This republic of suffering: death and the American Civil War

Abstract

One of the most memorable scenes in Gone with the Wind (both the novel and film) is of the crowd assembled outside of an Atlanta newspaper office trying to see the local casualty reports following the Battle of Gettsyburg.Those assembled fight for copies of the galley proofs whose ink is not yet even dry.When Melanie and Scarlett finally obtain a copy, they quickly scan the "Ws" to determine if Ashley Wilkes is listed among the killed, wounded, or missing.Once they find that he is not a victim of the battle, Scarlett and Melanie soon realize that many of their friends who stand nearby them are less fortunate as their loved ones are listed among the dead.Both Mark S. Schantz and Drew Gilpin Faust have written books that deal with how Civil War participants, like the residents of Atlanta in the summer of 1863, learned about and coped with the news of the death of fathers, brothers, and sons.Schantz explains the "wider cultural matrix" of the Civil War by emphasizing how "the ideas and attitudes Americans held about death in the middle of the nineteenth century" made it "easier" for them "to kill and be killed" during the conflict (2).He stresses that "Southerners and Northerners" did not "set out consciously to kill themselves because they knew they would all meet again in heaven or because they grasped that their deaths might be politically valuable or aesthetically pleasing" (3).Rather, he concludes that

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