Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death

1. “Emblems of Mortality”

6 chapter one F “Emblems of Mortality” The generation of Americans who fought the Civil War understood that they could not escape the embrace of death. Nor did they particularly wish to. They knew that death was the inevitable portion of all who live. In 1846, readers from New Haven, Connecticut, to Charleston, South Carolina, could examine the pages of the latest reminder of their own certain mortality. Based on the “dance of death” tradition that stretched back to early modern Europe, the pamphlet Emblems of Mortality articulated a worldview that we moderns find nearly impossible to conjure. In a series of engravings and facing pieces of text, the skeletal figure personifying Death literally grasps “all ranks and conditions” of people— sometimes by clutching bits of their clothing and sometimes by more insinuating or even violent means. Often pictured with his symbolic hourglass , the figure of Death begins by inviting the pope to consider his grave and concludes by carrying off the humble husband and wife to await the Last Judgment. In all, Emblems of Mortality depicts forty-three different scenes. Each one reveals the workings of Death on the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor, the virtuous and the criminal, the rulers and the ruled. “ E M B L E M S O F M O R TA L I T Y ” 7 The figure of Death in Emblems of Mortality may well have possessed special resonance for Americans of the early nineteenth century. Death is a man of many disguises. He is the trickster, the confidence man, the hustler par excellence—all characters of significant contemporary interest .1 He sneaks up on the figure of the “Empress” disguised as a woman and invites her to view an open grave. Dressed as a “Count,” Death surprises his quarry “to strip him of all honorable distinctions which may be about him.”2 Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, Death stalks his victims. In this grim work, he is not impressed by money or Fig. 1. Emblems of Mortality; Representing, By Engravings, Death Seizing All Ranks and Conditions of People. Imitated from a Painting in the Cemetery of the Dominican Church at Basil, Switzerland. With an Apostrophe to Each, Translated from the Latin. To which is now added, for the first time, a particular description of each cut, or engraving. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 8 A WA I T I N G T H E H E AV E N LY C O U N T RY power or even by virtue. As Death grapples with a “Gentleman” we see that Death “has seized him by laying hold of the splendid garment he wears, and is dragging him away in spite of all opposition.”3 Wealth and status could not protect one from death. In a world in which the Market Revolution was creating unprecedented concentrations of wealth in both the North and the South, the figure of Death as a great social equalizer may have appealed to the many Americans left behind in this quest for profit.4 Death also emerges in Emblems of Mortality as an entertaining figure, perhaps even one of art, culture, and sentiment. He is depicted frequently with musical instruments—a lute, a trumpet, drums, a violin, bagpipes, and a shepherd’s harp. Death carries off his duties with an unmistakable aplomb and skill. It is one of the ironies of Emblems of Mortality that the personified figure of Death emerges as an intriguing living being. Emblems of Mortality represents only one specimen, albeit an important one, of the multitude of ways Americans conceptualized death in the early republic. Encounters with death surface in almost every conceivable source with which historians of this period have worked—in crime novels, poetry, diaries, newspapers, public health reports, slave narratives , sermons, lithographs, paintings, speeches, and photographs. It’s hard to know what to make of this outpouring of evidence. Thirty years ago, historian of popular culture Lewis O. Saum warned against making facile generalizations about the apparent obsession with death in the decades before the Civil War. “The risk of idle supererogation or even impertinence,” he observed, “looms large in any effort to explain the superabundant musings and dotings on death.”5 Saum’s insight stands. Doing history is always a tricky business, but in the case of studying death the problem may be compounded by a...