This Republic of Suffering (21 page)

Till it reached a town in the distant North

Till it reached a house in a sunny street

Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat

Without a murmur, without a cry

…….….….….

And the neighbors wondered that she should die.
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Some grieving survivors did indeed literally perish. Told that her husband had been killed, one Iowa woman declared she wished to see her mother and then die, and she proceeded to do just that. In South Carolina the parents of eighteen-year-old Oliver Middleton, killed in 1864, were perceived by their acquaintances to be unalterably transformed by the blow, and Oliver's despairing mother followed him in death in a little more than a year.
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But Longfellow's poem suggests the possibility of metaphorical death in his rendering of the unspecified—and thus generalized—wife, mother, or sister. Even without the actual demise of the body, the bereaved might suffer a living death of spirit, heart, and hope. Civil War fatalities belonged ultimately to the survivors; it was they who had to undertake the work not just of burial but also of consolation and mourning. This would be, as Louisiana soldier Reuben Allen Pierson wrote from the field in 1862, “more trying than to face the battle's rage.”
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The notion of the Good Death, so often embodied in the condolence letter that bore “Aufaul knuse” from battle to home front, represented an initial collaboration between the dying and the living in managing death's terrors. The letter and the act of dying that it described affirmed a set of assumptions about death's meaning that established the foundations for the mourning to follow. A soldier's actual death comprised but a moment—“sudden and swift” like the subject of Longfellow's poem, even if it was preceded by lengthy struggle and agony. But for his survivors, his death was literally endless. His work was over, but theirs had just begun.

For many bereaved, even assimilating the fact of a loved one's death was difficult. Civil War letter and diary writers confronting news of loss repeatedly proclaimed their inability to “realize” a death—using the word with now antiquated precision to mean to render it real in their own minds. This word choice encompasses an important aspect of the process of grief as it has been described by psychologists and indeed observers through the ages. Freud, for example, contrasted mourning, a grief that understands that a loved object no longer exists, to melancholia, in which an individual “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost” and thus remains mired in “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love.” Freud writes of “the work of mourning,” defined by the effort to come to grips with the reality of loss and then to withdraw emotional investment from the departed. Mourning is a process with an end; melancholia a state, and, in Freud's terms, a pathology. The particular circumstances created by the Civil War often inhibited mourning, rendering it difficult, if not impossible, for many bereaved Americans to move through the stages of grief. In an environment where information about deaths was often wrong or entirely unavailable, survivors found themselves both literally and figuratively unable to “see clearly what…has been lost” and instead encouraged to deny it. In such conditions the temptation to distrust and resist bad news was all too alluring and the capacity for the genuine consolations of mourning severely compromised.
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Denial and numbness were, in fact, prominent means by which civilians—like soldiers—attempted to cope with war's losses. Abbie Brooks of Georgia confessed that sufferings had “purified and petrified me. I care very little for anybody or anything, am neither sorry nor glad, but passive.” After her brother's death, Kate Foster of Mississippi felt emotionally altered: “My heart became flint. I am almost afriad to love too dearly anyone now.” Kate Stone, who spent much of the war as a refugee from her Louisiana home, acknowledged that “death does not seem half so terrible as it did long ago. We have grown used to it.” Cornelia Hancock, nursing in Union hospitals, felt the same as the young Confederate: “One can get used to anything.” She had come to understand why hospital administrators so often failed to make the required list of fatalities: death had become too commonplace even to take note of. When she was told of the demise of a neighbor at home, Hancock confessed to her sister that a single death seemed not to mean “anything to me now.” The young wife of a Confederate officer reported that some bereaved southerners became almost paralyzed by their losses, “stunned and stupefied…forever, and a few there were who died of grief.” Mary Lee, living amid the constant battles over Winchester, agreed: “no one feels anything now.” Such denial represented its own kind of loss, an abandonment of emotion and sensibility that was a death in itself, another dimension of war's dehumanization.
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Making a death real, feeling and accepting its certainty, required effort. After her brother James was killed at Second Bull Run, Sarah Palmer wrote in anguish to her sister Harriet, “I can't realize that I am never to see that dear boy again…it is too hard to realize.” Death itself seemed impossible to understand, much less to connect with their vibrant young brother: “We have never known what death was before.” Their mother, Esther, turned to fantasies of denial, trying to reject rather than embrace the reality of his loss, which she found unbearable. “I sometimes think he is not dead, it might have been a mistake,” she wrote several weeks after he was killed. “I cannot begin to realize the death of my beloved brother,” wrote another sister, Elizabeth. “I find myself continually thinking of him as alive.” Five months later Harriet still struggled to accept the fact of his loss. “It is very hard to believe that dear Jim is dead. Were it not for the cessation of those letters we used to hail with so much gladness…I could not realize it.” Death seemed ineffable, a void that she could understand best through the physicality of the letters that came no more.
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Survivors sought material evidence that could convince their often “rebellious hearts” of the unfathomable and intolerable news that confronted them. Just two years after James's death another Palmer son and brother was killed. When bits of his clothing were forwarded to his family, his young widow, Alice, greeted them with relief: “The last lingering hopes have all been crushed. None of us could mistake those pieces of cloth. I thank God that he had on clothes that we knew. Otherwise we never would have felt sure that they were his precious remains.”
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Alice Palmer was among the fortunate. Hundreds of thousands of wives, parents, children, and siblings of unidentified and missing men would never have what she called the “melancholy satisfaction” of irrefutable evidence to serve as a foundation for emotional acceptance of loss. The intensity with which Civil War Americans sought to retrieve the bodies of their slain kin arose in no small part from this need to make loss real by rendering it visible and tangible. A Union nurse described a young wife after Antietam “whose frantic grief I can never forget.” Told that her husband had been buried two days before she arrived in search of him, she was “unwilling to believe the fact” and “insisted upon seeing him.” His comrades kindly agreed to disinter the body. One glance quieted her frenzy as she sank beneath “the stern reality of this crushing sorrow” and made plans to take the body back to Philadelphia. The “stern reality” represented by a body succeeded in establishing “the fact” of death in her mind, and the new widow began to move from resistance to acceptance of her cruel fate and her new identity.
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John Saunders Palmer Jr. with his wife of less than a year, Alice Ann Gaillard Palmer. South Caroliniana Library.

