This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [11]
Some men managed to write home themselves as they lay dying, speaking through pens instead of from the domestic deathbeds war had denied them. These letters are particularly wrenching, in part because last words of more than a century ago appear seemingly unmediated on the page, speaking across the years, serving as a startling representation of immortality to a twenty-first-century reader. Jeremiah Gage of Mississippi wrote his mother after Gettysburg, “This is the last you may ever hear from me. I have time to tell you I died like a man.”27
Bloodstains cover James Robert Montgomery’s 1864 letter from Spotsylvania to his father in Camden, Mississippi. A private in the Confederate signal corps, twenty-six-year-old Montgomery reported that a piece of shell had “horribly mangled” his right shoulder. “Death,” he wrote, “is inevitable.” But if the stained paper makes his wounds seem almost tangible, his assumptions about death emphasize the years that distance him from our own time. “This is my last letter to you,” he explains. “I write to you because I know you would be delighted to read a word from your dying son.” His choice of the word “delight” here—a term that seems strikingly inappropriate within our modern understanding—underlines the importance accorded the words of the dying. Even as his father faced the terrible news of his son’s death, Montgomery expected him to have the capacity to be delighted by the delivery of his son’s last thoughts. And even in extremis Montgomery followed the generic form of the Civil War death letter. By the middle of the 1864 Wilderness campaign, Montgomery may well have had a good deal of practice at writing such letters to other families. Now he could use this proficiency in composing his own.28
Montgomery died four days later. His close comrade Ethelbert Fairfax wrote to confirm his death and to describe James’s last moments to his family. “I have never witnessed such an exhibition of fortitude and Christian resignation as he showed. In this sad bereavement you will have the greatest of all comforts in knowing that he had made his peace with god and was resigned to his fate…He retained consciousness to the last…His grave is marked.” Marked but never found. Montgomery’s family never realized their hope to bring his body home to Mississippi.29
Letters describing soldiers’ last moments on Earth are so similar, it is as if their authors had a checklist in mind. In fact, letter writers understood the elements of the Good Death so explicitly that they could anticipate the information the bereaved would have sought had they been present at the hour of death: the deceased had been conscious of his fate, had demonstrated willingness to accept it, had shown signs of belief in God and in his own salvation, and had left messages and instructive exhortations for those who should have been at his side. Each of these details was a kind of shorthand, conveying to the reader at home a broader set of implications about the dying man’s spiritual state and embodying the assumptions most Americans shared about life and death.30
Condolence letters invariably addressed the deceased’s awareness of his fate. It was, of course, desirable for the dying man to be conscious and able to confront his impending demise. Only if he was facing death’s inevitablity would he clearly reveal the state of his soul in his last utterances. One of the Civil War’s greatest horrors was that it denied so many soldiers this opportunity by killing them suddenly, obliterating them on the battlefield and depriving them of the chance for the life-defining deathbed experience. Letter writers were honest in reporting such unsatisfactory deaths, explaining to loved ones at home that they were not alone in being deprived of the last words of the departed.
Sudden death represented a profound threat to fundamental assumptions about the correct way to die,