In your preface you state that we die “differently from generation to generation.”  How do we die differently today and why?

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Well, I think there are a number of factors that play into this. Technology is certainly one of them. Customs and values are another. We tend to die today in hospitals, tied up to all kinds of machines. The notion that the family should be at bedside is not so strongly felt. The place of religion is very different in our society. Ways of dying are more diverse because we are not as homogeneous in our identities and religious affiliations as people were during the Civil War. Nineteenth-century America was overwhelmingly Protestant, so that makes a difference. One of the things that I found most striking as I got more involved in this project is that many colleagues and friends did not want to talk to me about the subject of the Republic of Suffering.

A past president of Penn and another historian I know didn’t like coming when I gave talks about this; he didn’t want to think about death, and he teased me about it. He made it kind of amusing,  but I think it’s expressive of something deeply rooted in our culture, which Phil Arias has written about so eloquently, which is we don’t like thinking about death. We try to eliminate it from our thoughts and live our lives as if it’s never going to happen. The notion of the good death was that it was a prepared death.  You spent much of your life organizing yourself in relationship to death. That has had a very profound effect on me because I think that I have lived in some ways in a 19th- century world for the last 15 years, because I constantly thought about death.

Do you feel that you became obsessed with death?

Not in a bad way—I think in an illuminating way. I think in the way that it affected the question of moment of truth. When you think about death, it conceptualizes and intensifies much of what you do. It tells you to go smell the flowers; it put things in perspective when you’re having a horrible meeting or there’s a lot of difficult things going on.

You say that Americans in the 19th century were more prepared to die than kill.  Are we better prepared for killing than dying?

That’s an interesting question…

Let me rephrase my question: Would it be easier for a soldier today to kill than it was for a Civil War soldier?

Certainly desensitization to killing is still an important part of military training. I think it’s recognized that making individuals able to kill is a challenge and has to be taught. So we don’t just assume that everyone walking around in 21st- century America is a born killer. I would say that the glorification of violence in popular culture may indeed have broken down certain inhibitions about killing. We hear stories on the news about children who pop off and shoot each other, or gang warfare. I think the news likes to put front and center examples of times when the sanctity of human life has been completely ignored, and I think certainly popular culture points to and takes advantage of those examples.  You asked a really interesting question, and I don’t have a firm answer to it.  I think it’s a question worth exploring.

Could you describe what a good death would be in the Civil War period?  If a soldier could die ideally, what would that entail?

Well a soldier would be at home. He wouldn’t be on the battlefield—he would be surrounded by family, and then these various questions that I put forward in my first chapter would be addressed. He would be prepared, he would express his willingness to die, he would say he had met his savior and expected to be taken to heaven, he would have settled all of his accounts with his family. He also would have prepared in a quite specific way his will, his burial arrangements, and he would have a kind of understanding of a shared understanding with his family of what the next step was. In other words, he was on his way out.

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