Suffering

Well, we’ve finished our move. I lost the book I was going to read during the five days it took to travel across the country. Then we had unpacking to do. Then I hurt my back unpacking. So I’ve struggled in the last month to keep up even with reading – which gets interesting on heavy muscle relaxers! Finding opportunities to write for the blog has been almost impossible. It’s actually the end of November as I write this post, but I’m predating it to line up a little better with what I actually read when.

A few years ago while I was visiting the site of the tragedy that made for the bloodiest day in the history of the United States, a park ranger at Antietam National Battlefield recommended Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering. Prof. Faust discusses many aspects of death during and after the Civil War: what soldiers thought of impending death, how they brought themselves to kill, what burials were like, how families mourned, how people on the home front struggled to “realize” (we might say “assimilate”) the death of a beloved father, husband, brother, or son, and how the government took on the duty of accounting for every deceased veteran.

Most interesting to me was the notion of the “good death” so prevalent then in the United States – north and south. Families depended on a loved one’s last words in order to get assurance of the dearly departed’s destiny in the afterlife. Being willing to die, expressing faith, and telling the family that they will all one day reunite on the other side were all good signs that brought endless comfort to the mourning family. Young men were so eager to provide their families with this assurance, they often wrote down their own “last” words before a battle after having a feeling they considered a premonition of death. Following the sudden death of a soldier who had not prepared in this way, comrades often did the best they could to write to the homes of their late messmates with whatever information they had that could be taken as indication of a good death.

So much death, so well written about; the book was bound to be profoundly moving. Thanks for the recommendation, Mr. Ranger!

(And could you tell the interpretive ranger at Andrew Johnson National Historic Site that Johnson is consistently ranked by historians near the bottom among other Presidents for a good reason, and that he is not to be ranked “somewhere in the middle”? The President who allowed Black Codes to flourish and virtual slavery to return after the Civil War is certainly not the equal of Coolidge, who balanced the budget after the First World War; Jackson, who kept the country together during Calhoun’s treacherous nullification movement; or Grant, who took down the first Klan.)