Religion, Suffering & Death in Victorian America

 

I. Antebellum death traditions

  • Prolonged mourning and mourning dress
  • Mourning stationary
  • Memento mori
    • Photography
    • Jewelry, etc.

II. New kinds of cemeteries

  • By the early 19th century, the churchyard cemeteries from the colonial were overcrowded
  • Rise of new kinds of cemeteries in park like settings; idea that the ideal resting place should be in a peaceful, natural spot.
  • Designers made many paths; people were encourage to walk, reflect.

III. Ars moriendi 

  • Tradition dating back to plague years in the late Middle Ages
  • Laid out a protocol for how to die well
    • Emphasized giving up one’s soul gladly and willingly
    • Patterning one’s death like that of Christ on the Cross
    • Meeting the temptations of disbelief, despair, impatience, worldly attachments
  • Jeremy Taylor wrote a Protestant rendition of the tradition in The Rules and Exercise of Holy Dying (1650)
  • By the 18th century, a growing emphasis on “last words”
    • Legal tradition of “dying declarations”
    • Dates back to late 18th c.
    • Assumption: Death as a moment of truth

IV. The Good Death

  • To die at home
  • To die surrounded by loved ones
  • To show patience in the face of suffering and hence be an example to others
  • To demonstrate calm resignation in the face of death and a readiness and willingness to die

V. Government’s lack of commitment to deceased soldiers prior to the Civil War

  • No national cemeteries
  • No provisions for identifying dead or notifying next of kin or transporting bodies home
  • Or for providing aid to surviving dependents
  • No effective ambulance corps
  • No federal provisions for burying the dead
  • No Memorial Day

VI. Drew Faust, Republic of Suffering

  • “…the United States embarked on a new relationship with death….Death’s significance for the CW generation arose…from its violation of prevailing assumptions about life’s proper end—about who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances.”
  • “The Civil War represented a dramatic shift in both incidence and experience.”
  • Argues that people expected the majority of those who reached young adulthood to survive to middle age
    • Horror of the anonymous death, alone among strangers
    • Suddenness of death
    • Enormous number of bodies, like slaughtered animals
    • Missing bodies

VII. Nostalgia

  • Civil War era’s primary psychological diagnosis
  • A longing for home
    • Traumatic separation; disconnection
  • “appetite fails…excretions are impaired…sleep is disturbed…emaciation comes on…stupor and delirium”
  • More than 5,000 cases and nearly 60 deaths attributed to nostalgia in the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion

VIII. Nicholas Marshall, “The Great Exaggeration”

  • In assessing CW deaths, must emphasize contemporary context in which death was omnipresent
    • “While factually correct, the statistics work to exaggerate the war’s impact.”
  • Have to examine the meaning of death to contemporaries, not just look at the numbers.
  • “Americans were not facing appalling new levels of loss without a cultural leg to stand on.”
    • “…Americans had developed social and psychological means of coping with these losses, though they still felt them with tremendous force.”
    • Moreover, death was not primarily an experience of the aged
    • 1850: Chances of living to age 1: 77%; to age 9: 69%; to age 24: 62%, to age 49: 42%
  • Marshall’s evidence?
    • Diaries; lists people kept in their diaries of the individuals who died each year
    • Ways in which people discussed the number of Civil War dead within their community—did not set these deaths apart from others
    • Case of Abraham Lincoln
      • Felt death of his own son Willie acutely
      • Wrote moving letters to individuals who lost loved ones
      • But nevertheless showed a willingness to accept mass casualties during the war.

Lincoln’s 4th annual message to Congress, December 6, 1864: “The election has exhibited another tact not less valuable to be known–the fact that we do not approach exhaustion in the most important branch of national resources, that of living men. While it is melancholy to reflect that the war has filled so many graves and carried mourning to so many hearts, it is some relief to know that, compared with the surviving, the fallen have been so few…. It is not material to inquire how the increase has been produced or to show that it would have been greater but for the war, which is probably true. The important fact remains demonstrated that we have more men now than we had when the war began; that we are not exhausted nor in process of exhaustion; that we are gaining strength and may if need be maintain the contest indefinitely. This as to men. Material resources are now more complete and abundant than ever.”

 

IX. Clara Barton

  • March 1865: Lincoln appointed her General Correspondent for the Friends of Paroled Prisoners
    • To respond to inquires about missing soldiers by locating them among the prison rolls, parole rolls or casualty lists
  • She created the Bureau of Records of Missing Men of the Armies of the United States