John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence, & the Culture of War (review)

In this engaging, earnest book, Nudelman tells the story of the transformative impact of Civil War battlefield deaths on genteel northerners. The book is indebted to the emerging specialty of "violence studies" or "body history," which, some critics complain, lacks methodological sophistication and scholarly rigor.¹ Nudelman addresses these concerns explicitly. To decipher the meaning of death in war for nineteenth- century Americans, she looks at three discursive contexts: sentimental reform culture, scientific racism, and public punishments.

Her primary finding is that a process of "abstraction" or conceptual distancing and universalizing of personal loss enabled Americans to cope with the carnage, accept violent death as a source of collective rebirth, and rededicate themselves to national union. Civil War culture, she argues, "nationalized a sentimental view of the enduring and benevolent influence of the dead" (6).

Nudelman takes her theme from the popular Civil War song, "John Brown's Body," which Union soldiers sang to celebrate the transformation of Brown's "actual body" into a "diffuse, inspiriting presence." This salute to the memory of the abolitionist "martyr," Nudelman says, offers a "succinct and memorable example" of the creation of cultural nationalism. In representing the war as a sign of divine retribution, Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" elevates the John Brown song and prefigures that evolving wartime nationalism (169).

In successive chapters, Nudelman illustrates the variety of ways in which artists and political leaders clothed the dead with the imagery and rhetoric of rebirth and national community. Before the war, memorial culture affirmed the continuity of life and death in private ceremonies, ritual mourning, photos of bereaved mothers holding a dead child, and sentimental poetry. But the war changed everything. For loved ones, the death of a soldier on the battlefield was remote, anonymous, and unattended. Whitman, grappling with the challenge that battlefield death posed to memorial culture and evangelical faith, found new ways of conceptualizing those who died "unburied and unknown." But if Whitman rehearsed the narrative of "organic transformation" that rationalized the war's appalling death toll, Melville's poetry rejected the vision of war as integral to a "natural cycle of death and regeneration" (97).²

Nudelman observes that the bodies of African Americans, Native Americans, and the poor were degraded by postmortem dissection, burial in "potter's fields," and the desecrations of hired grave robbers— so-called "resurrectionists"—seeking specimens for medical schools (46). A pseudoscientific ethnography reified racial stereotypes and "reanimated" the skeletons of African Americans as a type. Dissection excluded the dead not only from a "religious narrative of burial and resurrection" but also from "forms of community that depended on the body as a figure for common experience" (7–8). The mutilated and exposed bodies of soldiers, she observes, recalled the insults inflicted on the corpses of these disadvantaged groups. Thus, the cultural project aimed at elevating the remains of dead soldiers "worked not only to sanctify the war but also to disentangle it from the violence traditionally visited on powerless people" (3). Military punishments and executions of black soldiers, Nudelman argues, foreshadowed a "postbellum order in which African Americans were marginalized by new forms of discipline" (148).

Photographs of battlefield deaths, Nudelman says, could strip away the "familiar forms of artifice" employed "to invest the dead with meaning"; such images implied that violence begets "isolation" rather than a spiritual community (106). In focusing on the dead bodies of soldiers and slaves, she hopes to point the way toward a "methodology that reverses the trajectory of abstraction by reconsidering the process of idealization in light of some of war's particulars" (12). Despite the wartime cultural linking of violence with rebirth and nationhood that she demonstrates, Nudelman insists that "far from breeding life, or strengthening community, violence wreaks havoc on our physical and conceptual worlds. At times, the corpse, in all its grim materiality, calls the idealization of death in war...