This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (National Book Award Finalist)

By Drew Gilpin Faust

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation.

An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half 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.

With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9780307268587

Drew Gilpin Faust

Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. A former dean and university president, she is the author of several books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize. She and her husband live in Massachusetts.

Reviews for This Republic of Suffering

[ericcostello-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An extremely grim, if absorbing, book. Faust takes a look at how both sides in the American Civil War treated the issue of their dead; he focuses mostly, though not exclusively, on the dead soldiers. The book marches through a logical progression, to wit: Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Realizing, Believing and Doubting, Accounting, and Numbering. One of the strongest things I got out of the book is how the war changed the way the United States dealt with its war dead; granted, the other wars previous to this (and subsequent to it) did not have the ferocious levels of dead that the Civil War did, it still strikes one that it was not just societal changes that made the treatment of the dead different. Technology, both in the killing and the recovery of the dead, had changed much. (After all, the railroads could send the boys to war, and bring their remains back.) The selection of illustrations is well-chosen. For the most part, Faust avoids trendy buzzwords in historiography (though gender stuff crops up a few times). Another thing, while I think of it, that crops up is how well Walt Whitman comes off in the book. The level of care he gave to wounded and dying soldiers says much about the man's basic decency; and of course, it enriched his own understanding and writing. A number of other reviews comment on how grim the book is. Undeniable, given the subject matter. If you can stick it, though, it's a good read. Recommended.

[msaucier818 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is almost impossible to rate. I will begin by saying it is the least favorite book I have ever read. That is not to say it was bad. It is very well written, exhaustive in its coverage of the topic of death in the Civil War, and deserving of the accolades it received when it was first published. However, for me, the subject matter was incredibly depressing. And its negative tone was relentless. I am sure in academic circles this book is essential reading. Also, as a history teacher, I know will use the idea of the individual death this book focues on in my classes. To summarize, I could never recommend this book to read to anyone not in a graduate program dealing with the Civil War.

[michaelbartley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

the book exams how both the north and the south deal with the huge number of dead in the civil war. in a word not very well! the number was overwhelming for each side. what interested me that before the war there was the concept of the good death. most people died at home surrounded by family and friends. the good death was when all would feel a sense of peace, that the person that died had lived a good life. that he or she was a important member of the family and the community. death was going to god's community. the civil war changed that. the solider died many miles from their home. they were not surrounded by family or community. often no knew they had been killed. perhaps if lucky members of their unit offer some comfort but it was not uncommon no one knew. the war changed how our nation viewed death. it became dark, lonely, and frightening.

[lamour_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One might say "another book about the Civil War, why?" but this is a remarkable effort. Gilpin looks at death in mid19th Century America with the focus on the Civil War and how the country handled the 600,000 plus deaths that came about because of the war. She organized the volume in chapters that focused on the idea of dying, the rules of burial, how to mark graves when you do not know the name of the soldier you are burying, the impact of all these deaths on the civilian population, what did the country owe to all these dead men in terms of recognition of where their final resting place was and the cost to the country and its people by the loss of all these men.I approached this volume anticipating reading a scholarly tome but while she conducted great amounts of research and the notes and bibliography are immense, this turned out to be a page turner for me. Gilpin fills the pages with anecdotes from diaries, newspapers and memoires to illustrate her points.

[richard7920 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well written and presented but -- just too damned depressing. An account of the costs of our national nightmare. Not a tome to snuggle up with on a cold rainy day.

[scarylullabies · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An excellent and compelling piece of non-fiction, and a must-read for anyone working in death care in America.

[maura853 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent scholarship -- and an interesting lens to take a look at how the experience of the Civil War shaped the America that emerged from all that death and destruction, and the attitudes of Americans who were yet unborn.

[montzaleew · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust is an eye-opening, informative, and sober look at life up close and personal. When I thought of the Civil War I had never really thought of all the details of what it would be like other than tv shows. This book takes you down and dirty on the death and suffering of the dead and dying but those around those men. There are problems I would have never thought of. Heartbreaking, informative, and I cried at times for the terrible injustices that transpires. I read about the worst in some people but I saw the best in others.In some ways the feelings are a lot like today.

[revliz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ah hah. This book answered a lot of questions I've had about the combination of death, military service, mourning customs, and patriotism. i would even say, you cannot begin to understand Memorial Day without reading this book. Even if I don't approve/sanction it all, at least now I feel I know where it's coming from. This is not (just/only) history; this is understanding where a lot of our assumptions and practices come from. If you're a thinking participant in this republic, read this book.

