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

The premise of Mark Schantz's new book, Awaiting the Heavenly Country, is that the way mid-nineteenth century Americans interpreted death ultimately helped sustain a war of unexpected slaughter. Unlike modern western nations, which do their best to hide the unpleasant realities of death, Schantz argues that Victorian America was a "death-embracing culture" (p. 4). People in this period had intimate knowledge of death, surrounded as they were by rampant disease and high infant mortality rates. Far from seeking to conceal the facts of death, they actively monitored the dying to ensure that they adhered to culturally prescribed ideals of deathbed behavior. At least until the war began, he points out, most people died in their own homes, attended by family members who often cherished physical mementoes of the dead in the form of hair, jewelry or printed eulogies. Constructing intricate bereavement rituals, elaborate cemeteries, and a literary culture saturated with death scenes, Victorian Americans imagined death as potentially instructive, inspirational, and redemptive.

Schantz's first three chapters detail Victorian attitudes toward death, examining visions of heaven and the afterlife, and looking at the rise of the rural cemetery movement. Throughout, the focus is on the way the Victorians romanticized and sentimentalized death. Religious tracts, for instance, imagined a transcendently beautiful heaven where friends would meet again and physical imperfections would be erased. The rural cemetery movement likewise took shape in the shadow of classical revivalism, which celebrated the heroic battlefield deaths of young men as the ultimate instance of civic virtue. Convincingly, Schantz suggests that such cultural beliefs both facilitated war and helped to limit protest over mounting death tolls.

In subsequent chapters, Schantz analyzes death poetry from the Southern Literary Messenger, published between the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, before moving on to look at the way African-American spokespeople in the antebellum era imagined death as redemptive and liberatory. In focusing on the former, he shows how Southern poetry of death "paralleled the work done by the architects of the rural cemetery movement," by figuring corpses as objects of useful and aesthetically pleasing contemplation. By creating idealized death scenes that presaged eternal bliss, antebellum fiction and poetry gave the Civil War generation "an imaginative template with which to deal with the suffering unleashed by mass warfare" (p. 106). While it might seem like a stretch to suggest that pre-war images of death survived the slaughter of the battlefields, anyone who has delved into Civil War era poetry or literature will grant Schantz's point. Certainly, ordinary soldiers discussed the horrors of the battlefields in their diaries and letters, yet middle class wartime writers on both sides continued to celebrate romantic and sentimental death scenes, much as they had before the conflict. As Schantz notes, even wartime photographers carefully arranged depictions of the aftermath of battles, providing middle class families with melancholy spectacles that could be contemplated in the privacy of the family parlor via newly purchased stereoscopes, just as they had earlier gazed on postmortem photographs of deceased loved ones. Likewise, black wartime writers continued a long tradition of idealizing death. In one of his most original chapters, Schantz focuses on the way antebellum black authors figured the relationship between slavery and death. Equating the two, and sharing with whites a vision of eternal bliss, blacks were primed to view death in war as profoundly meaningful and necessary.

Readers might quibble with Schantz's conflation of American culture. Given the miniscule number of college-educated Americans in this period, it seems unlikely that many readers would have interpreted, say, battlefield photographs using the kind of neoclassical or artistic frames of reference that he discusses. But Schantz is ultimately less interested in social and cultural divisions within Victorian America than he is in the gulf between that era and our own. In the [End...