This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [15]
Soldiers’ efforts to provide consolation for their survivors altered the traditions of the ars moriendi. New kinds of death required changed forms and meanings for consolation. When Civil War condolence letters enumerated evidence of the deceased’s Christian achievements, designed to show his eligibility for salvation, the writer often included details of the soldier’s military performance, his patriotism, and his manliness. “Tell my mother,” one soldier said, “I have stood before the enemy fighting in a great and glorious cause.” In a letter to the widow of a comrade who had died the preceding day, T. Fitzhugh reported all the customary information: her husband had been resigned to death, was conscious of his fate, and sent his love to his wife and children. But he also added that the soldier had “died a glorious death in defense of his Country.”42
The image of the Christian soldier encompassed patriotic duty within the realm of religious obligation. But in some instances patriotism and courage seemed to serve as a replacement for evidence of deep religious faith. After Ball’s Bluff, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. lay severely wounded, wondering if his religious skepticism was going to put him “en route for Hell.” A “deathbed recantation,” he believed, would be “but a cowardly giving way to fear.” With willful profanity, he declared, “I’ll be G-d’d if I know where I’m going.” But he urged his physician to write home in case of his death to say that he had done his duty. “I was very anxious they should know that.”43
Holmes’s worried acknowledgment of his failure to conform to expected belief and behavior ironically affirms the cultural power of the prevailing Christian narrative. Some nonbelievers hoped that patriotism would substitute for religious conviction in ensuring eternal life. A dying Confederate asked a friend, “Johnnie if a boy dies for his country the glory is his forever isn’t it?” He would have found the views of David Cornwell of the Eighth Illinois reassuring. “I couldn’t imagine,” he mused, “the soul of a soldier who had died in the defense of his country being consigned to an orthodox hell, whatever his opinion might be of the plan of salvation.”44
Cornwell’s views, widely held in both armies, seemed to many Protestant clergy an unwarranted theological departure generated by earthly needs rather than transcendent truths. As the Army and Navy Messenger, published in Virginia by the interdenominational Evangelical Tract Society, warned in 1864, patriotism was not piety. “It is not the blood of man, but ‘the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanseth from all sin.’”45
Despite clerical efforts, the boundary between duty to God and duty to country blurred, and dying bravely and manfully became an important part of dying well. For some soldiers it almost served to take the place of the more sacred obligations of holy living that had traditionally prepared the way for the Good Death. Letters comforting Wade Hampton after his son Preston was killed in the fall of 1864 emphasized this juxtaposition of military and Christian duty and sacrifice. William Preston Johnston urged Hampton to remember that his son’s “heroism has culminated in martyrdom,” which should serve as a “consolation for the years he might have lived.” James Connor’s letter to Hampton structured the imperatives of Christianity, military courage, and masculinity into a hierarchy of solace. “Your best consolation will I know my dear Genl,” he wrote, “be drawn from higher than earthly sources[;] still some alleviation of the sorrow is to be drawn from the reflection that Preston died as he had lived, in the path of duty and honor. Young as he was he had played a man’s part in the war.”46
Although Christian principles remained paramount, considerations of courage and honor could also offer “some alleviation of the sorrow” and thus came to play a significant role in Civil War conceptions of holy living and holy dying. A letter written from North Carolina in 1863 to inform William K. Rash that “your son R. A. Rash is no more