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating and obviously grim chronicle of how both the Union and Confederacy coped with the unprecedented vast carnage on the battlefields. A vividly detailed, richly layered, exceptionally well-written work of history.

[labdaddy4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not a light read but very interesting and enlightening. I was especially taken with the contrasts between how society processed so much death and destruction- then and now. Many aspects of how our nation deals with the tragedy of war stems directly for it’s experiences during the Civil War.

[scarchin-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I recommend this book to die hard Civil War buffs and US History teachers. It is a very detailed and, at times, fascinating examination of how the number of deaths in this conflict had an impact on a young nation - morally, socially, religiously, economically - and on the individuals who experienced it firsthand.
Due to its very scholarly nature, it took me a very long time to complete. I also think that it's fair to say that the reader gets the point before reading halfway through the book.
Excerpts would be very useful in a class discussion on the Civil War

[g33kgrrl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fantastic book covering death in the Civil War. Gilpin Faust discusses 19th century American's performance of the Good Death and how that reverberated through the entire life and death process, and subsequently had an impact on post-war society. I wish I'd had a better grasp on Civil War history in general before reading this; if you're going to read this and McPherson, I'd say read the McPherson first - I wish I had.Another bonus is the photographs included. I find it amazing to think there are photos from this era, how amazing. If terribly, terribly bleak.

[juva_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A microhistory of death during the civil war. How did the sudden increase in death effect the American concept of death? How did people of that era grieve loss and deal with the practical requirements of burial for hundreds of thousand? All the questions of the consequences of war are carefully examined and expounded in this excellent volume.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Death, dying, and killing in the Civil War. Faust argues that the scale of the Civil War transformed the meanings and modes of death, both for fighting men and for the civilians left behind—often left for months in ignorance of whether the soliders they cared about had survived or perished. Her accounts of how soldiers performed, or attempted to perform, “a good death” showed just how much social meaning shapes us, even in extremis. Race of course played a big role, both in how willing Southern whites were to kill Northern soldiers and in how living and dead black soldiers were treated. Before the Civil War, no one kept track of soldiers’ deaths in a systematic way; after, there was a massive effort both to identify the dead and change recordkeeping so people wouldn’t lose track of so many bodies and gravesites. Really interesting read.

[krumbs_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent, excellent book. It was a national book award finalist, and as far as I'm concerned it should have won. Gilpin Faust does an excellent job of making events, culture, people, emotions, reactions, deaths, lives, even statistics immediate and interesting. The amount of research that went into this was stunning (although as president of Harvard she used her share of research assistants), but pulling it all together into a compelling and readable whole is an impressive task. She doesn't just talk about the gruesome deaths of soldiers, she delves into the process of dying, burials, philosophy, religion, literature, personal and governmental responsibility--everything possibly surrounding the concept of "death" around the Civil War. Even after reading the final chapters, I still find it difficult to grasp the monumental task of locating, identifying, and reinterring all the hundreds of thousands of dead, but I have a better conceptual understanding of the problems during and after the war of dealing with the practical realities and problems that arose. It's not sad or uplifting, it just is. Social history at its best.

[jcbrunner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"This republic of suffering" suffers from the author's lack of familiarity with military and world history. She thus misinforms her readers, relying on the flawed book On Killing by Dave Grossman which in turn in part is based on false data. Her American readers are not given an international context to the casualties of the American Civil War. The carnage of the Napoleonic Wars was much larger. The Russia campaign of 1812 caused as many losses as the four years of war in America. Paraguay suffered a much higher proportional loss during the Paraguayan War. While Faust at the beginning mentions that most Civil War casualties died from sickness, she later reverts to a false battlefield hero narrative. She also fails to critically examine her sources, taking the written accounts of a soldier's death for the grieving families at face value. Neither the last words nor their sweet deaths are what happens in reality. These letters follow social conventions to ease the pain, especially as most of the dead passed away, in vain, from sickness, often after having to endure misery and pain for a long time.The first few chapters thus are of questionable value which Faust redeems with a strong finish. One novelty and consequence of the American Civil War was the creation of national cemeteries. Up to then, common soldiers' graves went unmarked. Disposing of the bodies was solved by mass graves. Relatives were highly unlikely to ever visit the battlefield and even if they did, most would have been unable to read the name of the fallen. The American Civil War changed this. A literate, relative wealthy society started to care for their war dead. Not at the beginning but already during the war - laying the basis for Arlington cemetery. After the war, the North started to collect and rebury properly the hastily buried bodies in national cemeteries. The fallen Confederates were not accorded similar honors and had to wait for private efforts to match the government's lead. The large cemeteries of the First World War can be traced back to those efforts, to a change on how Americans regarded their dead soldiers: Citizens to be respected and cared for and worthy of an eternal hallowed ground.

