This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

This is a powerful book that deals with one aspect of the Civil War in a very different context than normal--death. Many books speak of the sanguinary nature of the Civil War, death due to battlefield trauma as well as death due to disease, accident, and so on. But this book, written by Drew Gilpin Faust, addresses death on a much broader basis. As a result, this is a powerful work. One simple fact to begin: the number of Civil War soldiers who died is about equal to the number of American dead from the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and Korea combined. The focus of the book is briefly stated at the outset (Page xv): "Beginning with individuals' confrontation with death and dying, the book explores how those experiences transformed society, culture, and politics in what became a broader republic of shared suffering." Each chapter has a poignancy that is almost palpable. Chapter 1 focuses on the dying by soldiers. The effort to die a good death was one that manifest itself for many a soldier--Yankee and Rebel. One interesting issue--soldiers appeared to fear death by disease more than death in the heat of combat. Soldiers often carried letters to battle, containing their last words to families and loved ones in case they perished. This is an eye opening chapter. Chapter 2 deals with the other side of the coin--killing the enemy. Many were torn by their Biblical desire to avoid killing others versus their duty to try to do so. Killing others sometimes changed troops, numbing human feeling and producing aftereffects. Chapter 3 addresses burying the dead. After battles, there was often little time and the dead were buried in mass graves, often with no identification (no dog tags then). Soldiers felt an intense desire to decently bury the dead--but this was often more easily said than done. Chapter 4 deals with a related issue, naming those who died. Without identification, large numbers of dead soldiers were buried in anonymous graves. Even if reburied with more dignity, the names were still absent. The chapter addresses many issues, including the effort by loved ones to find the remains of their dead soldier(s). Other chapters deal with how people tried to make sense of the death of their loved ones; the nature of mourning; the relationship of death and religion; obligations to the dead; wondering how many actually died. A harsh truth (Page 267): "Nearly half the dead remained unknown, the fact of their deaths supposed but undocumented. . . ." And, the final sentence in the work (Page 271): "We still work to live with the riddle that they--the Civil War dead and their survivors alike--had to solve so long ago." A powerful book, one that will disturb many as they read it. But it also illuminates a little told side of the Civil War. Strongly recommended. . . .

Drew Faust's "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War" offers a look into the Civil War that is truly unique -- the impact of death as a phenomenon upon individuals (whose reactions ranged from horror and refusal of participating in killing to gleeful celebrations of killing), and upon America as a society and culture. I don't believe there is a significant aspect of the subject left unexplored; Ms. Faust even discusses its effects upon the poetry of Emily Dickinson as well as the creation of National Cemeteries and of the rise of embalming as a practical business. The unprecedented level of carnage sent shock waves through the American populace for decades afterwards, and even helped define inter-racial and inter-gender relations. "This Republic of Suffering" is obviously not your standard Civil War history, but it is a book that nonetheless should be of great interest to any serious, thoughtful student of that conflict.

Ms. Faust has exhaustedly researched a little-explored area of the Civil War. In the opening chapter, she utilizes numbers to illustrate the impact of death upon the American Republic -- for another war to have the reach that the Civil War did in its time, it would need to have 6 million dead today. At the onset of the war, neither the North nor the South had prepared for such massive causalities over four years. No system existed to identify, transport or bury the corpses. No one asked, "What do you do with 2,000 dead bodies, some from the other side?" Ms. Faust answers those questions in an informative, readable style.

Faust's book addresses her topic with precision, rigor, and, what's more, innovation. It's a fascinating read, filled with well-articulated, sophisticated arguments. These are clearly the result of studious research, and exhibit a great deal of respect for the author's historical subjects--qualities too rarely seen in scholarly work today.

So wrote a stunned and anguished Walt Whitman as he and the rest of the nation struggled to deal with the incredible carnage of the Civil War. In this eagerly awaited (certainly by me!) book, brilliant Civil War scholar Drew Gilpin Faust documents the social, religious, and psychological coping mechanisms adopted by Civil War America. It's difficult for us today to appreciate just how deadly the Civil War was. The numbers are staggering--620,000 dead soldiers, at least 50,000 dead civilians, an estimated 6 million pounds of human and animal carcasses at Gettysburg, etc--can't convey the concrete horror of a nation living day after day with the shock, disorientation, and despair caused by the bloodiest war in the country's history. The war years surely did transform the nation into a "republic of suffering" (a phrase coined by Frederick Law Olmsted). Faust argues that the nation tried to keep its head above water by, for example, ritualizing the final moments of wounded soldiers to make them more compatible with mid-nineteenth century models of a "good death"; justifying increasing levels of battlefield slaughter by invoking God, patriotic duty, and justice (which frequently was vengeance); trying to identify and bury bodies of the slain in such a way as to preserve some semblance of their humanity, despite the horrible maiming many of them suffered; creating public and private rituals of mourning; holding "the enemy" accountable for the carnage; and keeping the memory of the slain alive after the war (feeding into Lost Cause sensibilities on the one hand and Bloody Shirt ones on the other). To a certain extent, as Faust acknowledges, similar kinds of coping mechanisms are adopted by Americans during any war. But context determines precisely how these mechanisms will be enacted, and she does an excellent job of making sense of how they manifested in Civil War America. At the end of the day, Americans who lived through the Civil War needed to find a way to normalize their existences both during the actual conflict and afterwards, and to find some overarching meaning to the death and suffering that would justify the sacrifices. Given the war's unprecedented carnage, the task was as pressing as it was, ultimately, impossible. But in the aftermath of the war, the dead became, in the eyes of popular mythology, the sacrificial humus in which a newer, unified, and stronger nation would rise. Glorification of a nation's war dead may be inevitable. But it can also be a dangerous justification of future wars. Faust's thought-provoking, sensitive, and ground-breakinig book will become a standard work. It's much more than a book about the Civil War. It's also a meditation on the meaning of war and the human need to somehow infuse meaning into an enterprise that often seems so bleakly wasteful and tragically brutal. Faust's book richly deserves at least the Lincoln Prize. Personally, I'd like to see it honored with a National Book Award.