This Republic of Suffering (25 page)

Why this fratricidal strife,

Brethren made in your own image

Seeking for each other's life?”

Thus spoke a dying Federal soldier,

Amid the clash of arms he cried;

With hope he fixed his eyes on heaven,

Then bid adieu to earth—and died.
¹²

These verses left their own question unanswered, with heaven only a hope, but other songs promised that an afterlife would “turn our mourning into joy” and assured, “Mother, I die happy,” for “I see the angels coming, / With bright garlands for my brow.” To a chorus that asked, “Shall we know each other, shall we know each other, shall we know each other there?” a ballad published in New York confirmed that “Ye shall join the loved and lost ones / In the land of perfect day…‘We shall know each other there.'”
¹³

Heaven would re-create earthly ties in a realm of perfection and joy. Death as termination of life simply did not exist. A July 1863 poem in a popular Philadelphia magazine decisively erased death, even as more than six thousand soldiers were expiring in a Pennsylvania town little more than a hundred miles away.

There is no Death! The stars go down

To rise upon some fairer shore;

And bright in heaven's jeweled crown

They shine forevermore.

…….….….

And ever near us, though unseen,

The dear, immortal spirits tread;

For all the boundless Universe

Is Life—
There are no Dead.
¹⁴

The prominence of heaven in the discourse about Civil War death derived in part from the attractive place it had gradually become during the preceding century. The publication of Emanuel Swedenborg's
Heaven and Hell
in 1758 marked the origins of an important movement away from a conception of heaven as forbiddingly ascetic, distant from earth and its materiality, and highly theocentric. Instead, a more modern notion of heaven began to emerge as a realm hardly separate or different—except in its perfection—from Earth itself. “Man after death,” wrote Swedenborg, “is as much man as he was before, so much so as to be unaware that he is not still in the former world…Death is only a crossing.” At the same time, hell became less and less a subject for worry or dread.
¹⁵

Swedenborgianism as an organized denomination never came to hold more than a marginal place within American religious life. But Swedenborg's ideas attracted widespread attention in the United States, and Americans from Johnny Appleseed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher and Henry James Sr. cited its influences. “This age is Swedenborg's,” Emerson proclaimed in 1858. Swedenborgian thought made a significant mark upon Transcendentalism and encouraged tendencies toward a softening view of heaven across American religious denominations. As historian James H. Moorhead has demonstrated, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a muting of the “negative images traditionally associated with life's end.” A new eschatology that influenced nearly all of Protestant thought “sought to narrow the distance between this world and the next, even to annex heaven as a more glorious suburb of the present life.”
¹⁶

But this transition remained incomplete as the Civil War opened. Emily Dickinson was not alone in the concerns she voiced about the forbidding nature of the afterlife in her wartime poetry and letters: “Heaven is so cold!” “I don't like Paradise—Because it's Sunday—all the time.” The transformation of heaven intensified as war made questions about immortality more immediate and more widely shared. Historians Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang have noted that more than fifty books on heaven were published in the United States between 1830 and 1875, but this total does not include fictional works, or the dozens of Civil War funeral sermons appearing as printed pamphlets that made heaven a central theme, or the many periodical and newspaper articles with titles like “Heaven, the House of God” (which appeared in the columns of the
Daily South Carolinian
in 1864), or popular poetry that addressed the nature of the afterlife in rhyme (like “Hereafter” or “Up to the Hills,” from
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
). In 1863
Harper's Weekly
announced a second edition of William Branks's
Heaven Our Home
as a promising “New Source of Consolation” and reported it to be “having a large sale.” It was one of three titles Branks produced about heaven during these years. Historian Phillip Shaw Paludan counts nearly a hundred books on heaven in the decade after the war alone. The geography and society of the afterlife persisted as widespread concerns, for even when the slaughter had ceased, loss and grief remained.
¹⁷

An issue of particular focus in this literature, and in the struggle to come to terms with death, was the fate of human relationships in the afterlife. If death was no longer to be an ending, it would also no longer be a parting. Earlier visions of heaven had focused almost exclusively on the connection between God and man within the heavenly kingdom, even to the point of denying the persistence of earthly ties of family and friendship. But Swedenborg and thinkers influenced by his views created the foundation for what now came to seem a necessary component of an adequately consoling portrait of paradise.

