Lizzi’s Reviews > This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War > Status Update

-black soldiers’ different justifications for death: retribution for suffering, win a place in the polity thru willingness to give up lives, sacrifice for their own people’s freedom
-many had concerns of this perpetuating a tradition of black victimhood
-black soldiers fought extra hard—for equality and citizenship, and bc Confederate troops singled them out and backed them into a corner w nothing to lose

-intimate battles made it difficult for many soldiers to fire weapons and kill
-snipers were morally condemned for killing of soldiers doing personal activities w/ dehumanization of victims and absence of guilt due to the physical distance
-Confederate soldiers found it especially hard to conceptualize armed black Union soldiers, seeing them as “slaves uprising launched by the federal gov’t against the south”

-finding ways to justify killing even with Christianity’s opposition to killing. Self-defense, Confederate “crusader”/sanction for a holy war, retribution and revenge for comrades’ death.
-the thrill: firing back at someone firing at you, escaping sense of victim hood through action against enemy, hunting enemies like sport for pleasure, “Pandora’s box” after realizing one’s power in killing.

-when faith wasn’t enough for Good Death, patriotism served as replacement
-deserter execution
-the war machine brainwashes soldiers to “want” to die in order to feed the system
-created higher meanings of death as a reassuring return to the 19th century’s domestic understanding of death

-sudden deaths departed from the Good Death, sparking “prepared unpreparedness”—anticipation and acceptance of one’s imminent death to restore sense of control
-recipes of ars moriendi in letters: willingness and readiness of death, Christian conviction and calmness in the last moments as evidence of going to heaven and future salvation, a soldier’s sanctified changed way of living

-dehumanization and dissociation of souls and body due to the amount of bodies
-more soldiers died of diseases than on battlefields.
-the Good Death and Christianity, glorification of death as coping mechanism
-last words, extension of life thru the process of death itself