DEATH AND DYING

At a time when illness and death were understood to be the result not of germs but of imbalances in the body, and preferred treatments included bleeding and purging via induced vomiting and bowel movements, death was a common part of life. Life expectancy at birth for white Americans probably ranged from between thirty-five and forty-five years, compared to about seventy-five in the United States in the early 2000s. For African Americans and Native Americans, the reality was harsher. Among slaves and free blacks, life expectancy probably was ten to fifteen years below that of their white neighbors. Native Americans, especially in the West, continued to suffer from the catastrophic mortality that had followed from contact with Old World diseases.

rituals of death

In a world of frequent and unpredictable death, rituals of death provided comfort and guidance for Americans in their times of loss. Around 1800, these rituals underwent significant changes. Among the white, Protestant populations, rituals emphasizing preparation, resignation, and memory were especially prominent. Preparation was essential for every soul, since the time of death was uncertain, and a good Christian needed to be ready at his or her moment of judgment to die well. Dying well meant being in control of one's last moments and accepting the inevitable calmly. The early Puritans placed special emphasis on preparation but also believed most were nevertheless damned. By the 1750s a gentler theology offered more reassurance of salvation (especially for children), making the moment of death easier. Resignation to God's will, not always easy to achieve in practice, taught the necessity to accept one's loss and temper one's grief. Rituals of memory were also important, whether through letters and diary entries, funeral sermons, or gravestones.

The circumstances surrounding a person's death determined which particular rituals would receive emphasis. The death of a newborn rarely required the same emotional expression as that of a spouse. Sudden deaths might call forth more extensive periods of grieving than when a family was able to prepare in the face of a lingering illness. Epidemics, in which numerous citizens died, often in spectacularly unpleasant circumstances, were known to have disrupted normal rituals. Some historians have interpreted death rituals as part of the cultural elites' efforts to establish control over the common people, and have provided evidence of transgressions against the norms by common folk aimed at subverting the elite's authority.

Around 1800 major changes in the rituals associated with death occurred for Americans and other parts of Western society. The French historian Philippe Ariès identified a shift from "One's own death," with an emphasis on dying well, to "Thy death," with an emphasis on the loss to survivors. American historians have defined the change as involving the rise of romanticism and emotion, or a shift from a "prospective" concern with salvation after death to a "retrospective" stress on the life just lived. Gravestones were no longer made of dark stone but were instead made of white marble. Although the shape of the marker remained in the form of a tablet, skulls or soul effigies reminding one of death were replaced by a willow and/or urn expressing loss. A typical epitaph that before 1800 might have warned "prepare for death and follow me," later came to lament "dearest Mother, thou hast left us." Funeral sermons, which often warned listeners of the need for preparation, maintained their basic form into the nineteenth century but by 1830 were being replaced by memorial biographies celebrating the life of the deceased.

african american and native american variations

The dominant Protestant culture affected, but did not completely control, rituals followed by African Americans and Native Americans. Students of slavery have noted the continuity of African cultural preferences in slave funerals well into the nineteenth century. The funeral is a central part of African culture, needed to maintain a proper balance between the living and the dead. African patterns repeated in America include: processions with emotional outpourings, decoration of graves with broken crockery used by the deceased, and "double" funerals separating burial and memorial activities. In his narrative of his life as a slave around 1805, Charles Ball noted that African-born slaves believed they would return to Africa and their families when they died and that they sought to provide grave goods to facilitate the journey. American-born slaves, by contrast, stressed a happy life in heaven based on their Christian faith, with wicked slaves and cruel masters suffering separate punishment. According to Ball, slaves who committed

suicide were denied even the few Christian rituals granted to slaves under normal circumstances. Masters also tried to limit the size and timing of slave funerals, fearing large gatherings of emotionally distraught bondsmen and -women as potentially disruptive. At times of resistance, masters mutilated the corpses of rebellious slaves, drawing on fears based in African culture that the soul of a person who died unnaturally, or who was not properly buried, would be doomed to wander. Both free blacks in the Northern cities and slaves on plantations were buried in segregated grounds. Burial societies among African Americans were among the first social institutions formed by recently freed slaves.

Native American death customs were substantially different from Europeans' at first contact. Indians were often buried upright, in a flexed position, facing west, with grave goods intended to ease their journey to the afterlife. Seventeenth-century letters from Jesuit missionaries to France describe elaborate celebrations among Northern Woodland peoples in which the remains of all who had died in the previous twelve years were disinterred for reburial in a common grave. The Iroquois nations incorporated condolence ceremonies in their public political relations and made use of "mourning wars" to rebalance losses from deaths in war. By 1750 some Native Americans had converted to Christianity, adopting the death customs of Europeans. Even those who did not convert might incorporate European trade goods into the funeral bundle, or bury bodies lying down flat. Old World diseases continued to cause disastrous epidemics, during which normal death customs were abandoned.

See alsoCemeteries and Burial; Health and Disease; Monuments and Memorials .

bibliography

Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Translated by Patricia M. Ranum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Axtell, James. "Last Rites: The Acculturation of Native Funerals in Colonial North America." In The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America. Oxford, U.K., and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Isenberg, Nancy, and Andrew Burstein, eds. Mortal Remains: Death in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Ludwig, Allan I. Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650–1815. 3rd ed. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press published by University Press of New England, 1999.

Roediger, David R. "And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death, and Heaven in the Slave Community, 1700–1865." Massachusetts Review 22 (1981): 163–183.

Stannard, David E. The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Wells, Robert V. Facing the "King of Terrors": Death and Society in an American Community, 1750–1990. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Robert V. Wells