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detailed evidence of sanctified behavior that absent relatives had not been able to witness. When Henry Bobo, a Mississippi private, died of wounds received near Richmond in the summer of 1862, his cousin wrote from the field to assure Henry’s parents that their son had a better chance of getting to heaven than they might think. There had been, he reported, a “great change” in Henry’s “way of living” in the months just before his death. Although he had never actually become a professed Christian, Henry had quit swearing and had begun to lead a Christian life. I. B. Cadenhead’s sergeant tried similarly to reassure the soldier’s widow after her husband’s death outside Atlanta in the summer of 1864. “I have had several conversations with him upon the subject of death he sayed to me their was one thing that he was sorry for & that [was] he had not united himself with the church before he left home.” When Asahel Nash was killed in the fall of 1862, his parents wrote their nephews, who had served in the First Ohio with their son, to secure information about his life as well as his death. “We want you to write all you can about Asahel…How were his morals?” The army, they feared, was “a poor place to improve good habits.”38

Perhaps Walter Perry had succumbed to the temptations of camp life, for his brother Frank reported that the soldier expressed great anxiety about his past behavior as he lay dying after Antietam. Frank wrote his family in Georgia that Walter at first “said that he hoped he was prepared to meet his God in a better world than this,” but he knew “he had been a bad, bad, very bad boy.” Frank hastened to assure the dying man that Christ had come to save such sinners. And when Walter failed to mention any of the family by name in his last hours, Frank emphasized that he had nonetheless addressed them implicitly by repeating “Good by, Good by to you all.” Striving to fit his brother’s life and words into the model of the Good Death, Frank Perry consoled his family with a report of Walter’s expressed hope to “meet us all in Heaven.” But hope in this case seemed to fall considerably short of certainty.39

In a letter to his wife informing her of her brother George’s death in 1864, Frank Batchelor worked hard to transform the deceased into a plausible candidate for salvation. Batchelor admitted that George “did not belong to the visible body of Christ’s Church,” but cited his “charity,” “his strong belief in the Bible,” and his rejection of the sins of “envy hatred and malice” to offer his wife hope for her brother’s fate. Batchelor confirmed himself “satisfied” that George was “a man of prayer” and had no doubt at last “found the Savior precious to his sole” before he died. “This being so,” Batchelor happily concluded, his wife could comfort herself with the knowledge she would meet her brother again “in the green fields of Eden.”40

Just as the bereaved looked for persuasive evidence of salvation, so too were they eager for last messages from dying kin. Reports of parting communications to loved ones appeared in almost every condolence letter. Sanford Branch wrote his mother in Georgia after the First Battle of Bull Run to say his brother John’s last words were “about you.” After Private Alfred G. Gardner of Rhode Island was shot at Gettysburg, he charged his sergeant to tell his wife he died happy. T. J. Spurr of Massachusetts expired uttering the word “Mother” Wiley Dorman “asked for his Mother the last word he spoke.” Fathers often exhorted children to complete their education, help their mothers, and say their prayers. With these words dying soldiers brought the names and spirits of absent loved ones to their deathbeds and left their survivors with wishes and instructions that outlived their source. For those at home, news of these final messages reinforced the sense of connectedness to lost kin. Neither family nor soldier was left entirely alone, for these deathbed invocations of absent loved ones worked in some measure to overcome separations. Home and battlefront collaborated in the work of managing the unprecedented