Awaiting the Heavenly Country— The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death
by Mark S. Schantz, Cornell University Press
To 21st-century Americans living active, healthy and fulfilling lives well beyond their allotted “threescore years and ten,” a culture extolling the virtues of a “good death”—one that often seeks its comforts—seemingly confounds rational thinking. But that wasn’t the case for generations of people North and South, rich and poor, urban and rural, during the years leading up to the Civil War.
In Awaiting the Heavenly Country, Mark Schantz penetrates this cultural phenomenon in an attempt to understand why thousands of men “slaughtered each other with a zeal we still grope to comprehend” over four long years of war. Schantz concludes that “the great destructiveness of the Civil War might be seen, in part, as the product of cultural attitudes and assumptions about death that…seem alien to our world.”
Unlike Drew Gilpin Faust’s heralded This Republic of Suffering, which contends that the nation invented the modern culture of reverence for military death, Schantz makes a compelling case that attitudes facilitating the war’s tremendous carnage were firmly in place before hostilities ever began. He notes that thousands of young men rallied to the colors confident that, should they die on the battlefield, they would be cherished, just like heroes of Antiquity, by a society that already possessed a clear concept of a “heavenly country” that mirrored civil society. People already knew how they were supposed to act in time of war, Schantz argues, and “these cultural scripts required that men put their lives at great hazard to win imperishable fame for themselves, their families, their communities, and their nations.”
Awaiting the Heavenly Country provides much-needed context to the war’s more traditional battle and leader histories, and opens a window into the collective psyches of Americans, both North and South, who fought during those four years. What we find is that they are distinctly different and yet eerily like ourselves.
Originally published in the December 2008 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
