This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust

Author:Drew Gilpin Faust [Faust, Drew Gilpin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780307268587
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

“It was my Mother’s customs,” “My gentle Mother dear”

“I was my Mother’s darling,” for, I loved my lager beer.

“Kiss me good-night, Mother,” and bring me a Bourbon plain—

“Mother dear, I feel I’m dying,” with Mother on the brain.53

“The Dying Soldier.” Song sheet. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

Mark Twain took on The Gates Ajar in a “burlesque” entitled “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” Although he showed a version of it to William Dean Howells in the early 1870s, he dared not publish it until after the turn of the century and the death of his disapproving wife. Twain complained that Phelps’s novel “had imagined a mean little ten-cent heaven about the size of Rhode Island—a heaven large enough to accommodate about a tenth of one percent of the Christian billions who had died in the past nineteen centuries.” Twain’s hero had trouble managing his angel wings and flew so badly that he regularly collided with others. Stormfield was also startled to discover that the overwhelming proportion of American angels were in fact Indians, not white men, for Indians had been dying in the New World and accumulating in the American section of heaven for centuries. The combination of his poor aeronautic abilities and his minority status rendered Stormfield less than entirely comfortable in paradise. Twain reduced Phelps’s lugubrious earnestness to comic absurdity.54

Ambrose Bierce styled himself a wit, not a humorist, emphasizing the sardonic and cutting intent of his newspaper columns and stories. “Humor is tolerant, tender…its ridicule caresses. Wit stabs, begs pardon—and turns the weapon in the wound.” Raised on a midwestern farm where, as he later described it, “we had to grub out a very difficult living,” Bierce was the tenth of thirteen children—all given names beginning with A—born to parents he seems to have despised. He enlisted in the Union army when he was only eighteen. The most significant and prolific American writer actually to fight in the Civil War, Bierce saw nearly four years of combat and won multiple commendations for bravery before receiving a serious head wound at Kennesaw Mountain in 1864. After the war he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a journalist. Haunted all his life by what he described as persisting “visions of the dead and dying,” Bierce began in the 1880s to publish both fiction and nonfiction based on his military experiences. His writings about the war are often cited as the beginnings of modern war literature and as a major influence upon both Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway. Bierce crafted unromanticized depictions of battle that reflected his fundamental approach to both writing and to life: “Cultivate a taste for distasteful truths. And…most important of all, endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.”55

The yawning discrepancy between the hopes that inaugurated the war and the experience of its horrors deeply affected Bierce’s subsequent view of the world. Surviving the war left him tormented by the “phantoms of that blood-stained period” and by a bitterness

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