Death and Civil War America: Interview with Drew Gilpin Faust

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Explain how photography sometimes served as a surrogate for the family experience.

I think the most dramatic, public example of this was when Amos Humiston was found dead on the battlefield surrounded by portraits of his children, and there was a great effort to identify him. This seemed to be such an iconic moment—that this individual had wanted to die with his family around him, so he used his photographs in place of the actual individuals. It captured the public imagination, and there was a big effort to identify who he was, who his children were. That was accomplished, and his name was discovered through publishing engravings in the press. But I think the level of public interest in this is important—the image of someone who was torn away from family trying to reproduce that family through a ring of photographs around himself in his last moments.

You speculate that religion may have enabled killing in the Civil War. Could you explain that?

It’s just something worth thinking about. I don’t think you would say it absolutely did.  But I think religion may have enabled both killing and dying—certainly enabled dying, in that if you firmly believed you were going to another life, it was easier to give up this one. But the notion that there are Christian soldiers who undertake killing for purposes that are consistent with religious ends I think motivated numbers of soldiers in the war, so I think it contributed to easing the difficulties individuals confronted both as they thought about killing and about being killed.

Were there any differences between the way northern Union soldiers and African- American soldiers reacted to killing?

There’s a considerable body of evidence that shows African-American soldiers recognizing the Civil War as a continuation of the violence of slavery. This was not so much a break in a peacetime world but rather an exacerbation of a world in which they had long found themselves, so that violence was at the heart of their prewar existence. There is a lot of expression of violence in war as an opportunity of vengeance, for repaying debts, for an instrument of liberation and an instrument of revenge.  It’s sometimes criticized by African-American leaders. For example, Bishop Henry Turner was very nervous about calls for vengeance. He said we must not submit to this kind of definition, but one finds in numbers of letters from African-American soldiers the notion that this is a “just desserts” for the horrors of slavery. Abraham Lincoln phrased it a little bit differently, but he alludes to something of the same message in the second inaugural, where he sees the killing in the war as in some sense the price that America as a whole is paying for having embraced the slave institution. So it’s not a matter of our individual vengeance but rather the nation as a whole being punished for having been involved with slavery.

Was it harder for Americans to kill in the Civil War because the opponents were  fellow Americans?

Yes. I think it was harder for soldiers to kill people who looked like themselves. And one of the ways that we see evidence to suggest that that’s the case is the kinds of atrocities that soldiers often committed against African-American soldiers—the failure to take prisoners, the Fort Pillow Massacre, those are probably the most dramatic examples of this, but there was a sense on the part of white Southerners that these were not real soldiers—that this was a kind of slave insurrection, that they did not have a legitimate right to be in military uniforms and to be fighting. Some commanders even encouraged ignoring the laws of war and the differential treatment of black Union soldiers, so that you can see when differences of race emerged, differences in perception emerged as well, and differences in treatment.

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