Posts Tagged ‘Civil War’

The Art of Dying, or Ars Moriendi

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Pride of the spirit is one of the five temptations of the dying man, according to Ars moriendi.

Pride of the spirit is one of the five temptations of the dying man, according to Ars moriendi.

In the book, This Republic of Suffering, by Drew Gilpin Faust, the topic of the Good Death begins on page six. This topic, not unknown to American Civil War soldiers in the mid-nineteenth century, had its foundation in the ars moriendi, or “The Art of Dying,” two Latin texts that reached back to fifteenth-century Catholicism. In fact, this art of dying the ‘good death’ had become the core for modern Christian practice by the mid-nineteenth century.

Civil War soldiers were, in fact, better prepared to die than to kill, for they lived in a culture that offered many lessons in how life should end. But these lessons had to be adapted to the dramatically changed circumstances of the Civil War…Dying was an art, and the tradition of ars moriendi had provided rules of conduct for the moribund and their attendants since at least the fifteenth century: how to give up one’s soul “gladlye and wilfully”‘ how to meet the devil’s temptations of unbelief, despair, impatience, and worldly attachment; how to pattern one’s dying on that of Christ; how to pray. Texts on the art of dying proliferated with the spread of vernacular printing, culminating in 1651 in London with Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying. His revision of the originally Catholic ars moriendi proved not just a literary achievement but an intellectual triumph that firmly established the genre within Protestantism.

Taylor’s rendition of the ars moriendi as well as the original documents had, by the time of the Civil War, become so commonplace that preachers used them in sermons, popular health books combined the expanding insights of medical science with older religious conventions about dying well, and popular literature carried out the theme in scenes such as the death of Dickens’s Little Nell, Thackerey’s Colonel Newcome and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Eva.

By the time of the Civil War, the theme of the Good Death inspired songs, stories and poetry for and about the Civil War. As the war raged on throughout this country, the concept of the good death had burst its religious boundaries and had become part of respectable middle-class behavior throughout both the North and the South.

This long-held and widely-spread belief system about death is why, according to Faust, a soldier who died anonymously and suddenly in the heat of battle confounded all ability to understand why this death might be a “Good Death.” The Good Death was to take place at home, among loved ones who could witness the faith of that dying soul. To compensate for this denial of closeness between soldier and family at the time of death, other soldiers, chaplains, military nurses and doctors conspired to provide dying men and their families with as many of the elements of the “conventional Good Death” as possible. This meant that other individuals on the battlefield became surrogates for the family when a soldier died.

This unusual and heartrending change in familiar patterns of family care and death care in the 1860s led to the composition of several songs and poems. One, titled “Be My Mother Till I Die,” included the lines sung by a nurse:

Let me kiss him for his mother,
Or perchance a sister dear;
Farewell, dear stranger brother,
Our requiem, our tears.

This song was so widely popular that it called for a response, titled “Answer to: Let Me Kiss Him for His Mother,” which expressed gratitude for the women who cared for a family’s loved one far from home.

Bless the lips that kissed our darling,
As he lay on his death-bed,
Far from home and ‘mid cold strangers
Blessings rest upon your head.

Songs such as this and their responses did not belong to one side or another in that war. They were national responses to the disruption of war, which — for all intents and purposes — was a disruption of the Good Death. Songs such as this and actions of others who helped soldiers die on the battlefield helped to maintain that traditional connection between the dying and their kin that defined the ars moriendi.

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Posted in Death & Dying, Death Practices, Grief and Grieving, Traditions | No Comments »

Finding the Living Among the Dead

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

My daughter and I traveled to Wales in 2005 to find my third great grandfather’s grave. When we found it (after extensive research before our trip), we purchased some local flowers and left those flowers and a note attached to those flowers for anyone who might visit the grave later. If someone visited the grave, they may be a relative, even if distant.

Many people lurk around cemeteries and family grave sites on Memorial Day or during a town’s “Decoration Day”* for many reasons – one is to pay respect to the dead, but the other is in hopes of finding or seeing long-lost or totally lost relations. In other cases, entire families visit the cemetery to have picnics and to meet friends who aren’t lost (or dead) at all.

Cemeteries were the precursors to public parks, according to Sharon DeBartolo Carmack, author of Your Guide to Cemetery Research. The elite garden cemetery (such as Cave Hill Cemetery located in Louisville, Kentucky – the image shown here is the main entrance to Cave Hill Cemetery, Baxter Avenue) was designed for the dead, but also to appeal to the living. I wish I had known that some folks use cemeteries as meeting places before I visited Hawaii a few decades ago. Perhaps, then, I would not have been shocked at the families who gathered in cemeteries to sit on headstones while they munched away on poi or chicken and drank canned juice.

This tradition of picnicking at cemeteries truly is unique to Hawaii, and eating and socializing together at a relative’s or friend’s grave is not reserved for holidays. In one instance, a family gathers at a mother’s grave on her birthday. “It’s the idea like even if she were at home, she would just be sitting there listening to the conversation,” her daughter said. “She’s gone but she’s not forgotten.”