To embody—quite literally—death was one way to make it real. But the effort to render death palpable included as well the creation of visible symbols of grief that could be used to rehearse and enact the new roles the bereaved now occupied. In the mid-nineteenth century respectable Americans, or those who aspired to be considered among their ranks, customarily observed a formal period of bereavement after the death of a spouse or relative. The first ladies of both North and South spent much of the war garbed in mourning, for each endured the loss of a young child, Mary Lincoln's Willie and Varina Davis's Joseph, who fell from the porch of the executive mansion in Richmond. Mary Lincoln remained in deep mourning for more than a year after Willie's death, dressing in black veils, black crape “without the gloss,” and black jewelry. By 1863 she had progressed to half mourning and appeared in lavender, gray, and some purples, with a little white trim visible at the wrist. But after her husband's assassination, she returned to full mourning for the rest of her life. Men, too, wore tokens of mourning, armbands for lost kin, badges and rosettes, like those displayed by Virginia Military Institute cadets and officers for a month after Stonewall Jackson's death.
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Half-mourning dress of Varina Howell Davis. The Museum of the Confederacy.

By convention, a mother mourned for a child for a year, a child for a parent the same, a sister six months for a brother. A widow mourned for two and a half years, moving through prescribed stages and accoutrements of heavy, full, and half mourning, with gradually loosening requirements of dress and deportment. A widower, by contrast, was expected to mourn only for three months, simply by displaying black crape on his hat or armband. The work of mourning was largely allocated to women. The exigencies of war and, in the South, shortages of clothing and money undermined the rigidity of these expectations. But war's changed circumstances prompted desire to replace necessity. Even as expectations loosened, women sought the solace they hoped the costumes and customs of mourning could provide. Many women struggled to find the garments that would enable them to participate in this rite of passage and display of respect. Formal observance of mourning created a sense of process, encouraging the bereaved to believe they could move through their despair, which might evolve through stages of grief represented by their changing clothing: from the flat black silks, veils, and crape of heavy mourning, to the white trim and collars acceptable in full mourning, to the grays and lavenders that half mourning introduced, until at last they returned fully to the world and their customary attire.
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In the South, where 18 percent of white males of military age perished in the war, death was omnipresent, and fabrics and fashions were scarce. As the
Daily South Carolinian
asked in 1864, “Who has not lost a friend during the war? We are literally a land of mourning.” Confederate women, especially in cities and towns, seem to have done all they could to overcome obstacles to securing appropriate mourning dress, which promised the consolation of visibly shared misery. The southern death toll produced a uniformed sorority of grief. As Lucy Breckinridge of Virginia remarked, “There were so many ladies here, all dressed in deep mourning, that we felt as if we were at a convent and formed a sisterhood.” When the Yankees entered Richmond in April 1865, a New York newspaperman observed, “the women are nearly all dressed in mourning.”
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Teenaged Nannie Haskins of Tennessee was outraged when a visitor told her how well she looked in black after her brother's death. “Becomes me fiddlestick,” she wrote. “What do I care whether it becomes me or
not
? I don't wear black because it becomes me…I wear mourning because it corresponds with my feelings.” Mourning garb was, to paraphrase language that Saint Augustine used to describe the Christian sacraments, an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible state.
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