[corinneblackmer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an excellent, original, informative, and, I believe, important work about the American Civil War and the culture of nineteenth century America. Before the Civil War, it was commonplace to the point of being naturally expected that human beings would die in or near their homes, on familiar land, and within the bosoms of their families and religious institutions. The Civil War transformed these expectations in horrid fashion, causing major convulsions over belief, identity, and the sense of belonging. Because bodies were often not recovered from the battlefield, and because their were so many MIAs, people had to do without the physical bodies of their departed, which transformed settled ideas about the human body, the human soul, and the place of human kind within a larger providential scheme. Essentially, all these notions came under question.

[cyderry · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book is about the carnage that was the result of the Civil War.The reader is told of the total of casualties - dead, missing in action, and injured. We are also told of the indignity of the bodies that are left on the battlefields, unburied. We hear this through diary excerpts, journals and first hand accounts from Union as well as Confederate soldiers. It is sad to think that this time of literal carnage on the battlefields that there were no contingencies for aiding the injured so that many were just left on the field where they fell.This book also relates the improvements that were made to embalming processes and to the federal cemetery system so that families were able to accept the bodies of their loved ones or visit their final resting places.I didn't like this book because it just seemed to have no direction and to continually run on from one topic of death to another with no purpose. It didn't seem to have any continuity or justification for what it was stating, it stated it. Information - yes, purpose - No.

[piemouth · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

About America's national PTSD in the wake of the Civil War. More than 600,000 soldiers died - an equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. That doesn't include the wounded, and civilian casualties. Americans had to realize the enormity of what had happened to their country, to every family, to do the work of burying, naming, accounting, and numbering.Both sides assumed the conflict would last a couple of months. Neither planned for care of the wounded, housing prisoners, identification of the missing and the dead. The military had no formal muster rolls, no organized way of identifying the dead and wounded. To find what had happened, family members traveled to battle sites to try to find missing soldiers. Can you imagine knowing your son or father had fought in a battle you read about in the paper, and then no word from him? For months? Sometimes the missing one turned up in a hospital or prison camp; sometimes a letter describing his death and burial would come from a commander or fellow soldier; sometimes they never knew. Families wanted to know if their dear one had had a "good death". Was he a believer, was he willing to die? Letters sent from the front have descriptions like "the calm repose of his countenance indicated the departure of one at peace with God."The numbers were staggering, unimaginable. At the same time, a story lay behind every death. Every individual's loss was a heartbreak. Both sides realized they must name and count the dead and wounded, find every body and identify and bring home as many as possible. Vast cemeteries must be created. By the last year of the war the Army sent special units to search for and retrieve the bodies of Union soldiers, which were being desecrated in the South. African-American Southerners helped protect and identify some of these graves. Confederate women formed their own burial associations to care for their dead.Before the war most Americans weren't embalmed. Why would they be? They died and were buried close to home. Before the war, Americans pictured Heaven and the afterlife as a place where disembodied souls spent eternity in the presence of God. In the wake of the war came books that pictured lost sons and fathers in a Heaven like their earthly homes, where bodies were made whole again, amputated limbs restored. Some believers looked forward to being reunited with their lost ones after death; others lost their faith. What kind of God could allow such suffering? Spiritualism, table tapping, communing with the dead all became popular, as they do in the wake of every war.This is a terrific, detailed, moving book.

