This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [80]
Henry Bowditch undertook another action in relief of his own suffering and in honor and memory of his son. His preoccupation with Nat would serve as a lever at last to get, as he put it, “out of myself” and out of his grief in order once again to embrace his reformist commitments: he made Nat’s death, and the long abandonment on the battlefield without medical care that preceded it, a cause célèbre in the effort to establish adequate ambulance service in the Union army, a goal that was achieved in the last year of the war. Bowditch transformed Nat’s suffering into the salvation of others.
In the twenty-first century Americans considering the impact of death regularly invoke the notion of “closure,” the hope and anticipation of an end to the disruption of loss. Civil War Americans expected no such relief. For hundreds of thousands, the unknown fate of missing kin left a “dread void of uncertainty” that knowledge would never fill. Even for those who had detailed information or, better still, the consolation of a body and a grave, mourning had no easy or finite end. Many bereaved spent the rest of their lives waiting for the promised heavenly reunion with those who had gone before. Wives, parents, children, and siblings struggled with the new identities—widows, orphans, the childless—that now defined their lives. And they carried their losses into the acts of memory that both fed on and nurtured the widely shared grief well into the next century.
But if such devastating loss could not be denied, if it was “realized” and acknowledged, it had to be explained. The Civil War’s carnage required that death be given meaning.
CHAPTER 6
BELIEVING AND DOUBTING
“What Means this Carnage?”
“How does God have the heart to allow it?”
SIDNEY LANIER
What is Death?” Reverend John Sweet asked “a large assemblage” of mourners dressed in “somber black” who had gathered at services for Edward Amos Adams of the 59th Massachusetts in July 1864. Adams had died ten days after being wounded at Petersburg, a victim in the series of bloody assaults that Grant had launched in the effort to dislodge Lee’s army from its position some twenty miles south of Richmond. Age twenty-four, a member of Billerica’s Baptist church, a seaman turned teacher, Adams took his place in a long line of losses suffered by his community and his state. “Once again,” Sweet observed, “we are in the house of mourning.” Another soldier killed; another family bereaved; another funeral observed: “There is not a household exempt from the universal lamentation which ascends from a grief stricken people.” More than three years into the conflict Sweet turned to what had become a central question, even preoccupation, for many Americans of both North and South. Where had all those young men gone? Friends and relatives who rushed to battlefields in the effort to locate their bodies undertook what was in some sense just the first step in the search for the missing. Even if their material remains could be retrieved and decently buried, the fate of the self and the soul, as well as the meaning of the departed life, remained unknown. Survivors like those gathered on a New England midsummer’s day in 1864 asked with new war-born urgency what happened when life on earth ceased.1
Americans on the eve of civil war found their traditional systems of belief both powerfully