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on the actions not of God but of man. “War, when you are at it,” Holmes admitted, “is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine.” War may have shattered the young Holmes’s beliefs, but for the old man, war became the place where man’s confrontation with annihilation had made him “capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul.” Man’s ability to choose death became for both Holmes and Bierce the most important experience and memory of the war.11

We still live in the world of death the Civil War created. We take for granted the obligation of the state to account for the lives it claims in its service. The absence of next-of-kin notification, of graves registration procedures, of official provision for decent burial all seem to us unimaginable, even barbaric. The Civil War ended this neglect and established policies that led to today’s commitment to identify and return every soldier killed in the line of duty.

But even as the Civil War brought new humanity—new attentiveness to “sentiment”—in the management of death, so too it introduced a level of carnage that foreshadowed the wars of the century to come. Even as individuals and their fates assumed new significance, so those individuals threatened to disappear into the bureaucracy and mass slaughter of modern warfare. We still struggle to understand how to preserve our humanity and our selves within such a world. We still seek to use our deaths to create meaning where we are not sure any exists. The Civil War generation glimpsed the fear that still defines us—the sense that death is the only end. We still work to live with the riddle that they—the Civil War dead and their survivors alike—had to solve so long ago.

Notes

ABBREVIATIONS

The following acronyms are used in the notes to refer to archives:

BHL

Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

CAH

The Center for American History, The University of Texas, Austin

ESBL

Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Va.

LC

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

LCP

The Library Company of Philadelphia

MAHS

Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston

MOHS

Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis

NARA

National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

NYHS

New-York Historical Society, New York City

NYPL

Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations, New York City

PAHRC

Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historical Research Center, Wynnewood, Pa.

RBMSC

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

SCHS

South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston

SCL

South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia

SHC

Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

VHS

Virginia Historical Society, Richmond

VMIA

Virginia Military Institute Archives, Lexington

WFCHS

Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society, Winchester, Va.

WHS

Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Madison

PREFACE

1. [Stephen Elliott], Obsequies of the Reverend Edward E. Ford, D.D., and Sermon by the Bishop of the Diocese… (Augusta, Ga.: Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel, 1863), p. 8.

2. James David Hacker, “The Human Cost of War: White Population in the United States, 1850–1880,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Minnesota, 1999), pp. 1, 14. Hacker believes that Civil War death totals may be seriously understated because of inadequate estimates of the number of Confederate deaths from disease. Civil War casualty and mortality statistics are problematic overall, and the incompleteness of Confederate records makes them especially unreliable. See Chapter 8 of this book. Maris A. Vinovskis concludes that about 6 percent of northern white males between ages thirteen and forty-five died in the war, whereas 18 percent of white men of similar age in the South perished. But because of much higher levels