This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [17]
Military executions made a forceful statement about the need to be prepared to die. As the condemned prisoner scrambled to change his eternal fate with a last-minute conversion or repentance, he reinforced the centrality of readiness to the Good Death. Spiritual preparedness was of course the essence of dying well, but men often demonstrated readiness in more temporal ways. Many popular renditions of the ars moriendi emphasized the importance of settling one’s worldly affairs. A man who arranged for a burial plot on a furlough home was clearly contemplating his mortality, disposing of earthly preoccupations so that his death might bring a satisfactory conclusion to life’s narrative.
Many soldiers recognized their precarious situation by composing wills. “Knowing the uncertainty of life & the uncertainty of death,” Private Edward Bates of Virginia proceeded to arrange for the disposition of his twenty-five dollars of personal property. David Coe of Clarke County, Virginia, composed a will at the very occasion of his enlistment at the Berryville Post Office in June 1861. Calling for pen, ink, and paper, he conscripted postal patrons to serve as witnesses. “As I am about to leave home in these war of the Sothren Confedersey, I leave all I am worth…to my wife.” Thomas Montfort of Georgia found it “sad and melancholy” to see men before battle “preparing for the worst by disposing of their property by will” at the same time the surgeon sharpened his instruments, soldiers readied lint for bandages, and men scattered sand around artillery emplacements, “not for health or cleanliness, but to drink up human blood.” As his unit awaited a Union attack on Savannah’s Fort Pulaski, Montfort passed his time “witnessing wills” for comrades.52
Although the affluent were more likely to prepare wills, many soldiers of lesser means also sought to specify the distribution of their assets, perhaps to try to exert some control over a future in which they would play no part. Attendants in military hospitals often solicited oral declarations from dying soldiers in order to know what to do with their effects. John Edwards’s dying wishes, recorded as his “Noncuptative Will,” by Mr. Hill at the hospital of the 53rd Virginia in April 1862, requested that the forty dollars in his possession be sent to his sister because he knew he was “bound to die.”53
Soldiers’ personal possessions often took on the character of memento mori, relics that retained and represented something of the spirit of the departed. Burns Newman of the Seventh Wisconsin Volunteers undertook the “painful duty” of informing Michael Shortell’s father of his son’s death near Petersburg the preceding evening. “Enclosed,” he continued, “send you some trinkets taken from his person by my hand. Think you will prize them as keepsakes.” A Bible, a watch, a diary, a lock of hair, even the bullet with which a son or a brother had been killed could help to fill the void left by the loved one’s departure, and could help make tangible a loss known only through the abstractions of language.54
In a more figurative sense, condolence letters reporting the details of soldiers’ deaths served as memento mori for kin working to understand wartime loss. Survivors rewrote these narratives of Good Deaths using the condolence letter as a rough draft for a range of printed genres designed to impose meaning and purpose on war’s chaos and destruction. Obituaries often replicated