Presbyterian Robert Patterson acknowledged in his
Visions of Heaven for the Life on Earth,
published a decade after the war, that earlier conceptions of heaven that had excluded the continuation of love and friendship were “very chilling.” The era of Victorian domesticity could not tolerate the obliteration of these cherished ties of home and family. The widespread assumption among Civil War Americans that they would one day be reunited with lost kin was fundamental to the solace of religious faith. When
Harper's Weekly
published its notice of the best-selling
Heaven Our Home,
the aspect of the book it found most worthy of comment was that its author supported “the comforting belief of the recognition of friends in Heaven, which to him is a
home,
with a great, and happy and loving family in it.” Seven of the book's chapters were specifically devoted to “Recognition of Friends in Heaven.” If soldiers needed to be assured they would not really die, survivors yearned to know their loved ones were not—even if they were missing or unknown—forever lost. “They will not leave us long,” one South Carolina woman affirmed. They were “only gone before.” Jews as well as Christians invoked these consolations. Rebecca Gratz comforted her brother Ben about his son's death in 1861 by reassuring him “they shall be reunited in another world.” The Civil War made urgent the transformation of heaven into an eternal family reunion, encouraging notions of an afterlife that was familiar and close at hand, populated by loved ones who were just “beyond the veil.”
¹⁸

Many bereaved Americans, however, were unwilling to wait until their own deaths reunited them with lost kin, and they turned eagerly to the more immediate promises of spiritualism. A series of spirit rappings in upstate New York in the late 1840s had intensified spreading interest in the apparent reality of communication between the living and the dead. To an age increasingly caught up in the notion of science as the measure of truth, spiritualism offered belief that seemed to rely on empirical evidence rather than revelation and faith. If the dead could cause tables to rise, telegraph messages from the world beyond, and even communicate in lengthy statements through spirit mediums, an afterlife clearly must exist. Here was, in the words of one popular spiritualist advocate, “proof palpable of immortality.”
¹⁹

Men and women began to participate in regular spirit circles in hopes of communicating with the dead. By 1853 one spiritualist estimated that thirty such groups met regularly in the city of Philadelphia alone, and that thirty thousand mediums were operating across the country. The
Spiritualist Register
reported that just before the outbreak of war 240,000 inhabitants of New York State—6 percent of its total population—were spiritualists. Strongest in the Northeast, where it often attracted abolitionists, feminists, and adherents of other radical social movements, spiritualism had its southern disciples as well, an estimated 20,000 in Louisiana, for example, and 10,000 in Tennessee. In the mid-1850s South Carolina planter and politician James Henry Hammond and author William Gilmore Simms, both vigorous proslavery advocates, explored spiritualism as an alternative to what they regarded as the unconvincing tenets of revealed religion. Simms believed he had successfully communicated with his dead children, and Hammond developed a series of questions for the dead that Simms posed to a medium on a visit to New York.
²⁰

By the time war broke out, spiritualist notions were sufficiently common to influence and engage even those who were not formal adherents, and the war made spiritualist doctrines increasingly attractive. Mary Todd Lincoln sought regularly to communicate with her dead son Willie. She sponsored a number of séances at the White House, some of which the president himself was said to have attended. Henry Bowditch was no spiritualist but found deep comfort after Nathaniel's death in the explicitly spiritualist outlook of the author of the poem “My Child.” John Pierpont, fellow New Englander and fellow abolitionist, offered Bowditch

The promise That in the spirit-land,

Meeting at thy right hand,

'Twill be our heaven to find that—he is there!

