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: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9780307268587

Drew Gilpin Faust

CATHARINE DREW GILPIN FAUST is a historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. She was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard and the first to have been raised in the South. Faust is the former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2014, she was ranked by Forbes as the 33rd most powerful woman in the world.

Book preview

Acclaim for Drew Gilpin Faust’s

THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING

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.

—The New York Observer

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.

—San Francisco Chronicle

Faust excels in explaining the era’s violent rhetoric and what went on in people’s heads.

—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.

—The New Yorker

Fascinating, innovative…. Faust returns to the task of stripping from war any lingering romanticism, nobility or social purpose.

—The Nation

A harrowing but fascinating read.

—The Christian Science Monitor

Having always kept the war in her own scholarly sights, Faust offers a compelling reassertion of its basic importance in society and politics alike.

—Slate

[An] astonishing new book.

—The New York Sun

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Foreword to the Vintage Books Edition (2023) by Mike Mullen

Introduction to the Vintage Books Edition (2023)

Aftermath: New Reflections on This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

Preface: The Work of Death

1. Dying: To Lay Down My Life

2. Killing: The Harder Courage

3. Burying: New Lessons Caring for the Dead

4. Naming: The Significant Word UNKNOWN

5. Realizing: Civilians and the Work of Mourning

6. Believing and Doubting: What Means this Carnage?

7. Accounting: Our Obligations to the Dead

8. Numbering: How Many? How Many?

Epilogue: Surviving

Notes

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

A Note About the Author

Also by Drew Gilpin Faust

Copyright

_148356931_

IN MEMORY

OF

MCGHEE TYSON GILPIN

1919–2000

Captain, U.S. Army

Commanding Officer

Military Intelligence Interpreter Team #436

6th Armored Division

Wounded, August 6, 1944

Plouviens, France

Silver Star

Purple Heart

Croix de Guerre

Illustrations

Front Matter The True Defenders of the Constitution

Front Matter Confederate Dead at Antietam, September 1862

Chapter 1 Dying of Gangrene

Chapter 1 An Incident at Gettysburg

Chapter 1 The Letter Home

Chapter 1 The Execution of the Deserter William Johnson

Chapter 2 The Sixth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers Firing into the People

Chapter 2 The Army of the Potomac—A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty

Chapter 2 The War in Tennessee—Rebel Massacre of the Union Troops After the Surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12

Chapter 2 Unidentified Sergeant, U.S. Colored Troops

Chapter 2 Funeral of the Late Captain Cailloux

Chapter 3 Soldiers’ Graves near General Hospital, City Point, Virginia

Chapter 3 A Burial Party After the Battle of Antietam

Chapter 3 Antietam. Bodies of Confederate Dead Gathered for Burial

Chapter 3 Burying the Dead Under a Flag of Truce, Petersburg, 1864

Chapter 3 Dead Confederate Soldiers Collected for Burial. Spotsylvania, May 1864

Chapter 3 A Burial Trench at Gettysburg

Chapter 3 Rebel Soldiers After Battle ‘Peeling’ the Fallen Union Soldiers

Chapter 3 Burial of Federal Dead. Fredericksburg, 1864

Chapter 3 A Contrast: Federal Buried, Confederate Unburied, Where They Fell on the Battlefield of Antietam

Chapter 3 Horse killed in the war. Sketch by Alfred R. Waud

Chapter 3 The Burial of Latané

Chapter 3 Maryland and Pennsylvania Farmers Visiting the Battlefield of Antietam While the National Troops Were Burying the Dead and Carrying Off the Wounded

Chapter 3 Transportation of the Dead!

