The killing fields

Americans viewed death in the mid-19th century through the lens of evangelical Protestantism, with its focus on heaven as a real place where people went in their real bodies after dying. Admission to heaven required not just living a good life but also dying what was known as "the good death." Dying soldiers -- and anxious family members -- worried about this, because the devil tempted the dying with despair and disbelief. If wives were going to see their dead husbands in heaven someday, the dying had to follow what Faust calls "a checklist": The dying man should express an awareness of his impending fate and a willingness to accept it; he should restate his belief in God and in his own salvation; he should leave messages for "those who should have been at his side." Last words were important evidence of a good death. Before the war, men generally died surrounded by wives and children, who awaited and carefully noted their last words. But if you died on the battlefield, your fellow soldiers bore the responsibility of recording your last words and conveying them to your family. Those deprived of learning their loved ones' last words remained anxious for the rest of their lives about whether they would see their husbands and sons in heaven.

Blacks occupied a special place in the history of Civil War killing and dying. The Union Army included 180,000 black soldiers, but very few were permitted to engage in combat; most were assigned to labor details and many to burial duty. Southern whites found the fact of black soldiers intolerable; one white Southerner complained that it suggested that "our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Thus, Confederate forces regularly committed atrocities against black soldiers, including the mutilation of their corpses and the slaughter of black prisoners -- most notably in the Ft. Pillow massacre, north of Memphis, Tenn., in April 1864, when Confederate troops under Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest killed nearly 200 of the 300 or so black troops, most of whom had already surrendered. Early in the war, Confederate President Jefferson Davis approved the execution of four captured black soldiers, and Gen. Robert E. Lee did nothing to stop the murder of wounded black soldiers after the Battle of the Crater in 1864.