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as it has been described by psychologists and indeed observers through the ages. Freud, for example, contrasted mourning, a grief that understands that a loved object no longer exists, to melancholia, in which an individual “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost” and thus remains mired in “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love.” Freud writes of “the work of mourning,” defined by the effort to come to grips with the reality of loss and then to withdraw emotional investment from the departed. Mourning is a process with an end; melancholia a state, and, in Freud’s terms, a pathology. The particular circumstances created by the Civil War often inhibited mourning, rendering it difficult, if not impossible, for many bereaved Americans to move through the stages of grief. In an environment where information about deaths was often wrong or entirely unavailable, survivors found themselves both literally and figuratively unable to “see clearly what…has been lost” and instead encouraged to deny it. In such conditions the temptation to distrust and resist bad news was all too alluring and the capacity for the genuine consolations of mourning severely compromised.14

Denial and numbness were, in fact, prominent means by which civilians—like soldiers—attempted to cope with war’s losses. Abbie Brooks of Georgia confessed that sufferings had “purified and petrified me. I care very little for anybody or anything, am neither sorry nor glad, but passive.” After her brother’s death, Kate Foster of Mississippi felt emotionally altered: “My heart became flint. I am almost afriad to love too dearly anyone now.” Kate Stone, who spent much of the war as a refugee from her Louisiana home, acknowledged that “death does not seem half so terrible as it did long ago. We have grown used to it.” Cornelia Hancock, nursing in Union hospitals, felt the same as the young Confederate: “One can get used to anything.” She had come to understand why hospital administrators so often failed to make the required list of fatalities: death had become too commonplace even to take note of. When she was told of the demise of a neighbor at home, Hancock confessed to her sister that a single death seemed not to mean “anything to me now.” The young wife of a Confederate officer reported that some bereaved southerners became almost paralyzed by their losses, “stunned and stupefied…forever, and a few there were who died of grief.” Mary Lee, living amid the constant battles over Winchester, agreed: “no one feels anything now.” Such denial represented its own kind of loss, an abandonment of emotion and sensibility that was a death in itself, another dimension of war’s dehumanization.15

Making a death real, feeling and accepting its certainty, required effort. After her brother James was killed at Second Bull Run, Sarah Palmer wrote in anguish to her sister Harriet, “I can’t realize that I am never to see that dear boy again…it is too hard to realize.” Death itself seemed impossible to understand, much less to connect with their vibrant young brother: “We have never known what death was before.” Their mother, Esther, turned to fantasies of denial, trying to reject rather than embrace the reality of his loss, which she found unbearable. “I sometimes think he is not dead, it might have been a mistake,” she wrote several weeks after he was killed. “I cannot begin to realize the death of my beloved brother,” wrote another sister, Elizabeth. “I find myself continually thinking of him as alive.” Five months later Harriet still struggled to accept the fact of his loss. “It is very hard to believe that dear Jim is dead. Were it not for the cessation of those letters we used to hail with so much gladness…I could not realize it.” Death seemed ineffable, a void that she could understand best through the physicality of the letters that came no more.16

Survivors sought material evidence that could convince their often “rebellious hearts” of the unfathomable and intolerable news that confronted them. Just two years