Chapter 3 Business card for undertaker Lewis Ernde

Chapter 3 Embalming Surgeon at Work on Soldier’s Body

Chapter 3 Dr. Bunnell’s Embalming Establishment in the Field (Army of the James)

Chapter 4 Searching the casualty lists. Detail from News of the War by Winslow Homer

Chapter 4 The United States Christian Commission Office at 8th and H Streets, Washington, D.C., 1865

Chapter 4 Nurses and Officers of the United States Sanitary Commission at Fredericksburg, Virginia, During the Wilderness Campaign, 1864

Chapter 4 Telegram from William Drayton Rutherford to Sallie Fair Rutherford

Chapter 4 Advertisement for soldiers’ identification badges

Chapter 4 Note by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Chapter 4 Detail from News of the War by Winslow Homer

Chapter 4 Ward K at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Chapter 4 An Unknown Soldier

Chapter 4 Henry Clay Taylor

Chapter 4 Libby Prison, Richmond Virginia, April 1865

Chapter 5 View of the Darlington Court-House and the Sycamore Tree Where Amy Spain, the Negro Slave, was Hung

Chapter 5 John Saunders Palmer with his wife of less than a year, Alice Ann Gaillard Palmer

Chapter 5 Half-mourning dress of Varina Howell Davis

Chapter 5 Women in Mourning, Cemetery in New Orleans

Chapter 5 View of the ‘Burnt District,’ Richmond, Va.

Chapter 5 Godey’s Fashions for June 1862.

Chapter 5 Women in Mourning at Stonewall Jackson’s Grave, circa 1866

Chapter 5 President Lincoln’s Funeral—Citizens Viewing the Body at the City Hall, New York

Chapter 5 Henry Ingersoll Bowditch at the time of the Civil War

Chapter 6 The Dying Soldier

Chapter 6 Battle-field of Gaines Mill, Virginia

Chapter 7 Clara Barton, circa 1865

Chapter 7 A Burial Party on the Battle-field of Cold Harbor, Virginia, April 1865

Chapter 7 Miss Clara Barton Raising the National Flag, August 17, 1865

Chapter 7 The Soldier’s Grave

Chapter 7 Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia—Decorating the Graves of the Rebel Soldiers

Chapter 7 Confederate Cemetery of Vicksburg

Chapter 8 Walt Whitman

Foreword to the Vintage Books Edition (2023)

In May of 2020, one of my dearest friends and mentors dropped his wife of fifty-seven years off at a hospital in Dallas, Texas, for a non-COVID-related elective surgery, fully expecting to pick her up the next day. He was unable to be with her at the hospital due to the recently enacted and extremely restrictive COVID-19 pandemic protocols. His wife died while in the hospital, and he never saw her again. Hers was a shockingly unexpected death and a devastating loss.

Since Drew Faust first published This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the beginnings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has sustained and suffered the deaths of over one million Americans to the COVID-19 pandemic, a total that exceeds the cumulative losses of those killed in all of our wars, including World War I. This staggering toll, like many national crises, disproportionately affected the poor, the underprivileged, and our underrepresented minorities. What does it say about how we deal with our own mortality today, our seeming indifference as a country to a loss of this scale, as well as the loss of over 7,500 American servicemen and women in our excruciatingly long and unpopular wars? Have our culture and institutions advanced or retrenched with respect to the full comprehension of mortality and death since the time of the Civil War?

Even as Dr. Faust recounts and grapples with the enormous issues surrounding death’s impact in that most devastating war, new research since her book was first published detail a more accurate and richer accounting of those who died in that conflict. She deepens our understanding of not only those who died on the battlefield but also those who died later from their wounds, those who died from disease, and those civilians who were casualties, as is the case in any war. Have we yet to learn the hard lessons of death precipitated by the currentpandemic and our recent wars? Are we numb to the lessons of the pandemic of 1918? We must urgently learn from these events to better prepare for a future with commensurate catastrophes, each one like a pebble dropped into a still pond whose concentric circles of impact seem to extend to the outer limits of our beings as a nation and as a people.

This book harkens back to the nineteenth-century spiritual underpinnings of the good death as the foundational journey for a life well lived and its interface with death. In Dr. Faust’s recounting, the seemingly boundless impact of the death of a loved one has changed little over the last century and a half. And much, if not all, of what we experienced in the death of over one million Americans in the last three years is similar to that experienced in the Civil War: loss, grief, mourning, pain, despair, heartbreak, shock, denial, guilt, anger, loneliness, reflection, acceptance, hope. In her new introduction to her unique and powerful work, Dr. Faust eloquently depicts what has changed and what has not. How badly has our political divisiveness impaired our ability as a nation to deal with the impact of our massive human loss? How does our growing secularity affect us individually, as well as nationally, as we deal with our mortality and its most human and certain outcome?

