This Republic of Suffering [10]
But even without the formality of such resolutions, soldiers performed this obligation. After Gettysburg W. J. O’Daniel informed Sarah Torrence of the death of her husband, Leonidas, explaining that the two of them “went into battle side by side,” promising each other “if one go[t] hurt to do all we could for him.” The letter represented the final fulfillment of that obligation. William Fields wrote to Amanda Fitzpatrick about how her husband had passed his last hours in a Richmond hospital at the very end of the war: “As you in all probability have not heard of the death of your husband and as I was a witness to his death I consider it my duty to write to you although I am a stranger to you.” Duty similarly motivated I. G. Patten of Alabama to respond with “Aufaul knuse” to a letter that arrived in camp from I. B. Cadenhead’s wife almost two weeks after his battlefield death. Another Confederate castigated himself for not stopping in the aftermath of an 1863 battle to record an enemy soldier’s last words and transmit them to his family. In retrospect, this seemed to the young rebel a far more egregious failure than not providing water to the thirsty man.24
Remarkably similar North and South, condolence letters constitute a genre that emerged from the combination of the assumptions of ars moriendi with the “peculiar conditions and necessities” of the Civil War. These letters sought to make absent loved ones virtual witnesses to the dying moments they had been denied, to link home and battlefront, and to mend the fissures war had introduced into the fabric of the Good Death. In camp hospitals nurses and doctors often assumed this responsibility, sending the bereaved detailed descriptions not just of illnesses and wounds but of last moments and last words. Some hospital personnel even played the role of instructors in the art of dying, eliciting final statements and cueing their patients through the enactment of the Good Death. When Jerry Luther lay wounded in 1862, a physician urged him to send a last message to his mother. Another soldier, asked by a doctor for his last words to send home, responded by requesting the doctor to provide them. “I do not know what to say. You ought to know what I want to say. Well, tell them only just such a message as you would like to send if you were dying.” The expiring soldier clearly regarded the doctor as an expert in ars moriendi as well as in medicine. This was a ritual the physician must understand far better than he. The war encouraged not just the performance of the traditions of ars moriendi but their dissemination. Chaplains North and South saw this instruction as perhaps their most important obligation to the soldiers in their spiritual charge, a duty Catholic father William Corby described as “the sad consolation of helping them…to die well.”25
Sometimes soldiers would attempt to eliminate intermediaries and narrate their deaths directly. Many carried letters to be forwarded to loved ones if they were killed. Sergeant John Brock of the 43rd U.S. Colored Infantry described men bidding each other farewell as they awaited battle near Petersburg. “One corporal from the state of Maine,” he reported,