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The Agrarian Dispute: The Expropriation of American-Owned Rural Land in Postrevolutionary Mexico

America had a “death-embracing” one (4). For nineteenth-century Americans, the moment of death was idealized and didactic. Rooted in evangelical, classical, and romantic traditions, this American culture of death created an ethos that made it easier for Americans “to kill and to be killed” when the time came (2). Schantz finds this fascination with death throughout antebellum print literature and visual culture. The book is a series of discrete but related essays examining different aspects of this culture of death, including antebellum notions of bodily resurrection and heaven; the rural cemetery movement; sentimental “death poetry”; perceptions of death and especially suicide in slave narratives; and visual representations of death in lithographs, photography, and painting. Schantz, a professor of history at Hendrix College, is at his best when unpacking layers of meaning from specific texts or images. His analysis of memorial lithography and photography is particularly excellent, and his contention that the famous battlefield photography of Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and others was in fact quite conventional (i.e., guided by antebellum death photography and idealized conceptions of the corpse) is convincing and important. Given their cultural background and familiarity with such images, Civil War Americans were far less shocked by these carefully composed battlefield scenes than we might think. Each of the chapters works well on its own, but Schantz sometimes runs into trouble when trying to connect this antebellum culture of death to the Civil War. When talking about photography, lithography, and poetry, Schantz can demonstrate the carryovers between the antebellum period and the war years. But when discussing the impact that perceptions of death had on individuals and their activities during the war, his chosen sources simply do not allow him to make those direct links. Instead, he is forced to rely on statements such as “the belief in the reality of a heaven . . . may have been powerfully meaningful” to soldiers (61), or “this robust vision of a glorious life beyond death . . . must have possessed great significance for the Civil War generation” and “likely served to insulate” them from the carnage (67). The repetition of this type of speculative, conditional language in each chapter unnecessarily weakens the power of Schantz’s arguments. To make direct connections between this antebellum death culture and actual individual behavior, Schantz would have to examine Civil War letters, diaries, and other personal sources to show how soldiers and civilians interpreted the omnipresence of death around them. But these are not Schantz’s sources; nor is this really his project. Rather than trying to assert these links at every turn, it would have been better to have included an extended conclusion, where a certain degree of speculation is expected, to make his overall case for the significance that these ideas and perceptions of death had for the war generation. Such an approach, I believe, would have enabled Schantz to present his arguments even more forcibly. In any case, the overall point Schantz raises in this book—that ideas matter in history—is an important one. He challenges the general and the specialized reader alike to consider that perhaps the explanation for the Civil War’s bloodiness and the willingness of Americans to accept that bloodshed lies not entirely with changed weapon technology, outdated tactics, or blundering generals, but rather with the mindset and cultural baggage that nineteenth-century Americans brought with them to war, a mindset that made it possible to dispense and absorb death in ways and for reasons that we today have difficulty understanding.