As someone who has led our armed forces in both war and peace, and dealt directly with the profound consequences for those killed in action in our wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and the severe impact on those families who have made the ultimate sacrifice, I can personally attest that the grief and mourning caused by armed conflicts have remained the same over the last 170 years. If there can be an appropriate phrase that captures the woeful cries of those closest to the ones we have lost, it is to never forget their sacrifice. We as a nation can never repay that debt; we can only attempt to do so to the best of our ability.

As a nation we must try to understand the true and full consequences of our decisions. Dr. Faust lays bare these consequences in a powerful and compelling rendering in This Republic of Suffering, especially those of the most consequential political decision of all: going to war. For far too long our congressional leadership has shirked and cowered from their collective responsibility in this regard. Accounted for in this reading are the clear effects of this lack of leadership, whether in the executive or legislative branches. The understudied effects of death are crystallized herein and should be the purview of every responsible American. This gripping account of our humanity in its most difficult moments of mortality will help educate generations about our history and better prepare us for the future.

MIKE MULLEN

Admiral, U.S. Navy

17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

September 2022

Introduction to the Vintage Books Edition (2023)

AFTERMATH: NEW REFLECTIONS ON THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: DEATH AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

It was listening to the women that moved me to write a book about death and the Civil War. As I worked on what in 1996 became Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, I could hear the women’s voices clear and strong, transmitted in their diaries and letters across the century and a half that separated us. What concerned them most about the conflict their husbands, fathers, and brothers had launched was not southern independence nor the future of slavery, subjects that have preoccupied historians for more than a century. Nor was it visions of honor and glory. Those questions mattered, but what mattered most was survival—their own and that of their loved ones. As the war ground on, an unanticipated and mounting death toll heightened their anxiety at the same time it made their fears reality. Death, its proximity and actuality, became the war’s most widely shared experience, not just for the South’s slaveholding women, but for all Americans. The work of death was a dimension of Civil War history I knew I had to explore.¹

In the decade and a half since I published This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, a steady stream of historical writing has elaborated its findings and revised a few of its assumptions. And just as Civil War Americans had to embark on a new relationship with death, so we too have been compelled by COVID-19 to confront the bonds of our mortality under circumstances we could not have imagined. More Americans—over a million as I write in the summer of 2022—have died from COVID-19 than in the four years of the United States’ most bloody war. This book now exists in a different context from the world of 2008 in which it first appeared. New scholarly discoveries have enriched knowledge and opened fresh directions in historical interpretation. But Civil War death has come to hold more than academic implications. As I have lived through the pandemic, I have found myself often thinking of the experiences of my Civil War subjects. The links between our time and theirs have frequently astonished me—particularly as I have been confronted by what has not changed and what we have not learned. I began the book with a quotation from an 1862 sermon by a Georgia bishop: We all have our dead. We are indeed all mortal. But I know that differently now than when I first borrowed his words.

The outpouring of scholarship over the years since I wrote This Republic of Suffering means that the Civil War itself has changed. Even our understanding of something as seemingly fundamental as its death toll has significantly altered. As I detailed in Chapter 8, the effort to capture the meaning of Civil War death by attaching it to a number has persisted since the time of the war itself, as if an accurate statistic could grasp losses that seemed otherwise unfathomable. Yet given the incompleteness of our sources, the irregularity of recordkeeping on both sides, and the destruction of documents, especially Confederate materials, in the chaos of war’s end, we will never have an exact count. The prevailing estimate at the time I wrote the book was 620,000 combined Union and Confederate dead, although those of us who used this number customarily did so with caveats, recognizing it as at best an approximation.

In 2011, based on both new research and more sophisticated tools of demographic analysis, professor of history at the University of Minnesota J. David Hacker published an article that challenged this widely held assumption. Up until this time, estimates had relied on cobbling together military records like muster-out rolls and then making more or less educated guesses about the fatalities that might have been omitted. Hacker took an entirely different approach. Using samples from nineteenth-century censuses recently released to the public, he compared male survival rates between the 1860 and 1870 enumerations with similar rates in surrounding censuses. Hacker frankly acknowledged shortcomings in this innovative method—issues about the reliability of both the 1860 and the 1870 censuses and the inevitable inclusion in such a method of nonmilitary male deaths, for example.

