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four-year-old Frederick. But Amos Humiston was far from the only man to die clutching a photograph. Denied the presence of actual kin, many dying men removed pictures from pockets or knapsacks and spent their last moments communicating with these representations of absent loved ones. “I have often thought,” William Stilwell wrote to his wife, Molly, in Georgia, “if I have to die on the battlefield, if some kind friend would just lay my Bible under my head and your likeness on my breast with the golden curls of hair in it, that it would be enough.”18

Amos Humiston dies holding an ambrotype of his three children. “An Incident at Gettysburg.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 2, 1864.

In military hospitals, nurses frequently cooperated in the search for substitute kin, permitting delirious soldiers to think their mothers, wives, or sisters stood nearby. In a famous lecture she delivered across the country in the years after the war, Clara Barton described her crisis of conscience when a young man on the verge of death mistook her for his sister Mary. Unable to bring herself actually to address him as “brother,” she nevertheless kissed his forehead so that, as she explained, “the act had done the falsehood the lips refused to speak.”19

Perhaps Clara Barton was familiar with some of the popular Civil War–era songs that portrayed her situation almost exactly: the plea of the expiring soldier requesting his nurse to “Be My Mother Till I Die,” or even the lines of the nurse herself:

Let me kiss him for his mother,

Or perchance a sister dear;

……………

Farewell, dear stranger brother,

Our requiem, our tears.

This song was so widely sung it prompted a reply, which was published as an “answer to: Let Me Kiss Him for His Mother.” Written in the voice of those who remained at home, the ballad expressed gratitude to the women caring for the wounded at the same time that it sought to reassure wives and mothers that their loved ones were not dying alone.

Bless the lips that kissed our darling,

As he lay on his death-bed,

Far from home and ’mid cold strangers

Blessings rest upon your head.

…….….…..

O my darling! O our dead one!

Though you died far, far away,

You had two kind lips to kiss you,

As upon your bier you lay

…….….……

You had one to smooth your pillow,

You had one to close your eyes.20

The original song and its “answer” represented an interchange, a nationwide conversation between soldiers and civilians, between men and women, as they worked together to reconstruct the Good Death amid the disruptions of war, to maintain the traditional connections between the dying and their kin that defined the ars moriendi. The inability to witness the last moments of a brother, husband, or child shattered expectations about an appropriate earthly conclusion to these important human connections. A father who arrived to find his son just hours after he died of wounds received at Fredericksburg wrote feelingly of his disappointment—and described his vision of how his son’s life should have ended. “If I could have got to our child, and spoken loving and encouraging words to him, and held his dear hand in mine, and received his last breath: but it was not so to be.” Yet denied his deathbed role, the parent had at least achieved one of his purposes: he had acquired definite knowledge of his son’s fate.21

Because no effective or formal system of reporting casualties operated on either side during the war, it became customary for the slain soldier’s closest companions at the time of his death to write a letter to his next of kin, not just offering sympathy and discussing the disposition of clothes and back pay but providing the kind of information a relative would have looked for in a conventional peacetime deathbed scene. These were condolence letters intended to offer the comfort implicit in the narratives of the ars moriendi that most of them contained. News of a Good Death constituted the ultimate solace—the consoling promise of life everlasting.22