I don't know. George F. Will, Columnist: The soldiers went off to war expecting this would be quick. A good death was death experienced by free men, battling to end evil, in the world. Dear Madam, As you in all probability have not heard of the death of your husband and as I was a witness to his death, I consider it my duty to write to you although I am a stranger to you. It established a newly centralized nation-state and launched it on a trajectory of economic expansion and world influence. Harvard University's president examines how hundreds of thousands of Civil War deaths changed America in unexpected ways. And then they broke up and went into the infield of the racetrack and did what most of us do on Memorial Day -- they held picnics. Maris A. Vinovskis concludes that about 6 percent of northern white males between ages thirteen and forty-five died in the war, whereas 18 percent of white men of similar age in the South perished. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. Civil War Soldier (Actor, audio): Mr. William K. Rash. . Typically, the 'good' 19thC death would take place at home, amongst friends and family and feature some departing words of faith with which to reassure the living. The mass burials proceeded in the summer heat. Death and the Civil War How the unthinkable became the unforgettable. But hampered from the start by fewer resources, Southerners would soon be even more overwhelmed than their Northern counterparts by the logistical challenges of grappling with so many dead soldiers. Americans had to identify–find, invent, create–the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. He died happy and I certainly think that he is now better off. Narrator: Something new in the American experience would now begin to arise from the fields of Gettysburg -- as in the days, weeks and months following the battle the tiny Pennsylvania town now became the setting for one of the greatest collective efforts to honor the dead in the history of the republic. In addition, Faust keenly observes that while the American public was grasping to comprehend all this death, many of the same questions were crucial to the writing of Ambrose Bierce, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Approximately four times as many people attended church every week as voted in the election of 1860. When you were in New York State, and you were told that your son or husband had died in Virginia -- how could you be sure? September 21, 2012 • In her book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes that Civil War deaths — both their number and their manner — transformed America. There were no regular burial details or any graves registration units. The news struck him "like a dagger in my heart," he said. On the “untimely death of an adult child” as “particularly painful” in mid-nineteenth-century England, see Patricia Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. What you have is a universe that is telling people, "This is how it's going to be. O my dead, an aroma sweet! In the Civil War, I think we come as a nation to the insistence that citizenship is predicated on the willingness of people to lay down their lives for the state. 56. Performed by the Kronos Quartet But the patterns to which they were accustomed were in significant ways different from those the war would introduce. My friend Fairfax will write you at my request and give you the particulars of my death. Stone’s River Battlefield, NPS My grave will be marked so that you may visit it if you desire to do so. This program would not have been possible without generous access to the extraordinary collections of Dangerous. We together now have to rebuild it. I shall hope to survive and meet you again. Gene Jones David B. Chow Collection Elizabeth Marvel Eric Holtje.….Bassoon | ISBN 9780375703836 Human beings are rarely simply passive victims of death. When we think about what the Civil War means to us, it's in no small part because of that linking, explicitly by Lincoln, of our national identity with those who gave their lives. Jeffrey Zeigler, cello Soldiers on both sides worried deeply, and with reason, about what would happen to their remains. Tongue cannot describe the horrible sight.". But in the impoverished and embittered postwar white South, where virtually every household had lost a husband, father, brother or son, it did not pass unnoticed that $4 million in public funds was being expended exclusively on dead northerners. Tom Skarupa, Musicians The Grim monster death has ravaged him -- but one consolation he died in the full discharge of his duty in the defense of his home and country. “We all have our dead–we all have our Graves,” a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an 1862 sermon. Not long after the battle -- with financial help from every state in the Union that had lost men in the engagement -- a local lawyer named David Wills oversaw the purchase of 17 acres in the town -- which were soon taken over by the federal government. He was escorted by train and wagon to the camp of the First Massachusetts Cavalry, and taken to the tent where his son's body lay. Filmmaker Ric Burns discusses the intricacies of making Death and the Civil War. So I think the war casts not just a long shadow but a long sense of reality over who we are -- and how we deal with, really, those fundamental questions. This Republic of Suffering is the first study of how people in both North and South coped with this uniquely devastating experience. Narrator: Antietam had been far from a clear-cut Union victory. [A] widely and justly praised scholarly history.” —Adam Begley, New York Observer, “This Republic of Suffering is a harrowing but fascinating read.” —Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor, “If you read only one book on the Civil War this year, make it this one.” –Kevin M. Levin, American History, “Having always kept the war in her own scholarly sights, Faust offers a compelling reassertion of its basic importance in society and politics alike.” —Richard Wrightman Fox, Slate, “[An] astonishing new book.” —Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun, “A moving work of social history, detailing how the Civil War changed perceptions and behaviors about death. Mark S. Schantz, Historian: Certainly, as we think about the obligation of citizens to the state, and what the state owes its citizens -- particularly with regard to the thing that we, in some sense, is the only thing we really own, which is our own body and our own mortality. Jeff Frez-Albrecht The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking. That was their war aim. In part because of that, the concept of a "Good Death" prevailed. April 26, 1865, Final Confederate forces surrender. They have come home at last; and we, their brethren, their comrades, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, are met with one accord to welcome them to their native soil. He finds himself bursting into tears; he thinks he's been made like a woman or a child, in some ways, as he confronts this welter of emotion. Florentine Films In March 1863, Dr. Henry Bowditch of Boston, Massachusetts received a terse telegram from a cousin serving in the Union army with his eldest son, Nathaniel. Day before yesterday we marched over the battleground.