Nonetheless, he pointed out why the records of deaths we have largely depended on up to now have been even more seriously flawed and have led to a significant undercount.

The traditional estimate of 258,000 Confederate dead—originally put forward in 1901 by a Union veteran turned amateur historian as little more than an approximation—was not only based on incomplete records of battle casualties, it failed adequately to account for noncombat deaths from disease or accidents. Hacker also noted that military enumerations on which the earlier totals had been based did not include northern or southern soldiers who died of wounds after the end of the conflict, losses he was able to assess through his use of the postwar census. Hacker’s careful consideration of available data led to a new and dramatically—20 percent—higher final estimate: 750,000 soldier deaths—the equivalent of 7.5 million deaths in terms of the size of our population today. The human cost of the Civil War was even greater and death more omnipresent than we previously knew. It was, Hacker concluded, the greatest demographic shock in the nation’s history; it was one from which other profound shocks—social, cultural, political, personal—inevitably derived.²

Hacker was focused on soldier deaths, but deepened knowledge of the war’s realities suggests we should assume a higher death toll than has previously been supposed among civilians as well. In large part, this changed view arises from the expansion over the past three decades of historical interest in the social history of the war, in the lives and circumstances of ordinary people rather than just the generals and statesmen who had occupied the stage in earlier scholarship. By shifting the focus of military history toward those who actually did the fighting, this approach has yielded numerous new studies of the common soldier and as a result has made death and suffering more central within the military narrative of the war. But the flourishing of social history may have had even greater impact by making what happened beyond the lines of battle a key aspect of the Civil War story. As scholars looked more closely at the home front, at the experiences of white women in the North and South or of enslaved African Americans, for example, they began to see in new detail the variety of circumstances that damaged and ended lives beyond the reach of the battlefields on which Civil War history had so long focused. The numbers of such deaths are impossible even to approximate, as the data documenting them is episodic and anecdotal, if not entirely absent. We will never know how many civilians died as a result of the war, but the research that has in recent years so richly depicted their lives and their hardships indicates that the number was likely far more substantial than we had imagined. Their loss must be factored into our efforts to understand the impact of the conflict. Battle and home front became in many ways indistinguishable.³

Guerrilla warfare was one particularly devastating way the conflict was brought home. The late Michael Fellman had addressed these grim realities early on in Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War, which appeared in 1989, and he continued to produce insightful work on unconventional warfare until the time of his death in 2012. His study of Missouri, Fellman once observed, was really my book on Vietnam, one that rejected a triumphal Civil War master narrative of battlefield glory, nation building, and emancipation for skepticism about what ends can ever balance the indiscriminate slaughter of war.⁴

Both the volume and claims of guerrilla studies have only expanded in the past two decades, as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the unconventional combat that has characterized our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have enhanced historians’ interest and changed their perspectives on the Civil War’s irregular warfare. In his revision of death statistics, Hacker sought to include some estimate of the losses of guerrilla fighters, but he did not attempt to assess the impact of their activities on the civilian population. A number of less quantitatively inclined scholars have more than filled that breach with portraits of another kind of Civil War, one of cruelty and unrestrained violence executed against men, women, and children alike. In border areas of the South, like Missouri, and regions that sheltered Unionist enclaves, like western North Carolina, historians have depicted a war within a war of hangings, torture, and executions. Irregular warfare, some recent work has even argued, played the decisive role in the conflict.⁵

The foregrounding of terroristic unconventional warfare has been one essential component of what has been described as a broader Dark Turn in Civil War history. These studies have placed merciless violence and suffering at the center of their interpretations and have challenged idealized renderings of a good war, where violence is redeemed by the liberation of the slave and the salvation of the American nation as humanity’s last best hope. This Republic of Suffering has come to be seen by many historians as situated at the heart of this darkness.⁶

"War is always about damage," Stephen Berry declared in his introduction to Weirding the War, a collection of essays published in 2011 that included examples of a wide range of this work—on subjects like ruins, starvation, atrocities, torture, amputations, persisting postwar trauma, and resulting suicides. Part one of the volume was entitled Death Becomes Us: The Civil War and the Appetite for Destruction. The nation learned to define itself by death, the double entendre suggests; and, worse yet, seems to have come to like it. Several chapters in the collection have since become books and have been joined by a proliferation of other studies of brutality and loss, of human suffering and environmental devastation.⁷

