In the spring of 1863, Lord & Taylor in New York, down on Ladies’ Mile, opened a “mourning store,” where the new widows of the Civil War could dress their grief in suitable fashion. Some idea of what they shopped for is apparent from the inventory advertised by Besson & Son, in Philadelphia, a mourning store of the same period: “Black Crape Grenadines / Black Balzerines / Black Baryadere Bareges / Black Bareges.” The Civil War dead are still among us—long after their beautifully dressed widows have passed away—and the problem is how to get them buried. The acceptable thing to say now, as it was then, is that the soldiers, and their sacrifice, are what remain to inspire us. But it’s the corpses that haunt us, not the soldiers, as they haunted us then, and no amount of black crêpe can cover them over. The scale of the dying disillusioned a country, and also, as Lincoln saw, gave us a country—turned a provisional arrangement of states into a modern nation. A few new books attempt to place the dying in the right context: What did people of the time make of all that dying? More provocatively, did those who died in some sense want to die, and, most provocative, did so many die, after all?
Drew Gilpin Faust, the Civil War historian who is also the new president of Harvard, has published what will probably be the central book in this accounting: “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” (Knopf; $27.95). Her argument is that the scale of the killing between 1861 and 1865 demanded a new cult of memory—a new set of social rituals, some rooted in the Bible, but many intensely secular, the rituals of Republican mourning. These rituals—the response to the mass killing, from military cemeteries, neatly rowed, to a taste for tight-lipped prose—made us what we are. The embalming fluid developed at the time by Yankee ingenuity to preserve dead bodies on their way home from the battlefield still runs through our veins.
Faust, like most American academic historians, is a pragmatically lily-livered social constructionist: she thinks that ways of mourning, like lust and greed and kinship and other seemingly hardwired features of human experience, are remarkably plastic. The academic left wing believes that these attitudes come top down, as power enforces them; the right that they come bottom up, as a people evolves them; and a good liberal like Faust that they come from somewhere in between—half from what the rich and powerful tell you to feel, and half because the rich and powerful stay rich and powerful by letting ordinary people express their lust and grief more or less the way they want to. A moment of shock at a new blow (Pearl Harbor, September 11th, a son’s death on the battlefield) is swiftly followed by set-piece reactions, widely shared. How these set pieces get set is Faust’s subject. “It is work to die, to know how to approach and endure life’s last moments,” she writes. “Death also usually requires participation and response.” If this makes death sound oddly like an undergraduate exam (“Before deceasing, please fill out all questions below, and respond in full; show all work”), it is also obviously true. “Americans had to identify—find, invent, create—the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss.”
The fight, Faust reminds the reader, which was expected to be, if not a romp, then at least a rout, turned out to be a bloody war of attrition, where defensive firepower so overwhelmed the offense that—at Antietam and Fredericksburg and the Wilderness—the soldiers mostly just stood there and watched each other die. “Neither North nor South had expected the death tolls that Civil War battles produced, and the steadily escalating level of destruction continued to amaze and horrify,” she writes, and goes on:
The killing was horrifying in its suddenness: eighteen-year-olds were ripped apart at close quarters by minié balls, or shot down in the middle of normal drill by tree-infesting snipers. There is no pleasant way to die in battle, but presumably a Byzantine axe-bearer or an Anglo-Norman longbowman in Henry V’s train would have some belief that his individual courage or resourcefulness could help him control the outcome. The Civil War battlefield was pure Russian, or Virginian, roulette; you walked out and prayed that your bullet didn’t come up. S. H. M. Byers, of Iowa, “remembered one terrible battle where ‘lines of blue and gray’ stood ‘close together and fire[d] into each other’s faces for an hour and a half.’ ”
Organized massacre—men advancing to their death through close rifle fire—was the rule of battle; chaotic massacre the rule of its aftermath. Faust does a good job of making us see the war for what it was, not a neat epic of blue and gray but four years of terror and cruelty and violence. With all the gallantry of an Einsatzgruppe on the Eastern Front, the gentlemen of the South set about killing black soldiers indiscriminately. “Private Harry Bird reported that Confederates after the Battle of the Crater in 1864 quieted wounded black soldiers begging for water ‘by a bayonet thrust,’ ” Faust writes. “Bird welcomed the subsequent order ‘to kill them all’; it was a command ‘well and willingly . . . obeyed.’ General Robert E. Lee, only a few hundred yards away, did nothing to intervene.”
