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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library) Paperback – Illustrated, January 6, 2009
| Drew Gilpin Faust (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.
- Print length346 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateJanuary 6, 2009
- Dimensions5.19 x 0.75 x 8.03 inches
- ISBN-100375703837
- ISBN-13978-0375703836
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Extraordinary ... profoundly moving.” —Geoffrey C. Ward, The New York Times Book Review
“This Republic of Suffering is one of those groundbreaking histories in which a crucial piece of the past, previously overlooked or misunderstood, suddenly clicks into focus.” —Newsweek
“A shattering history of the war, focusing exclusively on death and dying—how Americans prepared for death, imagined it, risked it, endured it and worked to understand it.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Faust yanks aside the usual veil of history to look narrowly at life's intimate level for new perspectives from the past. She focuses on ordinary lives under extreme duress, which makes for compelling reading.” —USA Today
“Faust is particularly qualified to identify and explain the complex social and political implications of the changing nature of death as America’s internecine conflict attained its full dimensions.” —Ian Garrick Mason, San Francisco Chronicle
“Faust excels in explaining the era’s violent rhetoric and what went on in people’s heads.” —David Waldstreicher, The Boston Globe
“The beauty and originality of Faust’s book is that it shows how thoroughly the work of mourning became the business of capitalism, merchandised throughout a society.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
“Fascinating, innovative ... Faust returns to the task of stripping from war any lingering romanticism, nobility or social purpose.” —Eric Foner, The Nation
“Eloquent and imaginative, Ms. Faust’s book takes a grim topic–how America coped with the massive death toll from the Civil War–and makes it fresh and exciting.... [A] widely and justly praised scholarly history.” —Adam Begley, New York Observer
“This Republic of Suffering is a harrowing but fascinating read.” —Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor
“If you read only one book on the Civil War this year, make it this one.” –Kevin M. Levin, American History
“Having always kept the war in her own scholarly sights, Faust offers a compelling reassertion of its basic importance in society and politics alike.” —Richard Wrightman Fox, Slate
“[An] astonishing new book.” —Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun
“A moving work of social history, detailing how the Civil War changed perceptions and behaviors about death.... An illuminating study.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Penetrating ... Faust exhumes a wealth of material ... to flesh out her lucid account. The result is an insightful, often moving portrait of a people torn by grief.” —Publishers Weekly
“No other generation of Americans has encountered death on the scale of the Civil War generation. This Republic of Suffering is the first study of how people in both North and South coped with this uniquely devastating experience. How did they mourn the dead, honor their sacrifice, commemorate their memory, and help their families? Drew Gilpin Faust’s powerful and moving answers to these questions provide an important new dimension to our understanding of the Civil War.”
—James M. McPherson, author of This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War
“During the Civil War, death reached into the world of the living in ways unknown to Americans before or since. Drew Gilpin Faust follows the carnage in all its aspects, on and off the battlefield. Timely, poignant, and profound, This Republic of Suffering does the real work of history, taking us beyond the statistics until we see the faces of the fallen and understand what it was to live amid such loss and pain.”
—Tony Horowitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War
“Drew Gilpin Faust has used her analytical and descriptive gifts to explore how men and women of the Civil War generation came to terms with the conflict’s staggering human toll. Everyone who reads this book will come away with a far better understanding of why the war profoundly affected those who lived through it.”
—Gary W. Gallagher, author of The Confederate War
“Drew Faust’s brilliant new book, This Republic of Suffering, builds profoundly from the opening discussion of the Christian ideal of the good death to the last harrowing chapters on the exhumation, partial identification, reburial and counting of the Union dead. In the end one can only conclude, as the author does, that the meaning of the Civil War lies in death itself: in its scale, relentlessness, and enduring cultural effects. This is a powerful and moving book about our nation’s defining historical encounter with the universal human experience of death.”
—Stephanie McCurry, author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the political culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country
“Whitman was wrong; the real war did get into the books. This is a wise, informed, troubling book. This Republic of Suffering demolishes sentimentalism for the Civil War in a masterpiece of research, realism, and originality.”
—David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
About the Author
DREW GILPIN FAUST was president of Harvard University, where she also holds the Lincoln Professorship in History. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, she came to Harvard after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of five previous books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery Craven Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Illustrated edition (January 6, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 346 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375703837
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375703836
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 0.75 x 8.03 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #127,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #95 in American Civil War Biographies (Books)
- #157 in U.S. Civil War History
- #459 in Historical Study (Books)
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"The work of death," Faust writes, "was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking," which "shaped enduring national structures and commitments." While tackling the logistics of mass death in comprehensive detail, she also addresses the emotional and social ramifications on the home front. In eight chapters, accompanied by forty-eight pages of notes, the story shifts between battlefield and Victorian parlor, soldier and civilian. Faust's extensive use of first person accounts, and other primary sources, illuminates the human suffering behind the statistics: 2% of the nation's population died in uniform; more than 90% of injuries and death were caused by mini-balls; 300,000 bodies of Union soldiers were relocated to seventy-four newly-established national cemeteries after the war, and at least half of all dead soldiers remained unidentified.
