Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death, and: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (review)

620,000 is a familiar number to students of the American Civil War. Most scholars know that total casualties during four years of fratricidal combat roughly equaled the combined tally of American dead from the Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and Korean War. Although number crunching can be instructive, it is difficult for us, nearly one hundred fifty years later, to comprehend this enormous carnage. A fatality rate of close to two percent of today’s U.S. population would be utterly unfathomable in any modern conflict, yet Americans of the Civil War era had to come to terms with such devastating slaughter. These excellent books explain how mid-nineteenth- century Americans approached dying, coped with their individual and collective losses, and endeavored to find meaning when confronted with the ubiquity of death during the Civil War.

Mark S. Schantz convincingly demonstrates that antebellum attitudes toward death produced a cultural climate that prepared Americans to deal with the unprecedented loss of life during the Civil War. In chapter one, he describes the widespread familiarity with death shared by all citizens regardless of race, age, gender, or social class. As settlers migrated from crowded cities to rural areas, antebellum Americans encountered death through the spread of diseases such as consumption. High rates of infant mortality disposed parents to the likelihood that they would lose some of their children at an early age, and they consequently instructed surviving progeny on how to deal with the deaths of siblings. Eulogies of famous leaders such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson reminded citizens of the importance of mourning and memorializing national heroes, and these exemplary deaths provided models of the Good Death for all to emulate. An account of the passing of a seven year-old African-American boy in 1835 demonstrated that even the deaths of pious children could edify the living on how to confront death without trembling.

In the second chapter, Schantz asserts that a belief in heaven made the reality of death less dreadful for many antebellum Americans. The expectation of living eternally in a beautiful environment, receiving perfected material bodies, and being reunited with deceased family members and friends effectively diminished the fears and pains of death for believers. The unknowable nature of heaven, apart from its description in Scripture, allowed individuals to speculate about a person’s experiences in the celestial realm, and this creative latitude only heightened popular appeal for the heavenly sphere. Schantz concludes that many civilians tolerated the excessive casualty rates of the Civil War because of their conviction that faithful soldiers would gain entrance into heaven.

After establishing the prevalence of death and eternity as a common topic of thought and discussion for antebellum Americans, Schantz devotes four chapters to cultural mediums that predisposed civilians to dealing with the enormity of death during the Civil War. From the 1830s to 1850s, the rural cemetery movement emphasized the civic benefits of preserving memories of noteworthy citizens. Schantz asserts that Civil War soldiers took comfort from the assurance that they would be mourned and memorialized if they never returned home, and the living understood the importance of fulfilling this patriotic duty. Hundreds of sentimental poems about dying women and children published in the Southern Literary Messenger in the fifteen years prior to the outbreak of secession foreshad-owed the war poetry that lamented and honored soldiers killed in battle. Although upper and middle class whites produced the bulk of sentimental literature, they were not alone in writing about death in romantic terms. Antebellum accounts of slave suicide and fiery speeches by black orators such as Henry Highland...