The Last Full Measure of Devotion

"Americans viewed death in the mid-19th century through the lens of evangelical Protestantism, with its focus on heaven as a real place where people went in their real bodies after dying. Admission to heaven required not just living a good life but also dying what was known as 'the good death.' Dying soldiers--and anxious family members--worried about this, because the devil tempted the dying with despair and disbelief. If wives were going to see their dead husbands in heaven someday, the dying had to follow what Faust calls 'a checklist': The dying man should express an awareness of his impending fate and a willingness to accept it; he should restate his belief in God and in his own salvation; he should leave messages for 'those who should have been at his side.' Last words were important evidence of a good death. Before the war, men generally died surrounded by wives and children, who awaited and carefully noted their last words. But if you died on the battlefield, your fellow soldiers bore the responsibility of recording your last words and conveying them to your family. Those deprived of learning their loved ones' last words remained anxious for the rest of their lives about whether they would see their husbands and sons in heaven."

Jon Wiener reviews Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War in the Los Angeles Times.

And Richard Wightman Fox adds a review in Slate.

--as does Eric Foner in The Nation.