Many of these new inquiries have focused not just on the years between 1861 and 1865, but on war’s aftermath, on the physical and emotional destruction that persisted even when the guns went silent. As we saw earlier, Hacker had added post-1865 deaths to his estimation of the war’s toll, and social and cultural historians similarly sought to explore the varied dimensions and meaning of the devastating impact war exerted upon its survivors. Examinations of afflicted veterans, the disabled, the widowed, and the orphaned extended war’s darkness well beyond its chronological limits. Even after it ended, war remained terrible. The dead were gone yet lingered as a powerful emotional, cultural, and political force. Historians have investigated the ways the slain were remembered in cemeteries and ceremonies, at once drawing from and enriching larger themes of Civil War memory that traced the emergence of a Lost Cause to celebrate the Confederacy and justify another century of racial oppression.⁸

An earlier direction in Civil War writing, originating in the 1960s and influenced by the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement, had emphasized the war’s success in overturning slavery and heralded the agency of the enslaved in seizing their own freedom. But with the Dark Turn, there appeared more detailed studies of what that freedom had cost, as well as disillusionment among many historians about what freedom came to mean. With the defeat of Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow, how different from slavery did freedom actually turn out to be? Careful studies of the process of emancipation depicted frequently unchecked retributive violence against those who remained on wartime plantations and widespread illness, misery, oppression, and destitution among those who fled from slavery into Union contraband camps. The conflict portrayed by the Dark Turn was one that exacted more human suffering and delivered less human betterment. Far from a good or noble war, or the nation’s vaunted defining moment, the conflict was, in the eyes of one prominent historian, America’s greatest failure.⁹

This Republic of Suffering appeared near the outset of this new wave of scholarship, and I wrote not knowing the directions these studies would ultimately take and unaware that my book would become part of a larger thrust of interpretation. I was surprised when after the book’s publication I received questions about whether I had intended to argue that the war should not have been fought. It had not occurred to me that my work might be seen to make such a claim. As a historian I have never liked counterfactual questions; I prefer to regard what happened as needing to be explained and understood rather than judged or second-guessed. I had not undertaken a study of death in order to assess the war’s value. But I did want to illuminate the war’s cost. Like Michael Fellman, I am of the Vietnam generation, and I was an active opponent of that war. But I am also the daughter of a veteran of World War II and grew up imbued with a sense of the conflict as necessary and perhaps even good, though I have always struggled to countenance or justify violence.¹⁰

What I had hoped This Republic of Suffering might do was to remind its readers that we must anticipate and understand what war costs when we ask soldiers to fight. I had watched as we fell into the quagmire of Vietnam one escalation at a time without confronting the terrible price both Americans and especially Vietnamese would be required to pay. And as our Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became all but forgotten and all but ignored conflicts waged by less than one percent of the population, we had once again failed to accept our accountability for what we as a nation ask of those who fight our battles. I hoped as well that This Republic of Suffering could remind us of the price our forebears had paid for a reunited nation committed to a new birth of freedom and the consequent obligation that placed on us to make good their sacrifice. It was a freedom long constrained and long delayed; it is a freedom still far from achieved. But unlike many historians writing today in the shadow of the Dark Turn, I have no doubt that freedom, even the eviscerated freedom of the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, was far better than slavery. Yet I fully recognize what historians have in recent years so powerfully demonstrated: that emancipation involved violence, cruelty, suffering, and persisting racial oppression. Black freedom was not simply the shining, bright, and happy outcome of a destructive military conflict. It too was shrouded in war’s darkness.