When the Civil War began it was critical for both sides to prepare for the coming mortality, in part because the "miasma" of decaying bodies was still thought to pose a serious health threat. Commanding officers established cemeteries near military hospitals where bodies and amputated limbs called for speedy disposal. But the cemeteries were inadequate for the sheer numbers of dead and dying. Neither side could spare men for formal burial details or organized grave registration; soldiers were often buried where they fell, the places marked by wood panels scavenged from hardtack and ammunition boxes, and crossed fence rails served as makeshift grave markers. In Richmond, it wasn't unusual for the bodies of enlisted men to lie for days waiting interment while the bodies of officers were packed in charcoal and shipped to Washington where they would be enclosed in metal caskets and shipped North to their homes. A stopgap system of notification of kin, letters written by officers, comrades or medical attendants, was soon overwhelmed by the chaos of battle. Many families waited months, and sometimes years, for word of their loved ones.
Faust, Harvard's first female president and author of six books on Southern culture and the Civil War, was born in the Shenandoah Valley. She has a doctorate in Southern studies from the University of Pennsylvania. This book was conceived in 1996, following on the heels of her previous work "Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War." The reader will find few shortcomings in this balanced account of the Civil War and its aftermath. In fact, where Faust, perhaps, falls short in developing the 19th century concept of the "Good Death" and pervasive belief in an afterlife, Schantz's book ably fills the gap for any reader seeking a more exhaustive understanding of a time when the shadow of death fell over every home.
Faust takes her readers into homes and onto battlefields, North and South, and in the end brings us to stand in cemeteries where "row after row of humble identical markers . . . represent not so much the sorrow or particularity of a lost loved one as the enormous but unfathomable cost of the war." (249) Encompassing research in a broad range of disciplines including demographics, material culture, and thanatology, the resulting book strips away, as Eric Foner writes, "any lingering romanticism, nobility or social purpose" from war.
(p. 33) The question became how to balance “killing [as] battle’s fundamental instrument and purpose” with the “human reluctance to [essentially] murder” another human being. (p. 34) In her “work of death,” author Drew Gilpin Faust does not simply delineate the horrors of death during the Civil War, she attempts to uncover the “work” of dying. (p. xi)
At the heart of Faust’s book is the true human nature of those fighting in the metaphorical trenches. In the chapter entitled “Accounting,” readers find that despite untold numbers of dead littering the South in quantities unfathomable even by today’s standard, the human inclination to preserve dying with dignity outweighed, when possible, the immediacy of battle; there was without a doubt a “debt to the fallen.” (p. 211) The Civil War did not provoke a religious crisis - it reinforced what we already knew to be right with regard to not leaving another human being to die in an unmarked grave; his family never knowing what became of him, his heroism, the brutality his body endured, nor his soul having the right of passage the bible promised him. Faust notes that in particular instances military personnel took it upon themselves to keep detailed records of death and where soldiers were buried, far exceeding the military standard of the time; nor, frankly, the ability to simply keep up with the sheer numbers of dead- without which countless more souls would have been lost. Eventually, “widespread and continuing public discussion about the dead gradually articulated a set of principles that influenced military and legislative policy.” (p. 218) These exceptions speak to an innate human drive to preserve life, even among the chaos of war. Regardless of the fact Faust’s book is one comprised on the merits of war time death, there are glimmers of dignity that can not be ignored.
That being said, it should not be dismissed that Faust dedicates significant attention to the enthusiasm some men showed for killing, “the desire for retribution…almost elemental in its passion, overcoming reason and releasing the restraints of fear and moral inhibitions for soldiers who…witnessed the slaughter of their comrades.” (p.35) Some southern troops reveled in a job well done as they “rode over the battlefield, and enjoyed the sight of hundred[s] of dead Yankees.” (p. 37) If killing was a battle’s fundamental purpose were the troops wrong to take pleasure in appreciating what was then indeed victory; was there a difference between victory and being “carried away with the excitement & delight” of having murdered another human being? (p. 37)
This is not a question Faust specifically answers, rather she draws parallels between the human connection binding life and death, and our responses to killing under the auspices of bettering the same nation both armies were fighting for. Faust’s book is grim, appropriately so, the north and south lost almost the same equivalent of soldiers as they did in the Revolution through the Korean War combined. She very gently shows readers the toll all of that death took on the nation, and the lasting impact it has had, even today. To say it is a beautiful book might seem at first off putting, but that is exactly what is it.


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