This Republic of Suffering [84]
There is no Death! The stars go down
To rise upon some fairer shore;
And bright in heaven’s jeweled crown
They shine forevermore.
…….….….
And ever near us, though unseen,
The dear, immortal spirits tread;
For all the boundless Universe
Is Life— There are no Dead.14
The prominence of heaven in the discourse about Civil War death derived in part from the attractive place it had gradually become during the preceding century. The publication of Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell in 1758 marked the origins of an important movement away from a conception of heaven as forbiddingly ascetic, distant from earth and its materiality, and highly theocentric. Instead, a more modern notion of heaven began to emerge as a realm hardly separate or different—except in its perfection—from Earth itself. “Man after death,” wrote Swedenborg, “is as much man as he was before, so much so as to be unaware that he is not still in the former world…Death is only a crossing.” At the same time, hell became less and less a subject for worry or dread.15
Swedenborgianism as an organized denomination never came to hold more than a marginal place within American religious life. But Swedenborg’s ideas attracted widespread attention in the United States, and Americans from Johnny Appleseed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher and Henry James Sr. cited its influences. “This age is Swedenborg’s,” Emerson proclaimed in 1858. Swedenborgian thought made a significant mark upon Transcendentalism and encouraged tendencies toward a softening view of heaven across American religious denominations. As historian James H. Moorhead has demonstrated, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a muting of the “negative images traditionally associated with life’s end.” A new eschatology that influenced nearly all of Protestant thought “sought to narrow the distance between this world and the next, even to annex heaven as a more glorious suburb of the present life.”16
But this transition remained incomplete as the Civil War opened. Emily Dickinson was not alone in the concerns she voiced about the forbidding nature of the afterlife in her wartime poetry and letters: “Heaven is so cold!” “I don’t like Paradise—Because it’s Sunday—all the time.” The transformation of heaven intensified as war made questions about immortality more immediate and more widely shared. Historians Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang have noted that more than fifty books on heaven were published in the United States between 1830 and 1875, but this total does not include fictional works, or the dozens of Civil War funeral sermons appearing as printed pamphlets that made heaven a central theme, or the many periodical and newspaper articles with titles like “Heaven, the House of God” (which appeared in the columns of the Daily South Carolinian in 1864), or popular poetry that addressed the nature of the afterlife in rhyme (like “Hereafter” or “Up to the Hills,” from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine). In 1863 Harper’s Weekly announced a second edition of William Branks’s Heaven Our Home as a promising “New Source of Consolation” and reported it to be “having a large sale.” It was one of three titles Branks produced about heaven during these years. Historian Phillip Shaw Paludan counts nearly a hundred books on heaven in the decade after the war alone. The geography and society of the afterlife persisted as widespread concerns, for even when the slaughter had ceased, loss and grief remained.17
An issue of particular focus in this literature, and in the struggle to come to terms with death, was the fate of human relationships in the afterlife. If death was no longer to be an ending, it would also no longer be a parting. Earlier visions of heaven had focused almost exclusively on the connection between God and man within the heavenly kingdom, even to the point of denying the persistence of