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

•personal efforts to communicate info about soldiers’ status
•dog tags, pre-written letters, bible inscribed with name and address

•sanitary commissions size far exceeded Christian commission; more importance on modern warfare realism rather than sentimentalism
•sanitary commission created Hospital Directory which acted as communication agency for families about soldiers’ conditions

-embalming and the entire funeral industry started during civil war
-embalming as a way to “defy death” and grieve

-burials became impersonal due to higher volume of bodies as the war went on, often times the burden of finding and shipping the bodies back home fell on kin

-poor planning and organization of burials
-a lot of times responsibility for burying the dead fell on the victor side

-“killing was for black soldiers[…]the instrument of liberation; it was an act of personal empowerment and the vehicle of racial emancipation. To kill and to be[…]permitted to kill was ironically to claim a human right”
-self numbing/detachment to cope, think of self as machines. “Loss of feeling was at base a loss of self—a kind of living death that could make even survivors casualties of war”

-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