In her book, Carmack encourages family gatherings at cemeteries or taking a tour of cemeteries where ancestors are buried. She believes that this type of gathering is one way for younger family members to learn more about their families. She states that “cemeteries are also a wonderful place to teach children about respect for the dead and the sacredness of the final resting place.” These teachings, perhaps, can help to avoid future vandalism by explaining that the cemetery like “a museum without walls.”

* Decoration Day is a holiday celebrated mainly in the south at the local level. This holiday began after the Civil War and it was encouraged to help decorate the many graves of the Confederate dead. Northern citizens, however, were doing the same, and it was decided to merge the practice and create a national holiday. Decoration Day first was celebrated nationally on 30 May 1868. According to the Memorial Day History site:

Traditional observance of Memorial day has diminished over the years. Many Americans nowadays have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At many cemeteries, the graves of the fallen are increasingly ignored, neglected. Most people no longer remember the proper flag etiquette for the day. While there are towns and cities that still hold Memorial Day parades, many have not held a parade in decades. Some people think the day is for honoring any and all dead, and not just those fallen in service to our country.

There are a few notable exceptions. Since the late 50’s on the Thursday before Memorial Day, the 1,200 soldiers of the 3d U.S. Infantry place small American flags at each of the more than 260,000 gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery. They then patrol 24 hours a day during the weekend to ensure that each flag remains standing. In 1951, the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts of St. Louis began placing flags on the 150,000 graves at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery as an annual Good Turn, a practice that continues to this day. More recently, beginning in 1998, on the Saturday before the observed day for Memorial Day, the Boys Scouts and Girl Scouts place a candle at each of approximately 15,300 grave sites of soldiers buried at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park on Marye’s Heights (the Luminaria Program). And in 2004, Washington D.C. held its first Memorial Day parade in over 60 years.

To help re-educate and remind Americans of the true meaning of Memorial Day, the “National Moment of Remembrance” resolution was passed on Dec 2000 which asks that at 3 p.m. local time, for all Americans “To voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a Moment of remembrance and respect, pausing from whatever they are doing for a moment of silence or listening to ‘Taps.’

The Moment of Remembrance is a step in the right direction to returning the meaning back to the day. What is needed is a full return to the original day of observance. Set aside one day out of the year for the nation to get together to remember, reflect and honor those who have given their all in service to their country.

But what may be needed to return the solemn, and even sacred, spirit back to Memorial Day is for a return to its traditional day of observance. Many feel that when Congress made the day into a three-day weekend in with the National Holiday Act of 1971, it made it all the easier for people to be distracted from the spirit and meaning of the day. As the VFW stated in its 2002 Memorial Day address: “Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt, this has contributed greatly to the general public’s nonchalant observance of Memorial Day.”

On January 19, 1999 Senator Inouye introduced bill S 189 to the Senate which proposes to restore the traditional day of observance of Memorial Day back to May 30th instead of “the last Monday in May”. On April 19, 1999 Representative Gibbons introduced the bill to the House (H.R. 1474). The bills were referred the Committee on the Judiciary and the Committee on Government Reform.

So, the next time you visit a cemetery (if you ever do), take a look around and notice the living among the dead. You might realize that cemeteries – while useful as resting places for the dead – also are useful places to meet among the living.

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Posted in Cemeteries, Death & Dying, Death Practices, Graveyard Etiquette, History of Funerals, Talking with Children, Traditions | 1 Comment »

Veterans Cemeteries and Their Origins

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Congress enacted legislation authorizing the purchase of land to be used as national cemeteries on 17 July 1862, during the Civil War. Fourteen cemeteries were established shortly after this legislation. Fourteen national cemeteries were established that first year, including one in Sharpsburg, Md., where 4,476 Union soldiers were laid to rest after the one-day Battle of Antietam. By comparison, approximately 3,000 American, British and Canadian fighters died on June 6, 1944, during the invasion of Normandy.

After the Civil War, army crews were sent to seek Union soldiers’ remains to reinter them in these national cemeteries. By 1870, almost 300,000 Union soldiers’ remains had been buried in 73 national cemeteries.  Most of the cemeteries were located in the Southeast, near the battlefields and campgrounds of the Civil War, but almost half of the Union soldiers buried there are unknown. Confederate soldiers who were buried in federal cemeteries were primarily those who had died in Union prison camps. By 1873, all honorably discharged veterans became eligible for burial in national cemeteries, however.

In 1923, Congress established the American Battle Monuments Commission, an independent agency responsible for maintaining burial grounds in foreign countries for U.S. armed forces members who die overseas.  The commission maintains 24 American military cemeteries as well as monuments and memorials.

In the 1930s, new national cemeteries were established to serve veterans living in metropolitan areas such as New York, Baltimore, Minneapolis, San Diego, San Francisco and San Antonio.  Others associated with battlefields such as Gettysburg and Antietam were transferred from Army control to the National Park Service because of their historical significance.

In 1973, Congress authorized the transfer of 82 national cemeteries from the Department of the Army to the Veterans Administration, now the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  Joining with 21 VA cemeteries located at hospitals and nursing homes, the National Cemetery System comprised 103 cemeteries after the transfer.