[tjwilliams_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering is an ambitious work that attempts to explain how death and dying affected solders and citizens both during the Civil War and in its aftermath. The devastating death toll was entirely unexpected by both Union sympathizers and their Confederate counterparts given that each side had vastly underestimated the ultimate length of the war. With more than a half million American lives lost, survivors coped with the tragedy by analyzing and interpreting death in a way that would bring meaning not only to the individual death, but to the final number as well. Faust argues that it was the need for closure and the struggle of the survivors to understand the purpose behind death on such a massive scale that ultimately gave meaning to the Civil War and allowed the two opposing sides to reconcile.This Republic of Suffering is divided thematically, with each chapter devoted to a different aspect of death. The first three chapters—Dying, Killing, and Burying—are principally concerned with the soldiers and their interpretations of death. Faust continually stresses of the notion of the Good Death and its importance to both soldiers and civilians. During the time of the Civil War it was believed that moving on to the afterlife required a Good Death. These deaths typically required an acceptance of death and a willingness to move on to the next life. Soldiers writing letters to their fallen comrades’ families would emphasize these points, comforting the grieving survivors that their lost father, brother, son, or husband had understood his fate, accepted it, and asked once more for salvation.The middle three chapters—Naming, Realizing, and Believing and Doubting—deal with the roles civilians played in interpreting the death of individual soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of men died on the battlefields of the Civil War, many of whom were never identified. It was this unknowing that brought the most despair to survivors. Families often placed newspaper advertisements pleading for any information on lost loved ones. Several charitable organizations, most notably the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission, were created for the purpose of identifying dead or missing soldiers and informing their families of their whereabouts and the manner in which they died. The Civil War had a tremendous impact on American society, forcing nearly every person in the country to come to grips with the death of a family member or friend. This impact required the deaths and the war itself be given meaning, so that those men would not have died in vain.The final three chapters—Accounting, Numbering, and Surviving—provide the crux of Faust’s argument, in which death and dying in the Civil War came to define how the event was interpreted in the years following. With so many soldiers still unaccounted for at war’s end, the federal government began an aggressive project to find, identify, and reinter every Union soldier lost on southern soil. This process, and the creation of dozens of national cemeteries, gave meaning to the Union cause. These soldiers had died protecting their nation from those who would have rent it asunder, and it was the newly reunited government’s responsibility to ensure that those bled and died for it would be able to rest in peace. The federal government gave no such honor to Confederate soldiers, so the southern people took it upon themselves to return their lost brethren from the North and give them their own honorable death. Confederate soldiers, though they may have lost the war, nevertheless fought bravely for their cause and the cause of all southerners. In this way, “the Dead became what their survivors chose to make them (p. 269).” For a time, this meant that North and South continued their battle. But ultimately, with the United States government’s acknowledgement of Confederate losses as American losses, “the Dead became the focus of an imagined national community for the reunited states, a constituency all could willingly serve.”Faust’s breathtaking journey through the aftermath of the Civil War provides an illuminating look at the way soldiers and civilians interacted and how they worked together to understand the war and create a new community in its wake. In this way, the dead became much more than just a result of a devastating conflict. Instead, they became the tool used to bring both sides together in the end.

[spounds_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This Republic of Suffering has been on my to-read list for awhile and I finally got around to reading it. I’m sorry I put it off so long. This is a really well-written and engaging book.With as many books as there are about the Civil War, you would think someone would have written about the associated deaths before, but most authors only mention death as a postscript to their descriptions of battles or of the war itself. Others might conclude that there is only so much you can write about death and dying, but Drew Gilpin Faust has penned a fascinating treatise on all aspects of death and the Civil War.The book is broken into eight chapters, each named with a gerund. In the first chapter, Dying, Faust explains the concept of the ars moriendi, or good death, that people before the Civil War hoped to experience and how soldiers struggled to come as close as possible to this ideal even in wartime conditions. In the chapter on Burying she explains how the sheer numbers of battlefield dead overwhelmed most efforts to bury the dead carefully, and most were buried with no casket and often without any form of identification. In Accounting she describes the post-war efforts to find and identify all those who had been hastily buried in the wake of battles and reinter them in national cemeteries. Faust’s writing style is very accessible which kept my interest throughout. I had never thought about what it might be like for Union soldiers given the task of gathering the Union dead from Southern battlefields in an increasingly hostile land after the war, and the description of the competing efforts of the northerners and southerners in honoring their own dead and ignoring the former enemy’s.I listened to this book on Audible. The reader took a little getting used to. Her tone seemed a little “strident,” and I found myself wanting her to tone it down a bit, but it’s not the worst I’ve ever heard. All in all I found this a very enjoyable read and I highly recommend it.

[lateinnings · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A highly readable book on the cultural perceptions of death and how they were forever changed by the Civil War.

[thebentley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting and not as Union-biased as I expected (if more so than I might have hoped). Some chapters are more captivating and readable than others and work more toward coherent meaning. Overall, it could have made good use of footnotes to build up scholarly credibility without interrupting the narrative flow with repetitive examples. Faust has clearly done outstanding research with a lot of challenging primary sources, but she shows it off a little too much in the main text.

[mikewick_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This would have been better as a very long essay or as a shorter book, but regardless it was a great read. at the end you'll know all about how americans approached suffering and death during the civil war (a time when it couldn't be ignored). would also be a good starting place to learn about researching documents of the civil war--but maybe that's the librarian in me catching those bits.

