This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Drew Gilpin Faust (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 2008

An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.

During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. The eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.

Faust details the logistical challenges involved when thousands were left dead, many with their identities unknown, on the fields of places like Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. She chronicles the efforts to identify, reclaim, preserve, and bury battlefield dead, the resulting rise of undertaking as a profession, the first widespread use of embalming, the gradual emergence of military graves registration procedures, the development of a federal system of national cemeteries for Union dead, and the creation of private cemeteries in the South that contributed to the cult of the Lost Cause. She shows, too, how the war victimized civilians through violence that extended beyond battlefields—from disease, displacement, hardships, shortages, emotional wounds, and conflicts connected to the disintegration of slavery.

Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, and nurses, of northerners and southerners, slaveholders and freedpeople, of the most exalted and the most humble are brought together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War’s most fundamental and widely shared reality.

Were he alive today, This Republic of Suffering would compel Walt Whitman to abandon his certainty that the “real war will never get in the books.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Battle is the dramatic centerpiece of Civil War history; this penetrating study looks instead at the somber aftermath. Historian Faust (Mothers of Invention) notes that the Civil War introduced America to death on an unprecedented scale and of an unnatural kind—grisly, random and often ending in an unmarked grave far from home. She surveys the many ways the Civil War generation coped with the trauma: the concept of the Good Death—conscious, composed and at peace with God; the rise of the embalming industry; the sad attempts of the bereaved to get confirmation of a soldier's death, sometimes years after war's end; the swelling national movement to recover soldiers' remains and give them decent burials; the intellectual quest to find meaning—or its absence—in the war's carnage. In the process, she contends, the nation invented the modern culture of reverence for military death and used the fallen to elaborate its new concern for individual rights. Faust exhumes a wealth of material—condolence letters, funeral sermons, ads for mourning dresses, poems and stories from Civil War–era writers—to flesh out her lucid account. The result is an insightful, often moving portrait of a people torn by grief. Photos. (Jan. 10)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Those who fret over the state of American universities will embrace this history by Drew Gilpin Faust. Academics appreciate how Faust explains so many social and cultural changes by recentering the story of the war on its massive toll in lives: the estimated 2 percent who died, or 620,000, would be equivalent to 6 million today. She also breaks new ground by reexamining the relationship of the war to modern institutions like the welfare state. Yet Faust constructs This Republic of Suffering in a way that will appeal to every readerâ€"from the Civil War buff to the casual nonfiction reader. Some critics were a little queasy about the book’s level of detail, both in describing death and the lives of its victims. But as more than one reviewer pointed out, for a nation at war, such writing and such reading are a duty.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (January 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037540404X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375404047
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.3 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (110 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #262,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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256 of 266 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "the dead, the dead, the dead--our dead--all, all, all, finally dear to me...", January 7, 2008

By 

Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Hardcover)

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.

75 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A powerful work on death in the Civil War, February 1, 2008

By 

Steven A. Peterson (Hershey, PA (Born in Kewanee, IL)) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Hardcover)

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. . . .

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The CW from a different perspective, June 7, 2008

By 

Shannon Gaw (Roswell, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Hardcover)

"The Republic of Suffering" began with a focus on death and dying in the Civil War for the soldiers, their families, and civilians. It put forth some interesting commentary on the Victorian concept of the "good death" and how it influenced the soldiers' preparation for and acceptance of their fate. The text offered insight into the minds and attitudes of the time as well as some traditions and practices not explicitly discussed in detail in other CW books.

Halfway through, the author seemed to leave the battlefield and meander off into a history of the mortuary business and short bios and commentary of late 19th century authors like Dickenson and Melville. I found the chapters "Accounting" and "Numbering", which discussed the bureaucracy of death from the military and government perspective, dry and disjointed. That's not to say there weren't points of interest, but the second half of the book just could not keep my attention on an ongoing basis.

The reader will come away disturbed by the detail on the carnage and the paucity of information available to the families fretting over loved ones fighting the battles. They will also gain knowledge of the influence the war had on shaping the modern practices of handling death. "The Republic of Suffering" has its place in augmenting one's understanding of the Civil War. I struggled between three and four stars and would have given a three-and-a-half if I could have.