This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [16]
A Bad Death. “The Execution of the Deserter William Johnson.” Harper’s Weekly, December 28, 1861.
For some, even the reassurance of manly duty bravely accomplished remained unavailable. Commanding officers, chaplains, nurses, and friends did all within their power to cast each death as good, to offer grounds for hope to the bereaved. As one postwar chronicler explained, the Catholic Sisters of Mercy who nursed eighteen-year-old David Brant “wrote to his father the least painful account possible of the poor son’s death.” Indeed, attendants of the dying may not have simply waited to report a Good Death but worked instead to compel it by demanding courage and calmness from the moribund or even, as Catholic nurses and chaplains frequently reported, winning consent for last-minute baptisms. These observers were struggling to manage and mitigate some of the horror of the slaughter they encountered daily.48
But sometimes what one Confederate chaplain called “fond and comforting hope” was all but impossible. Hugh McLees, a missionary to South Carolina regiments, noted that “the deathbed of an impenitent and unpardoned sinner is a very awful place yet it is the one where I have been often called to stand.” To stand—but not to describe, for there was little motivation to communicate such distressing information to survivors. But depictions of Bad Deaths could serve as “edifying” examples. Reports of painful, terrifying deaths offered powerful warnings. Father Louis-Hippolyte Gache, a Confederate chaplain, found Freemasons especially likely to die badly, obstinate in rejecting faith to the end. Gache described a man who cursed both him and the church in his “last agony” and thus left his family with a “twofold bereavement: they mourned his physical, and with much more grief, his spiritual death.”49
Perhaps the most widespread version of the Bad Death appeared in the narratives of soldiers’ executions that can be found not only in newspapers and religious publications but in almost every surviving soldier’s diary and every substantial collection of soldiers’ letters. Punishment for desertion or for crimes like murder or rape, executions were more frequent in the Civil War than in any American conflict before or since. They were rituals customarily staged before assemblies of troops and were designed to make a powerful impression and serve a distinct disciplinary purpose. The Charleston Mercury described soldiers seized by “uncontrollable emotion” as their division formed three sides of a square to witness the execution of ten deserters. Soldiers who sat on their coffins as they awaited the firing squad or stumbled up the steps to the gallows served as an unforgettable warning to those who would die well rather than in shame and ignominy. An execution compelled its witnesses literally to confront death and to consider the proper path toward life’s final hour. In the case of execution of deserters, the ceremony offered a particularly pointed contrast between the Good Death in combat and the disgraceful end meted out to those seeking to escape battle’s terrors.50
Executions provided more than just negative examples. The condemned served in many cases as exemplars of hope, for chaplains worked to save these unfortunates from “the second death” and to use them to transmit a compelling educational message. Calm resignation, last-minute expressions of repentance, the enactment of elements of the Good Death even at the foot of the gallows, sometimes even an address from the prisoner urging his fellow soldiers to “beware of