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they had not long to live were explicit about being prepared, articulating their acceptance of their fate. J. C. Cartwright wrote with sadness to inform Mr. and Mrs. L. B. Lovelace of Georgia that their son had died in April 1862 in Tennessee. But, he reassured them, “he was conscious all the time and expressed a willingness to die.” T. Fitzhugh wrote Mrs. Diggs to report the death of her beloved husband in June 1863. He lived “but a short while” after being shot by the Yankees, but “he was in his right mind at the time of his death” and “was perfectly resigned.” A nurse in a Virginia military hospital informed the mother of a deceased patient that he had been “conscious of his death and…not afraid but willing to die,” which she reassuringly interpreted as “reason to believe that he is better off” now than in this world of woe.35

Witnesses eagerly reported soldiers’ own professions of faith and Christian conviction, for these were perhaps the most persuasive evidences that could be provided of future salvation. As T. J. Hodnett exclaimed to his family at home after his brother John’s 1863 death from smallpox, “Oh how could I of Stud it if it had not bin for the bright evidence that he left that he was going to a better world.” Hodnett was deeply grateful that John’s “Sole seme to be…happy” as he passed his last moments singing of a heaven with “no more triels and trubble nor pane nor death.” Captain A. K. Simonton of North Carolina and Isaac Tucker of New Jersey fought on different sides of the conflict, but both died with the words “My God! My God!” on their lips. Tucker was not a “professed and decided follower of Jesus,” but his regular attendance at church, his calm in the face of death, and his invocation of the divinity at the end suggested grounds for fervent hope about his eternal future. Simonton’s presentiment of his end, his attention in the weeks before his death to “arranging his business for both worlds,” indicated that he too was ready to greet his maker, as he indeed did with his last words.36

“The Letter Home.” Charcoal and graphite drawing by Eastman Johnson, 1867. Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

When soldiers expired unwitnessed and unattended, those reporting their deaths often tried to read their bodies for signs that would reveal the nature of their last moments—to make their silence somehow speak. Their physical appearance would communicate what they had not had the opportunity to put into words. Many observers believed, as one war correspondent put it, that the “last life-expression of the countenance” was somehow “stereotyped by the death blow” and preserved for later scrutiny and analysis. A witness to the death of Maxcy Gregg wrote to the general’s sisters that “the calm repose of his countenance indicated the departure of one, at peace with God.” In words meant to offer similar assurance to grieving relatives, a Confederate soldier reported the death of a cousin in 1863: “His brow was perfectly calm. No scowl disfigured his happy face, which signifies he died an easy death, no sins of this world to harrow his soul as it gently passed away to distant and far happier realms.” Clearly such a face could not be on its way to hell. A Michigan soldier, however, found just such evidence in the appearance of some “rebels” already many hours dead. “Even in death,” he wrote, “their traits show how desperate they are and in what situation their conscience was. Our dead look much more peaceful.” Witnesses eagerly reported any evidence of painless death, not just to relieve the minds of loved ones about the suffering a soldier might have had to endure but, more importantly, because an easy death suggested the calmness, resignation, and quick passage to heaven that the bereaved so eagerly hoped for as they contemplated the fate of their lost kin.37

Peaceful acceptance of God’s will, even when it brought death, was an important sign of one’s spiritual condition. But if resignation was necessary for salvation, it was not sufficient. Condolence letters detailed evidence of sanctified behavior that absent