This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

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Yankee private Henry Struble was not only listed as a casualty after Antietam but assigned a grave after his canteen was found in the hands of a dead man he had stopped to help. After the war ended, Struble sent flowers every Memorial Day to decorate his own grave, to honor the unknown soldier it sheltered and perhaps to acknowledge that there but for God’s grace he might lie.

Richmond's Mrs. William McFarland. "Let us remember that we belong to that sex which was last at the cross, first at the grave…Let us go now, hand in hand, to the graves of our country’s sons, and as we go let our energies be aroused and our hearts be thrilled by this thought: It is the least thing we can do for our soldiers.

Death has no power to change moral qualities,” he insisted in a Decoration Day speech in 1883. “Whatever else I may forget,” the aging abolitionist declared, “I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.

honoring the slain offered women a claim to both prominence and power in the new postwar South. Ensuring the immortality of the fallen and of their memory became a means of perpetuating southern resistance to northern domination and to the reconstruction of southern society.

Men, too, wore tokens of mourning, armbands for lost kin, badges and rosettes, like those displayed by Virginia Military Institute cadets and officers for a month after Stonewall Jackson’s death.

That fatal bullet went speeding forth Till it reached a town in the distant North Till it reached a house in a sunny street Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat Without a murmur, without a cry …….….….…. And the neighbors wondered that she should die.11 Some grieving survivors did indeed literally perish.

The establishment of national and Confederate cemeteries created the Civil War Dead as a category, as a collective that represented something more and something different from the many thousands of individual deaths that it comprised.

The war that freed the slaves established broad claims to rights—for blacks as well as whites, for women as well as men, for both the living and the dead.

What is Death?” had long served as a foundation and central concern of Christian doctrine. Sweet’s answer, “It is the middle point between two lives,

For Whitman, immortality rested, as he wrote in another poem, in mother earth’s absorption of bodies and blood rendered “in unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence.

there is no more exemption for nations than for individuals from the just retribution due to flagrant and persistent transgression.” But the Civil War’s “tears and blood,” he believed, “may at last bring us to our senses.