[flourishing_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating read, and one that kept me glued from start to finish, despite not being fictional. That's rare: I often pick up and put down non fiction books, however interested I am. But this book - intense.

[esigel_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil WarBy Drew Gilpin FaustThis Republic of Suffering is a very different Civil War book. I'm used to Civil War books that tell the story of battles, campaigns and leaders. This is a book about how an entire society, North and South, dealt with the most pervasive aspect of the war: its indiscriminate slaughter. Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, 2% of the population, by far the bloodiest war ever fought by Americans.In a series of chapters most of whose names consist of just a single word—Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Believing and Doubting, Numbering—Faust examines death from every point of view: the soldiers who fought and died, the families that mourned them, their fellow comrades who struggled to bury them, the civic and religious leaders, writers, poets and ordinary citizens who sought to make sense of the war and its awful toll.Throughout the book it is the voices of ordinary citizens that we hear, mostly through their letters or diaries, and already in a chapter or two we are already aware of the trauma that this war inflicted on everyone. It changed the way war was waged; it changed the way the army and the society treated the memory those who had fallen. One of the scandalous aspects of the war was how many dead soldiers could not be identified or counted or buried properly. After the war ended the army and the society at large undertook an enormous effort to rebury and identify them. This led to a permanent change in the way the U.S. military operated; identifying the dead and protecting and preserving their remains became a core value of military service. Honoring the memory of those dead, through holidays like Memorial Day, was a lasting legacy of the Civil War.This is a work of immense scholarship, precise and eloquent prose, and lasting impact.

[narboink · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Written with a studied calm, This Republic of Suffering carefully teases out bits of meaning in the rubble created by the American Civil War. Unlike many war chronicles, there is little here to gratify base interest in the macabre – although it is a book whose central subject is the lineaments of corporeal mayhem.In addition to Ms. Faust's laudable ability to write cogently and engagingly, she has also structured her book in an immensely gratifying manner. The first few chapters read like a conventional history of a neglected aspect of the Civil War, but by the end of the book the repercussions of what she has described become clear. Consequently, the reader comes not only to understand some fresh aspect of our contemporary attitudes about death and warfare, but also that those selfsame attitudes are protean, impermanent, and trace their pedigree to very specific individuals and actions. Things we take for granted or chalk up as simple commonsense ideas (i.e., the rightness of recovering and honoring fallen soldiers) turn out to be shockingly modern. This knowledge casts new light on how our current behavior might affect the attitudes and behaviors of future generations; particularly since so much of the post-mortem activity that followed the Civil War was largely undocumented (even ignored) and yet decidedly precedent-setting.This is a meditation on death as well as our attitudes about sacrifice and community. As such, it is a great deal more rewarding than a typical historical account.

[whjensen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"This Republic of Suffering" is a strange book. A book on of the Civil War, it does not deal with battles but rather their aftermath - the death of over 600,000 soliders (and countless more civilians) as a direct result of the Civil War. A book that has garnered much attention on the awards front, it reads closer to the text book you would expect from the President of Harvard.Faust puts out the theory that as a result of the Civil War, how our country viewed death changed dramatically. Each chapter of the book identifies a separate element from the killing to the burial to how people chose to die to the anonymity of the new type of war presaged by the Civil War. Taking each chapter individually feels like a tough slog. Her thesis is incredibly well documented with letters and documents, many of which become repetitious the fourth or fifth time you see a similar quote. It is only in reading the book as a whole and letting its threads come together that you start to see the bigger picture - that the Civil War created the underpinnings for our social welfare system (small though it may be compared to Europe) today, that the destruction of the Civil War created a search for meaning - accelerated in Europe by WW I - that did not include a God that would allow such terrible, terrible things to happen, that the Civil War did not finish in 1865 but still reverberates today.In a Victorian culture used to a person dying at home, surrounding by family members, the Civil War was a jarring event. Faust captures the disconnect it caused quite vividly. The book, as I stated, is not an easy read. The writing style is academic in nature rather than narrative. Yet for those who are willing to invest the time, the energy, they will come out the other side with a better understanding of our society today.

[marthahuntley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is excellently researched and written, and would be invaluable to any novelist or historian writing about the Civil War and its aftermath, but is pretty grueling to read (or hear). It is such a long book totally about death, a dissection of the trauma surrounding the casualties of the war, how such a bloodletting affected the men, the survivors, the country, literature,faith and more. Talk about "Stomping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." Or to change metaphors, chickens coming home to roost. As in present day, people who choose to start a war seem to take very little responsibility for the consequences -- as if it were some horrible surprise that just happened to us.