This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [83]
For hundreds of thousands of soldiers, some believers before their enlistment but many converted by revivals that swept armies of both North and South, death became a fixation. But often it was not so much as a fear but as a promise—of relief, of salvation from war and suffering, and of an escape into a better world. “I rather believe,” Thomas Hampton wrote, “if my friends knew the hardships that is incumbent on a soldier that they would scarsely begrudge a withdrawal from this Tabernacle of Mortality to that of Immortal Glory for which I often long to see.” Death offered these devout men a “change” but not an ending; the celestial skies of Glory became more alluring than the bloody fields of Georgia or Virginia. Spared the direct experience of combat, civilians were less likely to acknowledge death’s attractions, but they too found in religious doctrine the means to diminish its horror and to manage the losses war inflicted upon them. As Hampton’s wife explained, “I suffer all the time about you. Not half So much as I should if I knew you were not prepared. That is the greatest comfort of all believing if you fall by the hand of the enemy or disease you will rest in heaven…if it was not for the great hope I have I never could bear up under the present distress.”9
Thomas Hampton survived until the very last month of the war, when he was mortally wounded near Bentonville, North Carolina. His obituary reported that he died “in the full triumphs of faith.” Hampton sent word to Jestin “not to greave for him for he was going to be far better off than…in this troublesome world.” He would see her again in “Bright mansions above.”10
There has been much discussion in our own time of the denial of death, of the refusal of contemporary American culture to confront or discuss it. In widely read books and essays published in the 1970s and early 1980s, historian Philippe Ariès accused Western Europe and the United States of making death “invisible.” Modern dying, he argued, had been medicalized; mourning was regarded as “indecent.” Death had become as unmentionable as pornography.11 In the Civil War death was hardly hidden, but it was nevertheless, seemingly paradoxically, denied—not through silence and invisibility but through an active and concerted work of reconceptualization that rendered it a cultural preoccupation. Redefined as eternal life, death was celebrated in mid-nineteenth-century America. But its centrality, in popular culture as well as religious discourse, suggested that great effort was required to control and repudiate its terrors. Songs, poems, and stories struggled to answer the same question Reverend Sweet had posed to his afflicted congregation. “My God! What is all this For?” the title on one songsheet demanded:
“Oh great god! What means this carnage,
Why this fratricidal strife,
Brethren made in your own image
Seeking for each other’s life?”
Thus spoke a dying Federal soldier,
Amid the clash of arms he cried;
With hope he fixed his eyes on heaven,
Then bid adieu to earth—and died.12
These verses left their own question unanswered, with heaven only a hope, but other songs promised that an afterlife would “turn our mourning into joy” and assured, “Mother, I die happy,” for “I see the angels coming, / With bright garlands for my brow.” To a chorus that asked, “Shall we know each other, shall we know each other, shall we know each other there?” a ballad published in New York confirmed that “Ye shall join the loved and lost ones / In the land of perfect day…‘We shall know each