Death and Civil War America: Interview with Drew Gilpin Faust

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There’s an ongoing debate because we spend so much money today to try to recover any body we can from the battlefield. There are some people who say we shouldn’t do so, but it seems to me that that process, that idea starts in the Civil War era.

One can see in the Civil War itself a real shift in consciousness about the obligation of the state to involve itself, or commit itself, to a retrieval of the dead. We take that for granted now, but that was not at all in people’s minds at the beginning of the Civil War.

Did you find any evidence of either the Northern or the Southern government  manipulating mourning for patriotic purposes?

Mourning became a vehicle for patriotic expression in many ways. At the beginning of the war every soldier’s death was greeted with parades. These were mourning parades, elaborate funerals, elaborate forms of recognition. But when you start getting toward the numbers of Civil War dead that ultimately amounted to 620,000, you obviously don’t have the same level of ceremony surrounding the deaths. I think many of these events were a combination of patriotic outpourings and private mourning. Stonewall Jackson ‘s death observances went on for days, to the point that by the time he was lying in state at Virginia Military Institute, where he had been a professor, individuals were beginning to comment on the fact that the embalming job that had been done on him was weakening, and it was past time to get him into the ground. Same thing happened with Abraham Lincoln actually; his body was taken on a train trip around much of the nation in 1865 for crowds and crowds of people to express their grief at the loss of this Union president who had won the war for them.

I think some people would say the mourning for Stonewall Jackson is still going on, legions of people who go down to VMI. How did growing up in Virginia influence the way you view the  Civil War?

I grew up in Virginia in the 1950s and ’60s,  when reenactments of Civil War battles were taking place all around me. It was a time when people were very engaged with Civil War memories. A lot of my childhood weekends, I remember, were taken up with trips to battlefields and activities that were about the Civil War. I used to play Civil War with my brothers all the time. My older brother always made me be Grant because he wanted to be Lee. I was pretty old before I realized that Grant actually won, so I had a rather distorted view of things for quite some time.

Because of that view, do you like or dislike Grant?

I like Grant a lot. I think he was a remarkable individual. Another story I should tell about my childhood—and I’m not sure when this reached a level of actual consciousness—seems to me almost prophetic about this book.  My family, my parents and grandparents, are buried in a beautiful little cemetery called Old Chapel Cemetery, located between two small Virginia towns, Boyce and Millard. There’s a little family plot there. If you look around the graveyard, within two or three feet of this family plot there are little stone markers that say unknown Confederate soldier, unknown Confederate soldier. Those were individuals killed in a skirmish on that ground during the Civil War and interred in unidentified graves. My family is buried in the midst of the phenomenon that is at the heart of this book.

Who was the Civil War buff in your family who dragged everybody to the battlefields—or was it the entire family?

Probably my parents thought, “Well, these are historic sites; let’s take them to those historic sites.” But my older brother was the Civil War nut. He collected guns and other weapons and all kinds of paraphernalia.

Did that part of your background help you? You use a lot of material culture in your books and your classroom—does that come from your family experience as well?

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Tags: Civil War, Civil War Times, Social History