This Republic of Suffering [77]
Into the feelings of waste and futility represented by so many fore-shortened young lives, funeral sermons injected the consolation of narrative, of a story with a purposeful trajectory and an ending that showed death was never premature but always came at exactly the right time in accordance with God’s design. “The child of scarce unfolded piety, and the veteran Christian, alike yield up to God in death a mortality mysteriously compact,” a New York sermon proclaimed, “the work both had to do on earth being as completely done, as if each had been assigned the longest period known to man.” Reverend Philip Slaughter found in the life of Randolph Fairfax narrative continuities that might not have been evident before his heroic death. Slaughter noted that the dead Confederate always played fairly as a boy and obeyed his mother, had requested a Bible for his fourteenth birthday, and carried a New Testament in battle. When he was killed instantly by a shell at Fredericksburg, the testimony of his life served, in Slaughter’s view, to provide the certainty of salvation that Fairfax himself had been unable to articulate. As Reverend Robert Dabney explained in a memorial to Lieutenant Colonel John Thornton, “he being dead, yet speaketh,” through the “narrative of…[his] religious life.” The dead carried a message from God, and in some sense were themselves that message, as Dabney made clear in another sermon, this one to honor Stonewall Jackson: “Our dead hero is God’s sermon to us. His embodied admonition, His incorporate discourse.”44
Soldiers remembered in published funeral sermons and biographies were usually individuals of considerable importance, with families of sufficient means to sponsor these memorials. Almost always they were officers. These soldiers were markedly less representative of the masses of Civil War armies than were the men whose deaths were reported in the stream of private condolence letters written by comrades to send news of particular deaths to loved ones at home. But the existence of these more polished and elaborated printed efforts to grapple with death and its meaning represent many more such sermons that never made their way into print. The cultural, emotional, spiritual, and ideological work that the privileged sought to accomplish with printed sermons was work that mourners from ordinary families would have needed to undertake as well—even if they lacked the resources to publish books and pamphlets that would be available to historians more than a century later. Beneath these countless historical silences, ordinary Americans were also struggling to come to terms with their losses.
How to mourn was often something that had to be learned, and the work of funeral sermons was to teach these lessons too. The orations of two clergymen, one northern, one southern, offer a primer in grief and consolation, articulating accepted understanding of what we today would call the psychology of loss, as well as the means of explaining and alleviating sorrow. At an upstate New York funeral service for Lieutenant Colonel James M. Green, whose body lay unidentified and unrecovered on Morris Island in South Carolina, Reverend Charles Seymour Robinson reminded the mourners that “time in a measure will help you.” God’s mercy had provided that “months and years” would lessen the “first violence of a sudden affliction.” The bereaved would always feel their loss, he acknowledged, and always remember the departed with affection. But “you will,” he assured them, “by and by be able to look calmly on these days of grief.” Robinson listed three specific sources of consolation. “Patriotism,” he declared, “will come in to aid in mitigating the sorrow. These times are historic.” In a few years, he assured his listeners, they would look back and proudly recount the sacrifices of their dead, giving their lives for their country. A second source of comfort would be the sympathy of others. Shared mourning, he affirmed, was easier mourning. Finally,