A focus on war’s cruelties has shifted our perspective on a critical moment in our history. But from the start, I was interested in more than just trying to understand a particular highly consequential earlier era. I was also attracted to This Republic of Suffering’s questions because of their timelessness, because of the underlying sameness of confronting death as a human being in any time and place in spite of the differences of belief and circumstance that separate us across centuries and geographies. Human beings inevitably die; Montaigne wrote that life is about learning how to do so. There could be no more interesting subject. But I did not expect these connections between the Civil War past and the twenty-first-century present to assert themselves as forcefully as they did in 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic represented an assault upon much of what we had come to take for granted about our modern world and upon the control we assumed we held over our lives and destinies. We had felt almost smugly complacent when we compared ourselves to an earlier, less sophisticated, less technologically advanced world. We had come to believe that vaccines and antibiotics had conquered infectious disease, and the power of science had minimized our vulnerabilities. Even AIDS, which had challenged what one medical historian has called the age of hubris, seemed tractable once protease inhibitors emerged in the mid-1990s and changed the course of the disease. But with the scale and breadth and mystery of its deadly reach, the coronavirus robbed us of our illusions of safety. Suddenly I recognized circumstances that seemed taken from my research, not part of the wealthy and modern society that I was confident had long since bypassed such suffering and inhumanity.¹¹

What do we do with the bodies? Civil War Americans had asked as they faced enormous and unanticipated numbers of casualties after battles like Shiloh or Antietam or Gettysburg. In the spring of 2020, New York City, the pandemic’s early epicenter in the United States, was confronting the same question as morgues filled, corpses were piled in refrigerated trailers, coffins became unavailable, funeral homes ran out of chemicals for embalming, crematoria could not keep up with demand, and the city began mass trench burials of the dead. The effort to ensure a good death that had animated so many Civil War soldiers returned as a matter of widespread concern in pandemic America as contagious patients, like so many Civil War soldiers, died away from family desperate to share their last words and hours. And like soldiers who entrusted comrades or nurses with final messages to pass along or surrounded themselves with photographs of wives and children as they lay dying on the field, so too modern Americans improvised, saying goodbye with iPads instead of face-to-face with kin standing close at their bedsides. In both eras, death’s customary and consoling rituals became impossible; the rupture of bereavement could not be countered with the affirmation of community and continuity.¹²

Civil War soldiers and civilians alike worried that so much death and suffering would render them numb and unfeeling, demoralizing them in a literal nineteenth-century sense of the word—removing their morality. Indifference, they feared, would undermine their very humanity. We have grown used to it, nurse Cornelia Hancock ruefully observed of the suffering in a Union field hospital. Yet, ultimately, Civil War Americans refused to grow used to it, recognizing the ethical and emotional perils of numbness and committing themselves to public and private acts of memory and mourning that persist even into the present. Memorial Day, after all, is a Civil War invention. Yet today, as medical historian Richard Keller has observed about the pandemic, the United States is engaged in an active process of forgetting. How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal? asked journalist Ed Yong in March 2022. We have not—at least not yet—confronted or processed the meaning and trauma of a million deaths.¹³

We have been accustomed to a very different relationship with death than our nineteenth-century predecessors. Many of us in the United States had the luxury not to consider our mortality, to deny death and push it to the margins of consciousness, to postpone thinking about it until life’s very final days. Efficient and systematic, both medicine and the funeral industry whisked death’s evidences out of sight, aiding us in our desire to keep them out of mind. Nineteenth-century Americans, in contrast, believed that a consciousness of death enabled a more purposeful and intentional life. Constant awareness of the finitude of human existence made it more precious and gave each moment of life deeper meaning. Americans today seem to want little part of such awareness. In the summer of 2022, even as new strains of the Omicron variant spread actively, we endeavor to deny not just death but disease itself, ending public health regulations and protocols, insisting life return to prepandemic normal even as the virus continues to mutate, spread, and kill.¹⁴

Epidemics and wars are very different phenomena. No one chooses a pandemic or expects it to have an uplifting purpose. By contrast humans themselves create wars and seek to imbue them with redemptive meaning. The pandemic dead are victims, not heroes, no matter what courage they may have displayed as they faced their demise. But in spite of these contrasts, there are lessons for our time in the experience of Civil War Americans. Loss claims a presence; it remains insistent in the minds and lives of those who have been bereaved. The experience of profound and shocking vulnerability is not easily forgotten. Divisions amplified and underscored by crisis are not easily healed. We will live with the impact of this pandemic even when—and if—it finally subsides. It will have an aftermath no matter what efforts we may make at denial. The Civil War generation confronted mortality and tragedy in ways that can enlighten us still if we are willing to listen to their voices and seek to understand their lives. They have solved what, in a poem about the battles of the Wilderness, Herman Melville called the riddle of death. For us, it remains a puzzle.¹⁵