On Nov. 11, 1998, congressional legislation changed the name of the National Cemetery System (NCS) to the National Cemetery Administration (NCA). Today, there are 141 national cemeteries and the NCA operates 125 of them. Two national cemeteries – Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. – are still administered by the Army.  Fourteen national cemeteries continue to be maintained by the Department of the Interior’s National Park Service.

More than three million people, including veterans of every war and conflict – from the Revolutionary War to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan – are buried in VA’s national cemeteries, which have a total of more than 17,000 acres of land from Hawaii to Maine and from Alaska to Puerto Rico.

The Veterans Millennium Health Care and Benefits Act of 1999 required the VA to establish six additional national cemeteries in areas of the United States in which the need for burial space is greatest. Those areas are: Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; Miami, Florida; Sacramento, California; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Fort Sill National Cemetery near Oklahoma City opened for interments in 2001, the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies near Pittsburgh, Pa. and the Great Lakes National Cemetery near Detroit opened in 2005, the Georgia National Cemetery, and the Sacramento Valley VA National Cemetery opened in 2006, the South Florida VA National Cemetery near Miami, opened in 2007.

The National Cemetery Act of 2003 authorizes VA to establish new national cemeteries to serve veterans in the areas of Bakersfield, Calif.; Birmingham, Ala.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Sarasota County, Fla.; southeastern Pennsylvania; and Columbia-Greenville, S.C. All six areas have veteran populations exceeding 170,000, which is the threshold VA has established for new national cemeteries.

If you visit the National Cemetery Administration site, you can find a cemetery through a map or search for a relative through their Nationwide Gravesite Locator.

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Posted in About Tombstones, Cemeteries | 2 Comments »

Uneasy About Embalming

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Embalming, as an art and a practice, began in ancient Egypt as mummification, and has grown throughout the centuries to become a necessity at times, a blasphemy to some and a horror to others. Embalming, in most modern cultures, is the art and science of temporarily preserving human remains to forestall decomposition and to make them suitable for display at a funeral. According to Wikipedia:

“Contemporary embalming methods advanced markedly during the American Civil War, which once again involved many servicemen dying far from home, and their family wishing them returned for local burial. Dr. Thomas Holmes received a commission from the Army Medical Corps to embalm the corpses of dead Union officers to return to their families. Military authorities also permitted private embalmers to work in military-controlled areas.”

While the Wikipedia entry marks the American Civil War as a time of great advancement in embalming, this practice still had a long way to go. Arsenic often was used as embalming fluid, which was later found to contaminate groundwater. And, it wasn’t until 1867, two years after the end of that war, that the German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann discovered formaldehyde, whose preservative properties were soon discovered and which became the foundation for modern methods of embalming.

In fact, embalmers often had a nasty reputation among northerners and southerners during the American Civil War. The following account is from the book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” by Drew Gilpin Faust:

The U.S. Army was deluged with anguished protests from families of dead soldiers who believed they had been cheated by embalmers operating near the battlefront. An officer at City Point, Virginia, protested to Inspector James A. Hardie in 1864 that “scarcely a week passes that I do not receive complaints against one or another of these embalmers…[They] are regarded by the medical department of the army generally as an unmitigated nuisance…the whole systems as practiced here is one of pretension, swindling, and extortion.” In 1863, a case was lodged against Hutton & Williams, “EMBALMERS OF THE DEAD” in Washington. Hutton was imprisoned and the company’s records were seized. The suit alleged that the pair regularly recovered and embalmed soldiers without permission and then demanded payment from grieving families, threatening to disinter or refuse to return the bodies of their conditions were not met.

In the fall of 1864 Timothy Dwight of New York pursued a grievance with secretary of war Stanton against Dr. Richard Burr, a prominent Washington embalmer, claiming that Burr was guilty of extortion for preying upon him in his distress after “the loss of a most excellent Boy.” Burr defended his fee of one hundred dollars to the provost marshal, saying his employees has risked their lives recovering the body from near the picket line and then carrying it several hundred yards under fire. He had then disinfected the body “by means of my embalming fluid and charcoal” and enclosed it in a zinc coffin, sealed it, and shipped it – clearly warranting, he insisted, his charges. On January 9, 1865, General Ulysses Grant responded to the chorus of grievances by withdrawing all embalmers’ permits and ordering them beyond the lines. The distances separating the dead and their loved ones nevertheless continued to encourage embalming, in spite of great uneasiness about the practice and widespread hostility toward its practitioners.

If you feel uneasy about embalming, remember this: Regardless of whether embalming is performed, the type of burial or entombment, and the materials used – such as wood or metal caskets and vaults – the body of the deceased eventually decomposes. Modern embalming is done to delay decomposition so that funeral services may take place or for the purpose of shipping the remains to a distant place for disposition. Many states do not require embalming to take place if the body is not traveling a long distance, but the body must be buried within a certain time frame if you decide to bypass this process.

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Posted in Death & Dying, Funeral Arrangements, History of Funerals, Traditions | 2 Comments »