‘euthanasia.’”
Christian leaders characterized the manner of one’s dying as an art and, from the fifteenth century on, collected the precepts of the good death under the rubric of the Ars Moriendi (“the art of dying”). The Ars Moriendi became especially popular during the Black Death of the fifteenth century, and underwent a revival in the opening years of the nineteenth century. In just the way the Boy Scout manual, in the first decade of the twentieth century, would offer precepts to young people on how to live a moral life, so these little books on the art of dying acted as handbooks, as sourcebooks where one could find rules of decorum and behavior on facing the inevitability of one’s final hours. By the time of the Civil War—that is, by midcentury—the Ars Moriendi had faded away, replaced by the autonomous and secular work of the embalmer and the other professionals associated with funereal services in general, and those who specialized not in the art of dying, but in the art of death—the morticians.
What a change this was, what a great handing over of one’s autonomy and soul and character to the new cadre of technicians. The Methodists spent time recording deathbed experiences, which they published for the family of the departed and which they titled “biographies.” For that’s what they were, the bios, the authentic life of the person in his or her final hours. Friends and neighbors listened for last words, which revealed the state of the soul more truthfully and more forcefully than any other sentences the dying person had ever uttered in his or her lifetime. “People believed final words to be the truth,” Faust writes, “both because they thought that a dying person could no longer have any earthly motivation to lie, and because those about to meet their maker would not want to expire bearing false witness. As sermonizers North and South reminded their congregations: ‘A death-bed’s a detector of the heart.’”21
By mid-century the practice had stopped—the stories gone, the telling of the tales over and done. The religious person at the side of the bed was replaced by the physician. This perhaps inevitable slide into the medicalization of death is a part of what the philosopher Heidegger means when he talks about the decline of art and the rise of technology in the modern world, or what Shai J. Lavi calls the “expanding technical search for mastery over death.”
Some Christian theologians believed that the final expression on the face revealed the state of the person’s conscience at that critical moment of death. And in the strong evangelical reach of the nineteenth century—forty percent claimed such affiliations—people entered heaven in the same way they exited life. Beyond any consideration of the Ars Moriendi, people achieved an everlasting life predicated on the kind of actual life they had pursued on Earth. And so facial expressions, attitudes, posture—a whole range of gestures and emotions—factored into a person’s smooth transition into a blessed and eternal life. Thus the key question: How did the soldier—my soldier—actually die? For that final expression offered a clue to what kind of paradise the departed might expect. Such was the price of solace during those most torturous of times.
Embalmers, of course, knew that families desired a countenance of tranquil acceptance on the faces of their departed loved ones, and most decidedly not one of anguish or revenge. Expressions that smacked of rage or anger—or even what might be deemed discontent—did not ensure an easy entrance into heaven and, in fact, tended to foreclose on an eternal life in the hereafter. Families needed to see expressions of peace and repose, the kind of beatified countenance associated with a quiet and restful sleep.
Such expressions of ease had side benefits, as well. As Shakespeare put it, sleep was just death’s second self—life and death collapsing onto each other. And thus, according to Gilpin Faust, “to contemplate one’s husband, father, or son in a state of seemingly sleeplike repose was a means of resisting death’s terror—and even, to a degree, its reality; it offered a way of blurring the boundary between life and death.” As in life so in death, in the nineteenth century—no one quite able, no one quite willing, to point to that line that separated life from death.
The dead hardly ever come home from war. And when they do, they certainly have been drained of all humanness. This extends far beyond the Civil War. Witness the Vietnam War, where young men and women came home in what looked like large Hefty sacks, called body bags. In the first Gulf War, the military sent the dead home in the gruesome-sounding “human remains pouches.” And in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the dead never came home. Well, the American public was never allowed to see them return because the Pentagon had adopted a new policy of forbidding news photographers to take pictures of flag-draped coffins. The president argued this policy out of respect for the families of the dead soldiers. Clearly, the Bush administration followed a consistent policy of disregarding actual deaths in battle. Unlike many other presidents during times of war, this president did not attend soldiers’ funerals. Family members accused the administration of treating their dead sons and daughters, their husbands and wives, as if they were invisible.
So pervasive had death become during the Civil War that entrepreneurs could capitalize on its nervy presence. On the most fancy shopping boulevards of Manhattan and Philadelphia, and in other cities on the East Coast, as well, stores opened to meet the needs of the many widows that the war had produced. As with any sensible capitalistic scheme, stores catered to their clientele’s needs, and in this case shop owners managed to design a lively business in death by offering smart costumes to match the level of grief of any woman, so long as she could afford it. On the racks of these mourning stores, a widow might find the blackest of clothes—as black as the corpses themselves—which high-society women in “heavy or deepest mourning” would deem appropriate for their parties or teas or social gatherings.