The corpses left on the battlefield were often so close together that retreating survivors had to walk over them. Men became “putrefied meat, not so much killed as slaughtered,” Faust writes. One soldier who accidentally stepped on a dead man’s leg compared it to “a piece of pickled pork—hard and yet fleshy.” After Antietam, a Union surgeon reported, “the dead were almost wholly unburied [and] stretched along, in one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened, bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads.” The rotting dead turned blue, then black. “Not a purplish discoloration, such as I had imagined in reading of the ‘blackened corpses,’ so often mentioned in descriptions of battlegrounds, but a deep bluish black, giving to a corpse with black hair the appearance of a negro,” a Gettysburg veteran observed. (Faust points out how weirdly unsettling this rotting must have been in a society in which “race and skin color were of definitive importance.” Dying, all men were brothers.)
To deal with these horrors, a new set of social rituals, designed not so much to “blind” survivors to the reality as to make them believe that the reality was necessary and noble, came into being. The beauty and originality of Faust’s book is that it shows how thoroughly the work of mourning became the business of capitalism, merchandised throughout a society. The national mourning store included, of course, inspirational poems and high rhetoric, along with that new practice of embalming with zinc chloride, which “marbleized” flesh and allowed some of the dead, at least, to travel home for burial in recognizable shape. (There was a secondary market in icebox coffins, for the same reasons. Faust reproduces a full-page advertisement, inserted in the Gettysburg paper soon after the battle, for “Transportation Cases”: “Preserves the Body in a natural and perfect condition . . . for any distance or length of time.”)
Amplifying the new rituals, and democratizing them, were the recent inventions of the telegraph and the photograph. The telegraph meant that news of the battle, with the terrifying “lists,” was available in a timely way. One hadn’t consigned one’s son or husband to a Hades on Earth from which he might or might not emerge years later; one would know, and soon. For the soldier, there were new kinds of photograph—tintype, daguerreotype, ambrotype—which made those left behind more real and constant; many soldiers died clutching photographs of their families. One of the most storied deaths of the war was that of Amos Humiston, a Yankee soldier felled at Gettysburg, who was found with an ambrotype of three children in his hands but no other identification. “The ultimately successful effort to identify him created a sensation, with magazine and newspaper articles, poems, and songs celebrating the devoted father, who perished with his eyes and heart focused on eight-year-old Franklin, six-year-old Alice, and four-year-old Frederick,” Faust writes. In an irony that the postmodernists would appreciate, Humiston was most famously commemorated, clutching that photograph, in a Frank Leslie’s Illustrated woodcut.
Faust places these rituals and manners, and the more familiar ones of mass cemeteries and “sanitary commissions,” against the larger background of a changing faith in family life. Unlike the European practice of war, where peasant and proletarian infantrymen—largely detached from their families, who had long since given them up to the army and its institutions—and a tiny cadre of professional officers fought professional battles with a professional code of soldiering, the American Civil War soldier was often embedded in an ongoing family life. He hadn’t enlisted as a teen-ager and then been lost to the Continent and the Empire. He had gone to fight in Virginia for Ohio or Pennsylvania. His parents and siblings were waiting for him. The Civil War took place in a time, and in a country, where “modern” feelings of attachment to the small bourgeois family were not just ascendant but aggressively honored, more, perhaps, than anywhere else. The ancient facts of battlefield death had to be parsed not as the medieval vestige they in some sense remained in Europe but within the grammar of the bourgeois life that surrounded them. In “Vanity Fair,” the battle of Waterloo is both a social event and an aristocratic game, played for high stakes; when Amelia’s husband dies, it is a risk taken in a risky life. By contrast, in “Little Women,” that matchless novel of home-front life in the North, the March girls regard their father’s war service not as a gamble but as a sacrifice. What spurred new rituals of naming and caring, Faust writes, “was the anguish of wives, parents, siblings, and children who found undocumented, unconfirmed, and unrecognized loss intolerable. The Civil War took place in a newly and self-consciously humanitarian age . . . an age in which family ties were celebrated and sentimentalized, an age that believed, moreover, that it possessed the agency and responsibility, as well as the scientific expertise, to mitigate suffering.”
Faust is tracing a true fault line in modern consciousness. In these years, and despite much conventional religious piety, there’s a nascent sense that the deaths of the young men will never be justified in the eyes of a good God, and never compensated for by a meeting in another world. Their deaths can be made meaningful only through a vague idea of Providence and through the persistence of a living nation. Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg, through the dignity of near-Biblical expression, elevated sordid nationalism to a shimmering ideal of popular government; and it resonated because it said what a lot of people already felt. Fewer people found comfort in the promise of eternal life; more found it in the idea of a new world worth making.
