This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust

the physical devastation of battle. And yet death ultimately remained, as it must, unintelligible, a “riddle,” as Herman Melville wrote, “of which the slain / Sole solvers are.” 58 Narratives of the Good Death could not annul the killing that war required. Nor could they erase the unforgettable scenes of battlefield carnage that made soldiers question both the humanity of those slaughtered like animals and the humanity of those who had wreaked such devastation.

CHAPTER 2

    KILLING
    â€œThe Harder Courage”
    â€œI am aposed to one man killing another [but]…I shall fight.”
    THEOPHILUS PERRY
    T olstoy once wrote that what fascinated him about war was “its reality”—not the strategies of generals or the maneuvers of troops but “the actual killing.” He was “more interested,” he explained, “to know in what way and under the influence of what feelings one soldier kills another than to know how the armies were arranged at Austerlitz and Borodino.” 1 Killing is battle’s fundamental instrument and purpose. And in the Civil War it was killing, not dying, as Orestes Brownson observed in 1862, that demanded “the harder courage,” for it required the more significant departure from soldiers’ understandings of themselves as human beings and, in mid-nineteenth-century America, as Christians.
    Most Civil War combatants were very like one another—metaphorically, if not literally, brothers, in the oft-repeated trope of the war. When racial difference eroded this common identity, killing became easier, as in the many reported instances of atrocities against black soldiers, such as the infamous 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow. But in most circumstances and for most individuals during the war, killing posed a problem to be overcome. In this respect Civil War soldiers were hardly different from their fellow combatants in other wars. Studies of warriors in ancient times, in Napoleonic armies, in World Wars I and II, and in the Falklands confirm the judgment of Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, U.S. Army Retired, specialist in military psychology and former West Point faculty member, that “man is not by nature a killer.” Indeed, he often resists even firing his weapon. 2
    But just as human beings die differently in different times and places, they come to kill differently too. Human reluctance to murder expresses itself within a particular historical and cultural moment. Civil War killing, like death more generally, required work—intellectual and psychological effort to address religious and emotional constraints, as well as adaptation to the ways this particular war’s technologies, tactics, and logistics shaped the experience of combat.
    The first challenge for Civil War soldiers to surmount was the Sixth Commandment. Dying exemplified Christian devotion, as Jesus had demonstrated on the cross, but killing violated fundamental biblical law. As one Texas recruit explained his fears, fighting in battle seemed “the most…blasphemous thing perhaps on earth.” Sermons and religious publications North and South invoked and explored the traditional “just war” doctrine, emphasizing that killing was not merely tolerated but required in God’s service. There is “nothing in the demands of a just and defensive warfare at variance with the spirit and duties of Christianity,” an oft-reprinted tract for soldiers emphasized. Citing a variety of Old Testament texts, the
Confederate Baptist
insisted that men were exempt from the commandment not to kill “when lawful war calls for the slaying of our country’s foes.” While southerners most often appealed to self-defense against invasion as the source of the war’s justness, they invoked as well the notion of divine sanction for a holy war in which they served as Confederate crusaders. Northerners just as avidly claimed God for their side as