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That history animates what might otherwise seem a morbidly inanimate subject, and Faust organizes her account around what she calls the "work of death." Fittingly, her chapter titles--gerunds all--remind us that human beings are active participants in death rather than passive victims of it: "Dying," "Killing," "Burying," "Naming," "Realizing," "Believing and Doubting," "Accounting," "Numbering," "Surviving." And in the Civil War, the "work" proved to be as destabilizing as it was massive.
To be sure, Americans of the antebellum decades were no strangers to death's ubiquity. Urbanization had increased mortality and morbidity and decreased life expectancy, especially in the Northeast. But having been reared in Christian traditions (the great majority were, at this point, Protestant), they also understood death as a social and spiritual process, as a reckoning and a transition, and so had been tutored in an idea of the "Good Death." Theologically rooted in what was known as the ars moriendi, or "the arts of dying," which provided rules of conduct (how to surrender one's soul, and resist the devil's temptations, and identify with Christ, and pray) since at least the fifteenth century, the "Good Death" would later find expression in sermons, religious tracts, and popular literature (Dickens, Thackeray, Stowe). By the mid-nineteenth century, it had become a feature of middle-class cultural practice more broadly, in which witness-bearing by family members proved central. After all, most Americans, especially middle- and upper-class Americans, died at home.