DREW GILPIN FAUST

September 2022

Preface

THE WORK OF DEATH

Mortality defines the human condition. We all have our dead—we all have our Graves, a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an 1862 sermon. Every era, he explained, must confront like miseries every age must search for like consolation. Yet death has its discontinuities as well. Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space. Even though we all have our dead, and even though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.¹

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I’s Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities. As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital. Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.²

But these military statistics tell only a part of the story. The war killed civilians as well, as battles raged across farm and field, as encampments of troops spread epidemic disease, as guerrillas ensnared women and even children in violence and reprisals, as draft rioters targeted innocent citizens, as shortages of food in parts of the South brought starvation. No one sought to document these deaths systematically, and no one has devised a method of undertaking a retrospective count. The distinguished Civil War historian James McPherson has estimated that there were fifty thousand civilian deaths during the war, and he has concluded that the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II. The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.³

The impact and meaning of the war’s death toll went beyond the sheer numbers who died. Death’s significance for the Civil War generation arose as well from its violation of prevailing assumptions about life’s proper end—about who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances. Death was hardly unfamiliar to mid-nineteenth-century Americans. By the beginning of the 1860s the rate of death in the United States had begun to decline, although dramatic improvements in longevity would not appear until late in the century. Americans of the immediate prewar era continued to be more closely acquainted with death than are their twenty-first-century counterparts. But the patterns to which they were accustomed were in significant ways different from those the war would introduce. The Civil War represented a dramatic shift in both incidence and experience. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans endured a high rate of infant mortality but expected that most individuals who reached young adulthood would survive at least into middle age. The war took young, healthy men and rapidly, often instantly, destroyed them with disease or injury. This marked a sharp and alarming departure from existing preconceptions about who should die. As Francis W. Palfrey wrote in an 1864 memorial for Union soldier Henry L. Abbott, the blow seems heaviest when it strikes down those who are in the morning of life. A soldier was five times more likely to die than he would have been if he had not entered the army. As a chaplain explained to his Connecticut regiment in the middle of the war, neither he nor they had ever lived and faced death in such a time, with its peculiar conditions and necessities. Civil War soldiers and civilians alike distinguished what many referred to as ordinary death, as it had occurred in prewar years, from the manner and frequency of death in Civil War battlefields, hospitals, and camps, and from the war’s interruptions of civilian lives.⁴

In the Civil

Reviews for This Republic of Suffering

[sawcat · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Gilpin Faust discusses the notion of dying well, and how soldiers had to justify trying to kill others, even though it was against their beliefs. But then she goes into some subjects that were a bit surprising to me. Today, soldiers killed in combat or on the job, their remains are returned home to their families, and there are numerous National Cemeteries for them to be buried in. But many of these practices grew out of the Civil War. There was no formal method of identifying soldiers, no formal system for burying the fallen, or transporting them back to their families.

Gilpin Faust does a good job presenting the similarities and contrasts to the ordeals of those from the North and those from the South. There are lots of primary source materials, and a great deal of information in the end notes as well. There are a great deal of images in this rather short history book, but some people will likely find some of the photographs disturbing. This was the rise of photography, and people like Mathew Brady served as early photo-journalists, photographing camps, battlefields shortly after battles ended, or even sometime afterwards. So there are photographs of the dead- some lying where they fell, some along the process of burial, and one being embalmed before being sent to his family. These photographs, while squeamish, are necessary to demonstrate the various points she makes throughout the book.

A well written and documented book, I found it fascinating. If you would like to read up on a not often discussed social issues coming out of the Civil War, I highly recommend this book. This fall, the PBS program American Experience aired an episode entitled "Death and the Civil War", which is based on this book, which I would also recommend.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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 War
By Drew Gilpin Faust

This 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.

[keely_chace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

With this book, Drew Gilpin Faust offers a thoroughly fascinating and readable analysis of death, dying and grief during the Civil War. The author considers her subject from so many angles. As a word person, I particularly enjoyed her analyses of how contemporary writers such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville and Ambrose Bierce, responded to the war and its unprecedented carnage. Highly recommended for history enthusiasts who want to keep filling in the depth they never got in school.