This Republic of Suffering (26 page)

Caleb Wilkins, private of the 11th Indiana, described from his own experience how bodies persist into the afterlife. At the same time he offered an explanation of a puzzle that had tormented thousands of wounded men: why amputated limbs so often continued to hurt. “I can understand some things now that I couldn't before death,” he confirmed. Wilkins reported that his leg had been amputated and that several days later he had bled to death. (“The surgeons did n't tie the arteries well.”) When Caleb met his brother in heaven and took a look at himself, he declared, “that aint my body…I lost a leg, and this body is perfect.”
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His brother, already practiced in death, explained that Caleb was looking at his spiritual body. His “spirit foot and leg” were perfect, and the pain he had felt after his amputation in his absent foot had been a consequence of the separation of his material from his spiritual appendages. “The sudden severing of the mortal from the spirit leg caused pain, which lasted some minutes after the material leg had been amputated.” His amputation had been a kind of pre-death, a forerunner of the disjunction of material body and spirit yet to come. Wilkins and his brother helpfully provided readers with an explanation of the relationship of body and soul, as well as the assurance that no man, and indeed not even any leg, was truly lost.
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There is no Caleb Wilkins of Indiana, or Gilbert Thompson of Alabama, or Leander Bolton of Pennsylvania in the database of 6.3 million records of 3.5 million soldiers that the National Park Service has compiled with the assistance of the tools of our computerized age. The
Banner of Light
did not present the story of any reader's actual kin; it did not provide accurate details of deaths and burials, the kind of information families sought as they flocked to battlefields or inundated the Sanitary Commission's Hospital Directory with tens of thousands of anxious inquiries. The consolation of spiritualism lay in its promise that there could and would be answers to these questions, even if it did not itself immediately provide them. There would be an ending to uncertainty—perhaps through contact with the spirit world but certainly through reunion in the world beyond. The unfinished narratives of so many lives would ultimately have a conclusion.
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The Message Department of the
Banner of Light,
which continued to carry communications from dead soldiers for more than a decade after the war, affirmed for its community of readers that individual soldiers were neither dead nor lost. They were still their definable and particular selves—still, as they described themselves, eighteen-or twenty-two-or twenty-four-year-olds, still men of six feet or five foot six or five foot eight inches tall, still northerners or southerners, still black or white, each still possessing his own identity and name. And they were struggling to reach out to those they had left behind in order to console them with the reassurance at spiritualism's core: “I Still Live.”

Tellingly, Reverend John Sweet had used this very same phrase to explain death's meaning to the Baptist congregation mourning Edward Amos Adams. Adams was not sending spiritualist messages from the world beyond, and Sweet, a devout Baptist pastor, was no medium. But Sweet still designated Adams as one of the “speaking dead,” a man whose life and death in themselves—“a life and character that still moves and acts among us”—represented certain immortality. “They whom we call dead have voices for us” and “speak to us by the lives which they have lived.” Like the spiritualist dead, Sweet affirmed, Edward Amos Adams too “still lives.” Mainstream denominations shared many of spiritualism's consoling tenets and its promise that the dead remained, in important ways, still with them.
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The reassurances of spiritualism reached their broadest audience through popular fiction. After
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
the best-selling book of the nineteenth century was Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's
The Gates Ajar.
If Stowe's novel, as Lincoln reportedly remarked to its author, helped to cause the war, Phelps's work dealt with the war's consequences. Within twenty years of its 1868 publication,
The Gates Ajar
had been reprinted fifty-five times. Enterprising marketers even devised
Gates Ajar
funeral wreaths, cigars, and patent medicines.

Phelps began to write the book in 1864, when she was just twenty years old, at a time, she said, when the “country was dark with sorrowing women.” A soldier with whom she was in love had been killed at Antietam, but she recognized that her own personal grief was simply part of an inescapable “material miasma” of loss and pain. Phelps wrote in order to “say something that would comfort some few…of the women whose misery crowded the land.” Looking back thirty years later, Phelps remembered that she had not “thought so much about the suffering of men—the fathers, the brother, the sons.” The mourners she sought to console were the women, “the helpless, outnumbering, unconsulted women; they whom war trampled down, without a choice or protest.” Men had fought and died, but now they were beyond help. It was the victimization and sacrifice of the women who continued to suffer that attracted her concern. After her book appeared, these women wrote her by the thousands. “For many years,” Phelps reported, “I was snowed under by those mourners' letters…signs of human misery and hope.”
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The Gates Ajar
is structured as the journal of Mary Cabot, a young woman who has just learned that her brother Roy has been “shot dead.” Unable to reconcile herself to his loss or resign herself to God's will, she is near despair when her aunt Winifred arrives for an unexpected visit. A widow with a young child, fittingly named Faith, Winifred offers Mary a new understanding of heaven, together with the assurance that she will be reunited with Roy, “not only to look at standing up among the singers,” as an angel with a harp, but “close to me; somehow or other to be as near as—to be nearer than—he was here—
really
mine again.”
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Mary's pastor has provided her only an unsatisfactory vision of a place dedicated to “harping and praying” and to endless glorifying of God, a place that would “crowd out all individuality and human joy,” a place beyond any special personal human attachments. “He gave me glittering generalities, cold commonplace, vagueness, unreality, a God and a future at which I sat and shivered.” Mary is clear-sighted about what she needs to believe. “I wanted something actual, something pleasant, about this place into which Roy has gone.”
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Winifred readily offers it. Harps, choirs, white robes, pearl gates, she explains, are all just symbols, not the reality of heaven at all. Instead the future life is very like Earth at its most ideal, with trees and mountains, with houses filled with books, pianos, and pictures, and with individuals preserved as themselves, looking as they did in life, maintaining their own bodies and identities. Roy is, Winifred assures Mary, “
only, out of sight
…not lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated,” but continuing to love those from whom he has departed.
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Phelps, speaking through Winifred, stumbles a bit on the question of the body and its fate after death. “A little complication there!” Winifred admits. Deferring to the realities of science, she acknowledges that “popular notions of resurrection are simply physiological impossibilities,” and she cites as an example the problem of the material destiny of “two Hottentots, one of whom has happened to make a dinner of the other one fine day.” But without resolving these intractable complexities, which were all too relevant in a war in which amputation was so widespread, Phelps simply affirms that a real body that can be heard and touched and kissed will be preserved. To try to “speculate” exactly how, she concludes, is “a waste of time.”
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The authority on which Winifred and Phelps rest their claims for the afterlife is not that of Scripture or science but of distress and desire. What humans most need is what a benevolent God would want to provide for them. Most important in Phelps's vision of the future is the continuation of the self, of an identity that is defined by a body and by a set of relationships that seem to include both people and domestic objects. These are the essence of what the heaven of
The Gates Ajar
promises to restore to the bereaved. Heaven is reconceived as a more perfect Earth: Victorian family and domesticity are immortalized, and death all but disappears.