It wasn’t a small shift. For most of history, ordinary people lived their lives vertically, with reference to a Heaven above and a Hell below. Now we live our lives horizontally, with reference to a past that we can repair or extend, and to future generations for whom our sacrifices and examples may make a better life. (We live horizontally, too, in the knowledge of sex and death as shaping principles.) The Civil War was one place in which this change got made. At the end of the war, the rituals that Faust catalogues were not merely secular but in their quiet way anti-religious, grounding the meaning of the war entirely in the sublunary realm of gains and losses. It is as if the scale of death and suffering had vitiated the idea of a good God not so much by outright rejection as by forcing another rhetoric and language of explanation.
The effort to give shape and meaning to the bleak horrors of what happened can be seen in the rituals of mourning, but it can also be seen in the war’s literary relics. Literature is, as Faust recognizes, always in a way atypical. Emily Dickinson and Ambrose Bierce are not “representative” of anything; if they were, they wouldn’t matter. But there’s a sense in which the strange, astringent, skeptical tone that they distilled from the war is revealing of the era’s search for ritual and rhetoric. Walt Whitman is the real hero of Faust’s book, because he is the one figure in whom this double movement—toward the war as a noble enterprise; away from all war as horrific slaughter—is conscious and complete. Faust reminds us how deeply implicated he was in the war—not just as a poet or chronicler but as a witness and, most touchingly, a devoted “correspondent,” a letter writer to the bereaved. He was writing rote letters of condolence to the families of the dead even as he was working on his great war poems, which, as Faust says, “suggest no promise of an afterlife beyond that of nature’s own renewal,” and where the suffering, far from ennobling, simply doesn’t end:
A republic of suffering is made of infinite islands of mourning; we form the archipelago afterward, and only in our minds.
For historians like Faust, the key fact about the Civil War is the shock of carnage on an unanticipated scale: no one expected that much death, and people had to dress it as best they could. But what if the mass killing and dying of the Civil War was willed, wrought, and already existing in antebellum America? That is the thesis of Mark S. Schantz’s arresting revisionist history, “Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death” (forthcoming from Cornell; $24.95). In his view, a cult of death preceded the fact of dying. “Even after generals had felt firsthand the awful impact of the rifled musket, trench warfare, and long-range field artillery, they persisted in drawing up the same kinds of field orders,” Schantz writes. “Perhaps even more surprisingly, their men obeyed them, and loved ones on the homefront accepted these catastrophic losses as the natural cost of war. There was, however, nothing natural about this devastating loss of life. But to a people steeped in the martial and civic traditions of the Greek revival, heroic death on the battlefield was something that could be comprehended and admired.”
It wasn’t just memories of pillared porches and pedimented façades that kept them dying. There was the Protestant cult of the afterlife, which had, Schantz shows, a kind of folk-art particularity in American sermonizing. Heaven was not merely a general idea of glory but a particular idea of reincarnation: in the afterlife you wouldn’t just linger as a well-meaning spirit; you’d get your whole body back, good as new. He writes:
The revival of a Classical martial code; a maniacally detailed vision of Heaven; a rural cemetery movement that guaranteed a safe resting place—all these things together, Schantz argues, prepared American soldiers for death on the battlefield. In his view, it wasn’t the bloody war that made the rituals; it was the rituals that enabled the bloody war.
Schantz produces many memorable texts and weird instances of morbid imagination at work in the years preceding the war—one has only to recall Mark Twain’s Emmeline Grangerford, with her graveyard poems, to get a sense of just how weirdly ghoulish even backwoods American culture could be. But in the end the reader feels that this is cultural history pushed close to the point of self-parody. The line that Schantz draws between what the preachers and poets say and what people do is just too straight to be credible. All the Dickensian morbidity, all the “salvationist” sermons on the afterlife, couldn’t force someone onto the battlefield. Besides, the accounts we have are not of soldiers rushing forward to a glorious death but of soldiers shrinking from a hideous slaughter, and driven forward, finally, by the thing that drives all soldiers forward—the habit of obedience and the fear of looking like a coward to the guy beside you. You have his back, not your country’s, and not your church’s.
A pervasive cult of death might explain why the Civil War was so outlandishly bloody. Yet what if, of all unthinkable thoughts, the war wasn’t that bloody, and has come to seem so only in retrospect—what if it’s part of the self-caressing insularity of American life to think that it has some special, epoch-marking awfulness? This is the thesis of a pugnacious and partly persuasive book by the historian Mark E. Neely, Jr., “The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction” (Harvard; $27.95). Neely argues, at length and with some sideswipes at Faust’s earlier work, that it is only in our own time that the Civil War has come to be seen as a total war. He recalculates the figures for deaths in combat, the study of which Faust has pioneered, and concludes that the real number of dead killed on the battlefield is about a hundred and thirty-five thousand for the North and sixty-six thousand for the South. “In absolute numbers, then, the North suffered deaths equal to about two and one half times the number of Americans killed in Vietnam, and the South experienced well below one and a half times the deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam,” Neely writes. “Neither figure begins to approach in magnitude the American casualties suffered in World War II.”
