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received communications from the mainland only three times a week, when a steamer would arrive with its flag at half-mast if it brought news of casualties. Residents watching for the boat would be weeping before it even arrived at the dock. Seventy-three Nantucketers out of a population of about 6,000 died in the war, with 8 killed and 13 wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg alone. When Lieutenant Leander Alley’s body arrived home almost two weeks after the battle, “hundreds of people” called at his mother’s house to view the body, which one of his commanding officers had paid to have embalmed before its shipment north. Schools and stores closed in his honor, and family and neighbors gathered for “impressive funeral services” and a lengthy procession to the Unitarian cemetery.39

In the Confederacy, Clark Stewart, a Presbyterian clergyman, divided his time between Virginia hospitals and his South Carolina home, where he traveled about visiting bereaved families and presiding over funerals of soldiers returned from the battlefield. In his journal he noted the biblical verse he selected for each occasion. “Funeral sermon for Robt Hellams who fell at Fburg John 14:18,” his diary entry for January 18, 1863, read. “I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you” was an especially appropriate text for this itinerant clergyman.40

The proffering of comfort was a key function of the sermons that served as the heart of almost every funeral service, however modest or extravagant. But the oration was intended to assist mourners in understanding as well as alleviating their grief. Funeral sermons usually attempted to define the meaning of the deceased’s life and death, an effort that almost inevitably involved speculating on the nature of death itself. In both North and South many of these wartime sermons, as well as funeral biographies and memorials that grew out of them, appeared in print, ranging in size from a pamphlet of a few pages to full-sized octavos designed to serve as monuments to the dead and exhortations to the living. Almost without exception they drew explicitly upon details in the condolence letters that had announced the soldier’s death in order to fashion a more formalized and self-conscious story of a life and its significance. In his funeral sermon for John W. Griffin, a young Confederate chaplain who died in 1864, for example, L. H. Blanton referred to reports of the deceased’s last words and offered the consoling judgment that Griffin’s “dying testimony was all that Christian friends or the Church of God could desire.”41

The Good Death was the foundation for the process of mourning carried on by survivors who used the last words and moments of the dead soldier as the basis for broader evaluation of his entire life. More considered, more polished than condolence letters written from the front, the published funeral sermon was intended for distribution to a wider audience than simply next of kin or even those who might be able to attend a funeral service. The lost life, the soldier’s death no longer belonged just to that individual and his family but was also to be understood and possessed by the community—even the nation—at large. The funeral sermon, like the ritual that surrounded it, was a memorial, not in granite, but in words; it sought, like the Good Death itself, to ensure that dying was not an end, not an isolated act, itself undertaken in isolation, but a foundation for both spiritual and social immortality—for eternal life and lasting memory.42

Dabney Carr Harrison of Virginia, shot through the lungs at Fort Donelson, reportedly murmured, “It is all right! I am perfectly willing to die.” For Reverend William James Hoge, composing a sketch of Dabney’s life, this phrase became the all-important message of Christian sacrifice, an emulation of the Savior himself: however bitter the cup of pain and grief put into his hands by his heavenly Father, he would still say as he drank, “It is all right.” The entire life that Hoge recounted became a prelude to this final defining moment. Born on the Sabbath,