But many bereaved sufferers could not duplicate Mary Cabot's escape from despair to certainty. The “rebellious state of mind” in which Mary found herself at the outset of the novel, the firm declaration “I am
not
resigned,” echoed the diaries and letters of real-life mourners who found themselves unable to understand why a benevolent God would afflict them—and indeed the world—with such suffering. As Confederate poet and novelist Sidney Lanier wondered, “How does God have the heart to allow it?” The venerable problem of theodicy—of how and why God permits evil—presented itself forcefully to those witnessing the devastation of civil war. One solution to the dilemma was to discount or dismiss evil, and that indeed was the strategy of those who denied death's horrors and focused on the attractions of a highly Earth-like heaven. If death was to be not dreaded but welcomed, it need not challenge God's fundamental goodness.
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But many were unable to console themselves with a vision of heaven that transcended war's afflictions, and they instead confronted doubts about the very foundations of their faith. In the Confederacy, where one in five white men of military age would die in the war, mounting death tolls brought widespread and all but unbearable suffering. Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina understood the meaning of the summer of Gettysburg and Vicksburg firsthand, when in September 1863 she called at the houses of eight neighbors and found each one in mourning for a lost husband, brother, or son. Accepting such loss began to seem impossible, especially to women for whom the imperatives of family conventionally took precedence over those of politics. It was increasingly hard to simply murmur, “God's will be done.” Susan Caldwell of Warrenton, Virginia, a town located at the very seat of war, anguished over the “loss of our brave and gallant men” on the battlefields all around her and found herself unable “to gain power over my own rebellious heart…Oh! how hard to be submissive.” War-weary Americans invoked the trials and patience of Job, reminded themselves that the Lord “doeth all things well,” and dutifully and almost ritually affirmed, “Thou he slay me, yet I will trust in him.” But like Susan Caldwell, many feared they could not “stand a great deal more.”
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For some, consolation derived not just from assurances of a close and comfortable heaven but also from visions of transformations on Earth. Death would be not just easy but purposeful. Southerners and northerners alike elaborated narratives of patriotic sacrifice that imbued war deaths with transcendent meaning. Soldiers suffered and died so that a nation—be it the Union or the Confederacy—might live; Christian and nationalist imperatives merged in a redemptive vision of political immortality.

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is perhaps the best-known example of such an explanation and justification of war's carnage. Determined that “these dead shall not have died in vain,” Lincoln hallowed and sacralized a nation and its purposes with biblical cadences—even as he scarcely mentioned God. In the address the dead themselves become the agents of political meaning and devotion; they act even in their silence and anonymity. Lincoln immortalized them as the enduring inspiration for an immortal nation. Unlike the “honored dead,” the Union would not “perish from the earth.” Soldiers' deaths, like Christ's sacrifice, become the vehicle of salvation, the means for a terrestrial, political redemption.
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Lincoln's providential view of the war and its carnage appeared with perhaps even greater force a year and a half later, as both the conflict and his life neared conclusion. In the Second Inaugural of March 1865 Lincoln again offered an explanation for wartime slaughter, but this time it was God, not man, who gave it meaning. An Old Testament God of justice is avenging the sins of slavery. The Civil War and its deaths are not so much sacrifice as atonement. “Yet if God wills that it continue until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”
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Providential views of the war had abounded from the earliest days of the conflict, when North and South competed to claim God for their side. The Confederacy, as one southern clergyman declared, would be the “nation to do His work upon earth.”
Deo Vindice,
with God as vindicator, the official Confederate seal proclaimed. But only as the enormous cost in lives became clear did it seem imperative explicitly to link providentialist notions to war's losses, to impart to these deaths both transcendence and meaning. As Georgia bishop Stephen Elliott explained this necessity in an 1864 sermon, “To shed such blood, as we have spilled in this contest for the mere name of independence, for the vanity or the pride of having a separate national existence, would be unjustifiable before God and man. We must have higher aims than these.” War's dead and war's cost were changing and amplifying the understanding of its ends.
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But as Lincoln's Second Inaugural, delivered on the eve of victory, insisted, God “has his own purposes” and makes his own judgments. He, and neither Yankees nor Confederates, would define the reach of his providence. Both sides in the terrible conflict “read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other…The prayers of both could not be answered.” Northern success and southern defeat necessarily altered providential explanations of war and its carnage. Northerners were reinforced in their conviction that lives had not been lost in vain and were encouraged in their sense of national mission; Confederates confronted what for many became a profound test of faith.
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