But those shops, eager to cover all needs, also carried an assortment of garments in mauve and pale lavender for those a step below “heavy mourning,” what the period called “full mourning”; and a very few articles trimmed in white for those below that, in the mildest throes of only “half mourning.” Store clerks served as elementary bereavement counselors, able to assess a widow’s proper level of grief and to offer the proper costume for that emotional stage.
Imagine walking down Fifth Avenue today and seeing window displays devoted solely to death, including examples of the startling handiwork of the many embalmers who had opened thriving businesses after the start of the war. We would find such portals into death appalling, a publicity stunt, one of those cynical moves on the part of some hip young window dresser to pull the unsuspecting shopper up short. But that’s just what a fancy shop like Lord and Taylor showed in 1863, yards and yards of black crepe, fashionably rendered into elegant costumes for mourning. We have all but forgotten the names of those outfits now, but they sold fantastically well in the years of the Civil War: black crepe grenadines, black balzarines, black bayadere barèges, black barèges, black barège hernani, summer bombazines, mourning silks, barège shawls, grenadine veils, English crepes and veils, collars, sleeves, and on and on.
One can only wonder, today, what wearing those costumes actually meant. Clearly, the clientele consisted solely of wealthy widows. (Men, too, in mourning wore black, but confined their expression of grief to a black armband or a ribb
on of black crepe pinned to a suit jacket.) But even so, what did it mean to walk around society with such visible displays of grief? What were those costumes meant to convey to the rest of the public, including those widows too poor to afford such outward symbols of inner grief? Perhaps those costumes did the work of real grief; after all, churches and funeral parlors prescribed set times for mourning—one week for a child, one month for a loved one, and so on.
But, beyond matters of time, could it be that those mourning outfits actually rendered it unnecessary to pass through real and deeply felt grief, that the clothes signaled it all, and that these rituals of death actually provided another example of the falling away of the importance of immediate, lived experiences? Is a black getup the equivalent of a photograph of death, all color drained away to form a shadow of the real thing? Did these women parade the streets, unknowingly, as images? Such conditions would jibe perfectly with the changes we have seen in this period toward the human being. It was as if the country suddenly had been saddled with a department of grief, and had decided to place Coco Chanel in charge.
If the theology of the period dictated that soldiers had to face their final moment with dignity and calm—that is, with just the correct and appropriate expression—then what about the obligations of the living? If meaning had been drained from death, what meaning remained for those who lived? In certain ways, those mourning costumes dictated the proper attitude toward death: Anyone could tell by the widow’s garb that she had fulfilled her obligation and addressed death in the correct, sufficient, and accepted manner. In just the way one could tell the rank of a military man, one could tell the rank of the mourner—from heavy grief to something absurdly called half grief. Mourning costumes served as uniforms. And uniforms eliminate doubt and confusion; they dispense with thinking. Uniforms offer immediate recognition and orientation and comfort; they define and categorize—just one more instance of deep and complicated meaning in the nineteenth century fading away.
So while one might think that, in the midst of such rampant carnage, in the midst of such a “harvest of death,” death would imprint itself indelibly on the popular imagination and make it much more of a reality, just the opposite seemed to happen. The facticity, the finality, of death faded from consciousness, and the rituals of death, like some kind of after-image—not unlike Brady’s photographs—persisted. Listen to William Dean Howells on the subject of James Garfield, the future president of the United States, when he was still a Union general. It typifies a general movement taking place during the nineteenth century: “At the sight of these dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of a lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.”22
Drew Gilpin Faust herself seems to believe much the same thing. “Human life diminished sharply in value,” she points out, “and the living risked becoming as dehumanized as the dead. Soldiers perhaps found it a relief to think of themselves not as men but as machines—without moral compass or responsibility, simply the instruments of others’ direction and will.”23 This was, after all, the machine age, and as the mechanical began to invade most of life, it also crowded in on death. The Civil War seemed to crystallize and congeal those attitudes about death that had been building since the outset of the century.
Inventors turned their mechanical skills on the emotion of hate and made out of young men in uniforms automatons that dispensed rage and death. Meanwhile, embalmers used preservation and makeup to erase those expressions of rage from the faces of the dead soldiers. In fact, they erased all emotions, including, if there is such a thing, the look and pallor—the black mask—of death. For those who did die, religion and the prayers of their loved ones carried them to a new and everlasting life in heaven. Families buried their soldiers in their uniforms and, to complete the cycle, the living, mainly the widows, donned their own uniforms, the black and somber clothes of grief.
