The Sacred Remains

American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883

Gary Laderman

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780300143690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Death in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

When George Washington died in 1799, towns throughout the country commemorated the event with solemn processions featuring empty coffins. In contrast, after Abraham Lincoln's death in 1865, his body was transported around the North and displayed for more than two weeks, for by then corpses could be autopsied, drained of their blood, and beautified for the benefit of mourners. This absorbing book explores the changing attitudes toward death and the dead in northern Protestant communities during the nineteenth century. Gary Laderman offers insights into the construction of an "American way of death," illuminating the central role of the Civil War and tracing the birth of the funeral industry in the decades following the war.Drawing on medical histories, religious documents, personal diaries and letters, literature, painting, and photography, Laderman examines the cultural transformations that led to nationally organized death specialists, the practice of embalming, and the commodification of the corpse. These cultural changes included the development of liberal theology, which provided more spiritual views of heaven and the afterlife; the concern for health, which turned those who managed death toward more scientific treatment of bodies; and growing sentimentalism, which produced an increased desire to gaze upon the corpse or to take and keep death photographs. In particular Laderman focuses on the transforming effect of the Civil War, which presented so many Americans with dead relatives who needed to be recovered, viewed, and given a "proper burial."

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Living with the Dead in the Antebellum North
• George Washington's Invisible Corpse and the Beaver Hat
• 1 .Signs of Death
• 2.From the Place of Death to the Space of Burial
• 3 .Simplicity Lost: The Urban Model of Death
• 4 .The Great Escape
• 5. "The Law of Nature": Revisioning Mortality and the Natural Order
• 6 .Morbid Obsessions
• PART II. Death in the Civil War
• John Brown's Body and a Soldier's Experiences of Death on the Battlefield
• 7 .Death During Wartime
• 8 ."Let the Dead Bury the Dead": The Search for Closure
• 9. National Interests
• 10 ."Resurrection Days" and Redemptive Blood
• 11. Disenchantment with the Mortal Remains
• 12. Looking Death in the Face
• Epilogue. The Birth of the Death Industry
• Abraham Lincoln's Hallowed and Hollowed Body
• 13. The Business of Death in the Late Nineteenth Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index