This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [100]
But even if they could not explain the experience of war, they could not escape it. “A battle is indescribable,” a Union chaplain wrote after Fredericksburg, “but once seen it haunts a man till the day of his death.” Like Bierce, who declared himself possessed “by visions of the dead and dying,” many witnesses to the Civil War could not exorcise the phantoms of war by transforming them into reassuring religious or patriotic narratives of redemptive sacrifice. They remained glimpses, fragments, “visions,” sights not stories, visual rather than explanatory in their effect.83
Civil War carnage transformed the mid-nineteenth century’s growing sense of religious doubt into a crisis of belief that propelled many Americans to redefine or even reject their faith in a benevolent and responsive deity. But Civil War death and devastation also planted seeds of a more profound doubt about human ability to know and to understand. In an environment in which man seemed already increasingly undifferentiated from animals, the failure of the uniquely human capacity of language represented another assault upon the foundations of the self. The Civil War compelled Americans to ask with intensified urgency, “What is Death?” and in answering to find themselves wondering why is death, what is life, and can we ever hope to know? We have continued to wonder ever since.
CHAPTER 7
ACCOUNTING
“Our Obligations to the Dead”
“Such a consecration of a nation’s power and resources to a sentiment, the world has never witnessed.”
EDMUND B. WHITMAN
Only a little more than three months had passed since Appomattox when Horace Bushnell addressed the annual reunion of Yale alumni in July 1865. Asked to honor those Yale graduates who had lost their lives in the conflict, Bushnell insisted he could not and should not distinguish fellow collegians from the legions of those who had perished. Instead he spoke of all the Union dead, calling for the nation to acknowledge its debt to the fallen. Bushnell’s oration, “Our Obligations to the Dead,” sought to define the war’s meaning as inseparable from its human cost. In effect, he submitted to the reunited nation a bill on behalf of those who had paid the ultimate price during four years of conflict. In a language of gain and loss, of earning, buying, paying, and owing, Bushnell called Americans to account, demanding that the hundreds of thousands of lives lost be rendered purposeful, worth their expense of blood and suffering.1
Bushnell was far from alone in invoking and extolling the dead in the weeks after southern surrender. Just a few days before Bushnell’s Yale oration, for example, James Russell Lowell had stood before a parallel gathering of Harvard graduates in Cambridge to read a lengthy ode—more than four hundred lines—written to commemorate lost classmates. Twentieth-century novelist and critic Richard Marius once remarked that “on a hot summer day in Cambridge, this wretched poem must have been only slightly less painful than battle itself.” Romantic, sentimental, replete with rhetorical flourishes and classical and biblical references, Lowell’s ode hailed northern victory and mourned those missing from the assembly of graduates. “In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, / Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, / Dark to the triumph which they died to gain.” But Lowell’s empyrean salute to the “sacred dead” contrasted sharply with Bushnell’s pragmatic recognition that the living bore specific obligations to those who had perished. Bushnell’s