ABSTRACT
An estimated 360,000 Union soldiers and 260,000 Confederates died in the Civil War, together totaling 620,000 casualties. As death shrouded both nations, the physical and emotional traditions previously established by survivors in response to death came to an end and new customs ensued. The war made way for original symbolism, both political and religious, with which survivors would interpret both mass and individual death. The war demanded complex, innovative ways to explain the dead, physically and spiritually, and these new systems of belief came at enormous cost. As Drew Gilpin Faust explains, “Americans had not just lost the dead; they had lost their own lives as they had understood them before the war” (268). Loss was inscribed into the daily routines of those living in Civil War America.
