"A HERO'S DEATH IS A HAPPY DEATH"

From: "Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War" Gerald F. Linderman

“As George Stevens of the 77^th New York watched the ritual dismissal of a New Jersey officer caught in cowardice, he thought, “how much better it would have been to have fallen nobly on that field of battle, honored and lamented, than to live to be degraded and despised.”  A Wisconsin private wrote home that he 'would rather have been under ground, than to have been branded as a coward before the whole Reg’t'.

"An Indiana small-town soldier, Theodore F. Upson, told of his colonel’s confrontation with one of the regiments skulkers. “Get up . . .Cherry. Go to your Company and show yourself a man for once.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” “I will go, Colonel, since you insist, but I am sure if I go up there I shall be killed” “You had better be killed than have the reputation of a coward.” Cherry went up on the line and was killed instantly by a shot from a Confederate battery.

“But in the Civil War indiscipline was chronic, and without the power of the ideal of courage both to impel and compel men to combat, neither the Union nor the Confederate government could have mounted so comprehensive an effort.  In courage was the armies’ cohesiveness.

“If the good did die, they died good deaths.  The conviction early in the war, again reduced to the most direct terms of popular belief, was that the hero’s death was a happy death. As an infantryman in Lee’s army, Hunter watched from the heights above Fredericksburg the charge of the Union’s Irish Brigade.

 “As George Stevens of the 77^th New York watched the ritual dismissal of a New Jersey officer caught in cowardice, he thought, “how much better it would have been to have fallen nobly on that field of battle, honored and lamented, than to live to be degraded and despised.”  A Wisconsin private wrote home that he “would rather have been under ground, than to have been branded as a coward before the whole Reg’t.

"An Indiana small-town soldier, Theodore F. Upson, told of his colonel’s confrontation with one of the regiments skulkers. “Get up . . .Cherry. Go to your Company and show yourself a man for once.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” “I will go, Colonel, since you insist, but I am sure if I go up there I shall be killed” “You had better be killed than have the reputation of a coward.” Cherry went up on the line and was killed instantly by a shot from a Confederate battery.

"But in the Civil War indiscipline was chronic, and without the power of the ideal of courage both to impel and compel men to combat, neither the Union nor the Confederate government could have mounted so comprehensive an effort.  In courage was the armies’ cohesiveness.

"If the good did die, they died good deaths.  The conviction early in the war, again reduced to the most direct terms of popular belief, was that the hero’s death was a happy death."