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By Alec

As I read Faust’s article “The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying”, I began to pick up on a simple, yet intriguing sentiment that is unites the scores of letters sent to the families of fallen Civil War soldiers. Whether the author was a comrade or a surgeon or the soldier himself, and whether the recipient was the soldier’s spouse, parents, or other next-of-kin, all of the letters Faust cites depict a desperate attempt to rationalize the irrational, to make sense of a senseless death.

Since my final project for this class is concerned with early American love letters, I was naturally drawn toward making comparisons between the romantic notes I’ve been collecting and the much more somber correspondence in Faust’s essay. Though in subject matter they could hardly be more different – one celebrates life while the other bemoans its sudden disappearance – I think love letters and letters of consolation share a particular goal: to somehow compensate for and minimize the geographical separation between the sender and the recipient.

Love letters between spatially distant lovers often aim to make the distance feel more bearable. They contain proclamations of affection, updates on health and daily life, advice and anxieties, and countless other efforts to maintain intimacy. The letters in Faust’s article struck me as often performing the same general function, though in this case the distance between the bereaved and his mourners is an insurmountable, irreparable one. Still, when the companion of a fallen soldier wrote home describing the circumstances and nature of his comrade’s death, the aim seems to be to diminish the geographical distance between the homefront and the battlefront by offering the family knowledge they would have otherwise been robbed of entirely.

Avery pointed out in her post last week that the Pony Express Google Doodle offers a modern generation a way of remembering (or misremembering, one may argue) an event we did not actually experience. I think that letters sent to the families of slain soldiers perform a similar function, in that they offer their readers a way of memorializing and experiencing a deathbed they were unable to tend to. These “false memories” are, by necessity, incomplete and often incorrect, but they’re better than nothing, and I’d imagine that many of their authors would have happily traded them for the horrors they were actually forced to witness.

Drew Gilpin Faust. “The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying” in The Journal of Southern History. Vol. 67, No. 1 (2001)