Bowditch's struggle to grapple with—to “realize”—the loss of his son was made considerably easier by Pierpont's assurance that he was only invisible, that he lived on in another, only temporarily inaccessible world. Swedenborg's comforting ideas about heaven were central to spiritualist ideology and spiritualism's appeal, and such sentiments played a prominent place in Nathaniel's funeral sermon as well, which assured mourners that “he is just the other side of the thin veil…He stands there, waiting till you come.”
²¹

In New Orleans an officer of the Native Guard led an active spiritualist circle called the Grandjean Séance. Within weeks of André Cailloux's death, the group made contact with their departed hero. “They thought they had killed me but they made me live,” Cailloux reported from the afterlife. “It will be I who receive you into our world if you die in the struggle, so fight!” He consoled his black comrades that “there must be victims to serve as stepping stones on the path to liberty.”
²²

Extensive marketing of the planchette, precursor of the Ouija board, during the 1860s, and especially in the years immediately following the war, offered everyone the opportunity to be a medium and turned spiritualist exploration into a parlor game. A heart-shaped piece of wood on three legs, the planchette was believed to move in response to spiritual forces passing through the hands that rested upon it. The device, often equipped with a pencil, could point to letters of the alphabet or actually write out messages from the dead. In the North planchettes were available in a variety of woods and decorative styles; they transformed spiritual communication into a fashionable and “novel amusement.”
²³

Spiritualists held their first national convention in Chicago in 1864, marking a growing prominence and self-consciousness that extended well beyond the realm of popular amusement. “Virtually everyone,” historian R. Laurence Moore has observed, “conceded that spirit communication was at least a possibility.” Amid a war that was erasing not only lives but identities, the promise, as one spiritualist spokesman wrote, of the “imperishability of the individual and the continuation of the identical Ego” after death was for many irresistible. “And you will never lose your identity,” John Edmonds and George T. Dexter assured readers of
Spiritualism,
first published in 1853 and then reprinted throughout the rest of the century. “Physical death does not affect the identity of the individual.”
²⁴

Spiritualism responded to a question of pressing importance to the soldier and his kin. As an 1861 article in the spiritualist newspaper
Banner of Light
posed it, “he desires to know what will become of himself after he has lost his body. Shall he continue to exist?—and, if so, in what condition?” Each issue of the paper provided a chorus of answers, a “Message Department” of “Voices from the Dead” transmitted through “Mrs. J. H. Conant, while in a condition called the Trance.” Confederates and Yankees alike chimed in; soldiers of all ranks and origins reported that they had died well, that they had met relatives in heaven, and that, as one voice declared, “death has taken nothing from me, except my body.” Stonewall Jackson weighed in to defend his actions (“I adopted the course I took because I felt it was right for me to”), and Willie Lincoln sent regular communications.
²⁵

Philip Gregg, a Confederate killed three months before his appearance in print in April 1862, observed that “the emotions of the returning soldier, who has yielded up his life upon the battle-field, can be scarcely imagined.” Those who indeed found the notion of posthumous emotions too much to imagine were presented with his vivid description, although Gregg cut the rendering of his feelings short, concluding, “What I would say to my family the world has no right to hear.”
²⁶

Many messages contained the kind of information found in condolence letters written to inform relatives about the deaths of kin in hospital or battle: affirmations of a Good Death and of the principles of the
ars moriendi.
Whether or not Mrs. Conant was able to communicate with the dead, she certainly channeled the concerns of the living. Lieutenant Gilbert Thompson asked “as a favor of you to-day, that you will inform my father, Nathaniel Thompson of Montgomery, Alabama, if possible, of my decease. Tell him I died…eight days ago, happy and resigned.” Leander Bolton wanted to “give my mother a little sketch of the manner of my death.” Charlie Hiland reported, “I lost my life in your Bull Run affair, and the folks want to know how I died and what became of me after death…I should like to inform them.” Families were promised relief from that “dread void of uncertainty” about both the earthly and spiritual fate of their sons and brothers.
²⁷