This era outlined so many stages of death: passing away, ranging from a state called coma to suspended animation and on through hypnotic trances of one kind or another; people gradually losing substance and fading away into specters, ghosts, voices, and emanations from the other side. We can count nearly as many stages of death as we can of life. How would we enumerate them? Is there a taxonomy of death that the culture began delineating in the nineteenth century, and is it that taxonomy that allows us today to parse the beginnings of life?
To repeat: In this period, death began to vanish. Life, too, lost its once familiar parameters. To say that life and death vanished is to say, really, that the embodiment of those two states, the fleshy human being, somehow lost its importance, which occurred in all kinds of ways, even when people died in the most hideous, violent manner. Technology eviscerated the experience of death, cleaned it up, sanitized it, and made it palatable. The ultimate extreme of this continuum would be death with no body whatsoever. One sees glimpses of this in contemporary crime investigation programs on television, or with Doctor Henry Lee, the coroner on the O. J. Simpson murder case, who typically reconstructs crimes with the barest shreds of physical evidence, convicting criminals without a body present, and with only the smallest and seemingly most insignificant shred of evidence.
Is it possible, in the midst of such a continuous and all-pervasive pall, that death itself actually died? Is it possible that people can grow too familiar with death’s devastating hand? Certainly, photographic reproductions of death and dying render the real thing more remote. Mechanical reproduction seems to drain the real thing of its essence, no matter the period in which it takes place. Which is to say that, once such an extraordinary percentage of the population passes away, death perhaps must inevitably lose its dominion. Death in the Civil War had a numbing effect. In addition to this, attitudes toward grief in the nineteenth century had momentum from the underlying scientific and philosophical and artistic theories of the loss of humanness. There are at least two significant reasons to suspect that just such a diminution of death happened in the period. The first is religious, and the second is that movement which extended beyond religion, spiritualism.
As I said earlier, in the context of a growing evangelical Christianity, people did not die. They merely filled out their days in this world in order to pass on to another, more pleasant and more ennobled one in heaven. Egged on by the idea of the good death, surviving soldiers would give testimony about the way their buddies went out—always valiantly, always with a light heart, always willing to help others. The dead soldier always dies accepting and not fighting his fate. As a result of such a system of belief, no one ever really died. Each person calmly and—by all surviving accounts from the Union battlefield, at least—eagerly passed into another state, into another place; there, in heaven, he or she would spend his or her life in everlasting bliss.
And those on this side, also, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, knew the state of their loved ones on the other side by making contact with them through spiritual exercises—Ouija board encounters, séances, channeling, and so on. Those spiritual strategies, along with the Protestant notion of everlasting life after death, provided assurance that no one ever really died. Life merely went on and on, although in a different form, in a different place. The period even entertained questions about soldiers who had been mutilated in battle. Would they ascend into heaven intact, or would they remain forever maimed? (The preponderance of opinion, by the way, seemed to suggest that the body rose into heaven with all the parts restored and in good working order.)
In one of the most alarming moves, especially for a person with such political acumen as Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States, in the midst of the bloodiest war America had faced—or would ever face again—attempted to suspend one of the most fundamental and sacred precepts of jurisprudence, the writ of habeas corpus. The Latin writ habeas corpus loosely translates as “You have the body,” and intends to act as a safeguard against unlawful detention of a person, deman
ding that the person, the body, be brought before a judge to face charges, so that a fair and speedy trial might ensue, or that the magistrate release the person. Lincoln recognized, it seemed, that the body was no longer that important—so many corpses, so many burials, so many men lost to the vagaries of war. Yes, families wanted to see the body, and yes, they needed to know that their loved one had actually died, but religious principles had annulled death, had blunted its power to snuff out life. The physical form of the person, particularly in America and particularly in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the end meant very little.
Faced with unruly mobs bordering Maryland, the northernmost slave-holding state, Lincoln sought to suspend the writ of habeas corpus there, as well as in some midwestern states, on April 27, 1861. In part, Lincoln hoped to make it impossible for Maryland to secede from the Union, a move that, if it happened, he felt would complicate and prolong an already seemingly interminable war. To that end, he planned to detain for undisclosed periods of time rioters and rebels and various militiamen—those whom Lincoln singled out and designated troublemakers—in local jails until the war ended. But Lincoln’s efforts to subvert one of the Constitution’s basic rights failed. The circuit court of Maryland argued that Lincoln had overstepped his presidential powers and so struck down his proposed legislation.
Unsuspecting Souls Page 13