After a time, the reader sees that Neely isn’t really arguing against Faust’s view, the standard view: the soldiers did stand there and watch each other die; the bodies formed a road on the field and turned black from rot. His point is not that this view is false but that it is provincial. In reality, our Civil War was a mid-nineteenth-century war more or less like any other, Crimean or Mexican, and the casualties were just about what you might expect. Neely argues that the mythology of reconciliation has led us to bundle together deaths on both sides, North and South, so that the total “American” losses are represented as misleadingly large. This is, in effect, as absurd as combining German and British deaths in the Second World War into a single “European” figure. “If we consider the Civil War casualties one ‘country’ at a time, then the 360,000 Union dead do not equal even the 407,000 Americans killed in World War II,” he writes. “The 260,000 Confederate dead constitute but 64 percent” of the Second World War dead. The Civil War was a total war only if you had the bad luck to be a black soldier facing Confederates or a Native American facing either side. “The central restraining force on the destructive abilities of Civil War soldiers was their visceral perceptions of racial identity,” Neely says bluntly. Americans created a “modern cult of violence,” he says, out of a desire to ennoble the Civil War: by making its violence somehow epic and unprecedented, they would make the war of epic and unprecedented significance.
But if the Civil War was not, strictly, a “total war,” what war would be? Even on the Eastern Front of the Second World War—and if that was not a total war, ignorant armies clashing by night, then nothing could be—the fighting was done largely by regular armies under regular rules; when the Russians finally overran the last German H.Q. at Stalingrad, after unspeakable suffering of unthinkable numbers on an unimaginable scale, they took the remaining officers prisoner and marched them off to the mess hall and polite interrogations; many in the German Sixth Army survived the war to argue bitterly about what had happened. The estimated proportion of total dead on the Soviet side is somewhere around twelve per cent of the population, and on the German less than that. These are huge numbers—one in ten is what we should mean by “decimated”—but compared with, say, the European deaths in the Black Plague of 1348, where at least one-third of European humanity is estimated to have died, the numbers are small enough to allow the possibility of the quick recovery, which did, in fact, take place. Even total wars are never entirely total.
Yet the fact that the Civil War was seen as uniquely horrible—not predictably horrible, à la Schantz, or proportionately not so horrible after all, à la Neely—points toward a feature of our moral modernity that this war helped usher in. We sense an abyss between death and all other kinds of events, greater even than our fear of it warrants. It is our moral equivalent of the speed of light, the one fixed absolute. If less than one per cent of the population suffers from depression, or is too fat, or can’t find a mate, or even loses a home, we can adjust and contextualize; it isn’t really that bad. If four hundred thousand people are killed, then that is, with intimate family touched on, a million people—an unimaginably large number, more people than you will ever meet in a lifetime—whose lives have been blighted. That only a few hundredths of a per cent of New Yorkers died on September 11th hardly alters its significance for New York.
There is a curious double consciousness at large in liberal civilizations. On the one hand, they grant enormous importance to the individual and the individual’s immediate links—family, garden, small group, the Little Women waiting. On the other, they have been shaped by mass death and a readiness for mass killing, by what Papa goes through. (This imbalance may explain why we give murder such undue weight, why our most popular storytelling apparatus, nightly television, is devoted largely to the lore and legends and compulsive retelling of individual homicides, even though such investigations are a vanishingly small percentage of what policemen really do.)
The most affecting stories from the Civil War are of people who came to recognize this duality: believing in the goodness of the Cause and still finding nothing in the Mourning Store that fit; ignoring the usual vertical rituals of church and sermon, and trying to improvise horizontal rituals to make sense of what remained intolerable loss. Faust tells the story of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, whose son Nat was killed in Virginia in 1863, after being left wounded on the battlefield. Grief-stricken, the father tried the usual cant of consolation: he listened to sermons, he read inspirational poetry; Nathan, he told himself, died for a great cause, he had “died happily,” he was waiting, as the preachers insisted, “just the other side of the veil.” None of it helped; it was, historically, too late for that. “My heart seems almost breaking,” he said simply, and he couldn’t turn his mind from his loss. At last, he made a monument for his son in the shape of his sword, and to “get out of myself” he crusaded for better ambulance service on the battlefield, the kind of thing that might have saved his son’s life. There was no comfort to be found; but there was work to do, no pride in death, merely unending sorrow and the possibility, some distant day, of meaning. ♦
