Death and the Civil War: Shifting American Views on Mortality

Introduction

Victorian notions of the body and its functions were complex, given the combination of rising biological and medical knowledge during the nineteenth century and the prudery that gained such traction during the same era. These two trajectories were likely not in simple conflict, as they might appear. Rather, the increasing awareness of the body as an almost mechanical entity — rather than the soul-filled object of majesty it had long been regarded as — likely fueled a reluctance to acknowledge bodily functions and certainly bodily decay. In the United States, the Victorian Era brought with it a stark and unavoidable reminder of the body's frailties and ultimate lack of majesty with the onset and prolonged casualties of the Civil War. That half-decade of conflict is famously the bloodiest of American wars, claiming the lives of more U.S. citizens than any other war or military action in the nation's history. While it still serves today as a poignant reminder of man's inhumanity to man, its effect on the Victorian sensibilities of the era could only have been more profound.

The idea of a "good death" in Victorian times — given the aversion to all things bodily and medical that existed during the era — would have been one that took place privately, quietly, and with a minimum of medicinal fuss or outward symptom. Passing quietly in one's sleep would have been the ideal for most individuals of the period, and it would certainly not have been desirable to be immediately present for another's gruesome death, or to witness or even discuss the details of one's own passing. Photography, journalism, and the backyard presence of the Civil War made it all but impossible to avoid stories and images of death, and almost every family throughout the nation was touched by a death in the war in some way or another.

The good death was not to be found in the Civil War. Instead, those directly affected by the violence and death — and society as a whole — had to redefine the way they understood death, dying, and life itself. There was no longer a way to avoid thinking about these issues and their implications. Thus a new spirit emerged, one that recognized the raw brutality of war and of death and that arguably created a greater respect for the body — replacing the former, mistaken sense of majesty with which it had been imbued. Death in the Civil War era became a force in and of itself, with both concrete and abstract impacts upon American society that continue to reverberate today.

A Meditation on Death

Understanding how views of death generally, and the fatal violence of war specifically, were changed by the Civil War requires an understanding of the sentiments that existed prior to it. In his "Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society," William Lloyd Garrison celebrates the Revolutionary War as one in which "people rose up as from the sleep of death, and rushed to the strife of blood; deeming it more glorious to die instantly as freemen, than desirable to live one hour as slaves" (p. 18). Writing approximately six decades after the American Revolution commenced and three decades prior to the Civil War, Garrison viewed death in service of a higher purpose as noble and even graceful — a vision far removed from the gory details that would be almost universally shunned in the Victorian Era.

While Victorians might not have been able to see majesty in the body anymore, they could certainly see grandeur in the nobler principles and values of humanity. Garrison suggests that war and death are noble when they occur for noble purposes. While still not the typical Victorian ideal of the "good death," such a death would certainly be considered honorable according to Garrison's view and according to the sentiments of many during the period. Not all individuals would agree with Garrison's abolitionist viewpoint, of course, but many — if not most — people of the time would likely have agreed that there were some principles worth dying for. This was a period in which the concrete details of the body were ignored and the trajectory of history outweighed an individual's death, at least when viewed in the abstract or from a great distance. It was against this backdrop that the Civil War occurred.

The Civil War and Shifting Moral Perspectives

Walt Whitman's poem "1861" is an early harbinger of the changes to come in the manner that American individuals and American society as a whole viewed death and faced life during and following the Civil War. In sharp contrast to Garrison's sentiments of only a generation prior, the first casualties of war and the immediate and stark details of the violence brought about significant changes in American attitudes toward death — no matter what the larger purpose of that death was supposed to be. Whitman does honor the soldiers, describing them as "a strong man, erect, clothed in blue clothes," but he closes the poem by calling 1861 a "hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year" (p. 78). Though echoes of older sentiments remain, the newer dismay and recognition of war's crushing reality is made all the clearer.

This is not to suggest that everyone thought war was wonderful until the Civil War and Walt Whitman's poem — but the Civil War did mark a profound moral shift in American society and values. As seen in Garrison's tract, Americans had come to glorify the deaths of the past due to the purposes they bore, and morality regarding death emphasized this positive dimension. Recognizing the individual, the human, and the bodily impacts of war and death — as Whitman does — requires a different morality: one that recognizes the inherent rights and desires of each individual person as superseding, or at least possibly superseding, the larger values of society. When faced with the realities of death and the dismemberment of bodies during warfare, it becomes more difficult to justify or celebrate these gory sacrifices, regardless of what such deaths might accomplish on a grander scale.

Conclusion

The taboo nature of bodies in the Victorian Era could not persist during the Civil War in the United States. Constant confrontations with death and with the effects of violence on the body made these abstract and oft-avoided topics a harsh yet simple fact of daily life for many, and no one escaped knowledge of the death and destruction of war entirely. Nor was there any real healing or growth of strength in the wake of these deaths — only a continued slogging on, with a new but hard-won wisdom regarding the precious nature of each individual's life.