This Republic of Suffering [136]
26. Christian Recorder, November 12, 1864.
27. Richard Rollins, ed., Pickett’s Charge!: Eyewitness Accounts, (Redondo Beach, Calif.: Rank & File Publications, 1994), p. 96.
28. James R. Montgomery to A. R. Montgomery, May 10, 1864, CSA Collection, ESBL; John M. Coski, “Montgomery’s Blood-Stained Letter Defines ‘The Art of Dying’—and Living,” Museum of the Confederacy Magazine (Summer 2006): 14.
29. Coski, “Montgomery’s Blood-Stained Letter.”
30. Contrast this “checklist” with the “stock messages” that Jay Winter describes from British officers in World War I informing relatives of a soldier’s death: he was loved by his comrades, was a good soldier, and died painlessly. This is a remarkably secular formula in comparison to the Civil War’s embrace of the ars moriendi tradition. See J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 35. For a Civil War condolence letter written almost in the form of a checklist—indentations and all—see John G. Barrett and Robert K. Turner Jr., Letters of a New Market Cadet: Beverly Stannard (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 67–68. For a Catholic example, see Cooney, “War Letters of Father Peter Paul Cooney,” pp. 153–54. Much of the “checklist” had its origins in the deathbed observers’ search for reassurance that the dying person was successfully resisting the devil’s characteristic temptations: to abandon his faith, to submit to desperation or impatience, to demonstrate spiritual pride or complacence, to show too much preoccupation with temporal matters. See Comper, Book of the Craft of Dying, pp. 9–21. For a brief discussion of consolation letters, see Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 84–86.
31. Edwin S. Redkey, ed., Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African American Soldiers in the Union Army (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 67. Preparation constituted a significant dimension of the Good Death for Jewish soldiers as well. Note the emphasis of Albert Moses Luria’s family on his preparedness and note his epitaph: “He went into the field prepared to meet his God.” See Mel Young, ed., Last Order of the Lost Cause: The True Story of a Jewish Family in the Old South (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1995), p. 147. See also, on sudden death, W. D. Rutherford to Sallie F. Rutherford, June 23, 1864, W. D. Rutherford Papers, SCL; Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, p. 208.
32. Letter to Mrs. Mason, October 3, 1864, 24th Reg. Virginia Infantry, CSA Collection, ESBL.
33. Alexander Twombly, The Completed Christian Life: A Sermon Commemorative of Adjt. Richard Strong (Albany, N.Y.: J. Munsell, 1863), p. 10; David Mack Cooper, Obituary Discourse on Occasion of the Death of Noah Henry Ferry, Major of the Fifth Michigan Cavalry (New York: J. F. Trow, 1863), p. 30.
34. Bacon, Memorial of William Kirkland Bacon, p. 57. On presentiment see also Alonzo Abernethy, “Incidents of an Iowa Soldier’s Life, or Four Years in Dixie,” Annals of Iowa, 3d ser. 12 (1920): 408. For a Jewish example, see the report of the death of Gustave Poznanski in Charleston Daily Courier, June 18, 1862. On presentiment and on soldiers’ deaths more generally, see James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 63–70. See also Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988), pp. 63–64; L. L. Jones to Harriet Beach Jones, Herbert S. Hadley Papers, MOHS; W. D. Rutherford to Sallie Fair, July 26, 1861, W. D. Rutherford Papers, SCL. See also E. S. Nash to Hattie Jones, August 19, 1861, Herbert S. Hadley Papers, MOHS; Wells, Facing the “King of Terrors,” pp. 162–63.
35. J. C. Curtwright to Mr. and Mrs. Lovelace, April 24, 1862, in Lane, ed., Dear Mother, p. 116. T. Fitzhugh to Mrs. Diggs, June 23, 1863, Captain William