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Vinovskis concludes that about 6 percent of northern white males between ages thirteen and forty-five died in the war, whereas 18 percent of white men of similar age in the South perished. But because of much higher levels of military mobilization in the white South, mortality rates for southern soldiers were twice, not three times, as great as those for northern soldiers. James McPherson cites these soldiers’ death rates as 31 percent for Confederate soldiers, 16 percent for Union soldiers. Gary Gallagher believes Vinovskis’s overall death rate for the South is too low; he estimates that closer to one in four rather than one in five white southern men of military age died in the conflict. I have cited the more conservative total. See Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?” in Maris A. Vinovskis, ed., Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 3–7; James M. McPherson, personal communication to author, December 27, 2006; Gary Gallagher, personal communication to author, December 16, 2006.

3. James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3, 177, n. 56.

4. [Francis W. Palfrey], In Memoriam: H.L.A. (Boston: Printed for private distribution, 1864), p. 5; Richard Shryock, “A Medical Perspective on the Civil War,” American Quarterly 14 (Summer 1962): 164; H. Clay Trumbull, War Memories of an Army Chaplain (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1898), p. 67. Vital statistics for this period are very scarce, and the most complete cover only Massachusetts. I am grateful to historical demographer Gretchen Condran of Temple University for discussing these matters with me. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Part I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 62–63. On the “untimely death of an adult child” as “particularly painful” in mid-nineteenth-century England, see Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 39.

5. One notable appearance of the image of a harvest of death is in the title given Timothy O’Sullivan’s photograph of a field of bodies at Gettysburg in Alexander Gardner, Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the War (1866; rpt. New York: Dover, 1959), plate 36; Kate Stone, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868, ed. John Q. Anderson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1955), p. 264; C. W. Greene to John McLees, August 15, 1862, McLees Family Papers, SCL.

6. [Frederick Law Olmsted], Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1863), p. 115.

7. The general literature on death is immense and rich. A few key texts not cited elsewhere in this volume include Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Sandra Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Way We Grieve (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988); Paul Monette, Last Watch of the Night (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994); Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963); Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

8. Mrs. Carson to R. F. Taylor, September 14, 1864, Carson Family Papers, SCL. On changing notions of the self, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western