This Republic of Suffering [82]
This nineteenth century with its knife and glass
That make thought physical.
Uncertainty about the relationship of biology and consciousness, of body and soul, troubled even the most devout, who speculated about the definition of the human spirit and the justification for belief in immortality.5
Into this environment of cultural ferment, the Civil War introduced mass death. For an increasingly humanitarian age, such suffering could not help but raise disturbing questions about God’s benevolence and agency. But this was more than an abstract intellectual issue for the hundreds of thousands of Americans bereaved by the war. Loss demanded an explanation that satisfied hearts as well as minds.
Religion remained the most readily available explanatory resource, even as it was challenged by rapid cultural and intellectual change. Reverend John Sweet’s all-too-timely query, “What is Death?” had long served as a foundation and central concern of Christian doctrine. Sweet’s answer, “It is the middle point between two lives,” reveals much of the substance and the solace of belief. In the face of war’s slaughter, mid-nineteenth-century religion promised that there need be no death. Only a willful failure to believe could bring humans to the dread “second death” that cast them into hell. “Turn ye! Turn ye! for why will ye die?” a chaplain’s powerful sermon demanded of Confederate soldiers; “Why Will You Die?” a widely distributed Confederate tract reiterated. Death was a matter of choice and could be consciously rejected in favor of immortality. Soldiers need not be victims; even if their earthly destiny was beyond their control, they remained the masters of their more important eternal fate.6
Such convictions, as we have seen in the ritual of the Good Death, made both dying and mourning easier. Some historians have argued that, in fact, only the widespread existence of such beliefs made acceptance of the Civil War death tolls possible, and that religion thus in some sense enabled the slaughter. Confidence in immortality could encourage soldiers to risk annihilation. Civil War Americans themselves would not have questioned what one Confederate chaplain called the “military power of religion.” It is hard to imagine today a letter like the one a northern nurse sent from the front to a friend in 1864: “I should hardly think it worthwhile,” she remarked, “for Rebecca to grieve much for a dead person for she certainly will soon be with them in heaven.” Firm conviction could yield confidence that bordered on heartlessness and, in some cases, behavior that approached recklessness. But the long tradition of Christian soldiery would have cast religion’s contributions to war more positively, emphasizing faith as a fundamental motivation to religious and patriotic duty. Evangelical tracts and preachers, for example, repeatedly invoked the word “efficiency” in their communications to the troops. The Christian soldier, these preachers and exhorters explained, would be an efficient soldier because he would execute his obligations “conscientiously” and would not be afraid to die.7
Thomas B. Hampton of southwest Virginia became an exemplar of such a man, filling his letters to his wife, Jestin, with professions of his steadily growing religious faith as his regiment passed through the trials of Chickamauga, Resaca, and Atlanta. When the Confederate army was convulsed by religious revivals from the fall of 1862 onward, Hampton increasingly looked toward refuge in a “heaven where wars & rumors of wars are no more.” His company, he reported, held prayer meetings “nearly every night…a beautiful and sublime sight.” War, he found, was weaning him “from the things of this world.” His anticipations of death as relief from the horrors of battle focused his mind on what preachers like John Sweet offered as a second life beyond the grave: “although I may fall by the sword