Grow up in the south and of course the Civil War never leaves you. I grew up hearing about how our grandfather’s Shenandoah Valley barn was burned and rebuilt, and taking school trips to the New Market battlefield (I was intensely jealous of a classmate who actually stumbled across a bullet on the field, maybe turned up by rain or something, not discovered for more than a century since so many were killed there). It’s that scar in 19th century history, four awful years when two percent of the nation’s population died too young. It’s an architectural dividing mark – houses may be antebellum, or postbellum. (Interesting how disaster and tragedy divides the age and character of buildings in some places – in London, houses are only really old if they’re pre-1666, the year of the Great Fire.)
In college, I went back to New Market to write a story about it for the school newspaper, and I remember being particularly struck by its silence. I felt the same way in Gettysburg, Pa. years ago, visiting a family friend who was a ranger at the battlefield, and watched deer race across the long expanse at dusk. I felt it last year when I visited Antietam for the first time. These spaces are empty, and yet very full. Quiet, and yet there’s a noise underneath that you can’t forget – the tranquility of the battlefields is not the reality of the battlefields. I have a friend who believes in ghosts, who heard sounds at Antietam. I strained, tried to hear, thought I sensed the echoes of dying, but I can’t be sure. Once these places, the cornfields, the meadows, the trees, were witnesses to violence and death. Now they are witness to birds and rabbits and deer, and the people who come to visit and imagine and learn.
Our November/December issue is dedicated to the Civil War, and I’m doing some homework. I’ll be back in Gettysburg next week for the Journey Through Hallowed Ground Partnership meeting/conference, and in anticipation of that am reading “This Republic of Suffering,” by Drew Gilpin Faust, who will be a keynote speaker at the conference. She’s the president of Harvard and a Civil War scholar. Faust looks at the Civil War not in terms of battle lines and strategies and key turning points and marches, but in its most human, and saddest terms, those of death – the unreal and very real work of killing, dying, burying, mourning, in a war that killed the equivalent cumulative American losses in the Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and Korea.
Faust notes some interesting points about the soldiers’ psychology – in some ways, they were almost more ready to die than to kill. As a Confederate chaplain told his troops in 1863, “Soldier, your business is to die.” In a world where somehow, in the second century past such slaughter, nations around the globe still set off bombs, shoot, commit genocide, I’d hope we’d learn from remembering how direct, how human death is, and especially was in 1861, when there were no such things as guided missiles.
“Death in war does not simply happen,” Faust writes, “it requires action and agents… It is work to die, to know how to approach and endure life’s last moments. Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face – to worry about how to die – distinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.”
* A correction was made following an error in the first posting of this blog, pointed out by NRJMike. I checked my faulty memory with my dad, and indeed the barn was burned, not spared, and then rebuilt.
