Mortal Remains: Death in Early America

Introduction

Introduction How is the culturally learned fear of finality explained? That is the essential question behind this book, which began as a symposium titled "Mortal Remains," underwritten by the Mary Frances Barnard Chair endowment at the University of Tulsa and held April 19-22, 2001. Historians and literary scholars met and gave papers on a variety of subjects relating to individual and community experiences with death during the formative period in America's modern history, 1620-1860. The combined purpose of the symposium participants, and of this collection, is to emphasize America's beginnings in terms that are a bit different from the waythe story isgenerally told. We write of life as lived in relation to death as felt. How death touched the lives of early Americans emerges most plainly from the pages of their personal correspondence. When men and women reported on the passing of relatives and friends, they bequeathed a rich record to historical investigators. In demographic terms, we are led by facts to reevaluate the past: there was a gradual increase in life expectancy between 1750 and 1790, in spite of the Revolutionary War; yet, whilesurvival statistics vary among geographic regions, we have also learned that the average American's life span declined after 1790, from approximately fifty-six to forty-eight years by the time of the Civil War.Geographical mobility helped to spread infectious diseases, and many more Americans suffered from scarlet fever, typhoid, and tuberculosis. Growing urban areas likeNew York, Philadelphia, and Boston faced periodic epidemics—yellow fever was perhaps the most ravaging among these. The towering image of six foot four inch Abraham Lincoln was anomalous: the U.S. population was weaker, shorter, and less robust by the mid-nineteenth century because fighting childhood diseases took a tremendous toll. Mortal Remains studies neglected aspects of American culture, illustrating the profound ways in which experiences with death and the imageryassociated with death influenced not only something as obvious as religious practice, but also national and gender politics, race relations, and other notions which are easy to relate to our own contemporary concerns. As they struggled to survive and grow in a medically primitive and politically evolving environment, early Americans reveal in their texts that mortality was, for them, inseparable from national self-definition. They combated 2 Introduction personal dissolution and attempted to make sense of their suffering and loss while projecting a future of cultural permanence and spiritual value. Understandings are gleaned from stark images and subtle metaphors. In this study, "great white men" share the stage with murder victims, desecrated Indian burial sites, and threatened slaves. This is a book about embattled ministers and comforting angels, about a harsh reality softened by sensual visions. Mortal Remains presents a series of vignettes that encompass a range of human responses. Just as people cannot seem to avoid looking at and contemplating terror, they cannot avoid seeking out comfort and desiring reconciliation in the afterlife. Private and public rituals and private and public shrines reanimate departed persons, idealistically projecting the renewal of life—this is as true in the imagined national family as it is in the "typical" family. Visual and written records keep the dead alive. From the Vietnam VeteransMemorial in Washington, B.C., to television retrospectives and popular biographies of "heroes," or journalistic rediscoveries of white relatives by the curious descendents of African American slaves, death's finality is never quite acknowledged . When we say,"life goes on," we are doing more than sighing in the acceptance of some passage, we are also asserting the power of the living to rationalize and remember death in new ways. Since the death of George Washington in 1799, the passing of presidents has transformed the ancient rituals of mourning for a king into celebrations of democratic rule. Yet even for the average individual, death is followed by a series of cultural rituals. A corpse is prepared for burial, and then in a public ceremony the community honors the deceased. Afterward , the body is hidden from view: it is interred in the ground, in a crypt, or it is cremated (a common modern practice in the United States, but traditionally performed in many older cultures). Traces of a life—the headstone , obituaries, genealogies in family bibles, portraits or photographs, locks of hair, church and state documents—systematically leave a record for posterity , that is, for as long as the official record, newspaper, cherished family memento, or cenotaph survives. As of this writing, death looms especially large in the...