Product Description

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

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

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

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

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7993 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-08
• Released on: 2008-01-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

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

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Stephen Budiansky

Professional military men of the late 19th century were generally unimpressed by America's Civil War. "A contest in which huge armed rabbles chased each other around a vast wilderness," Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke contemptuously sniffed, concluding there was nothing for the world's armies to learn from such an unmilitary spectacle that had so little to do with the established art of war.

But in 1901 a young member of the British Parliament accurately read the war's central and overwhelming implication -- one that would be borne out all too well in the bloody century of industrialized slaughter to come. "The wars of peoples," warned the 26-year-old Winston Churchill, "will be more terrible than those of kings."

The American Civil War was the first "war of peoples," and as Drew Gilpin Faust vividly demonstrates, the unprecedented carnage of this first modern war overwhelmed society's traditional ways of dealing with death. The customs, religion, rhetoric, logistics -- even statistical methods -- of mid-19th century America were unequal to slaughter on such a scale. How American society attempted to come to terms with death that broke all the rules about dying, and how the nation ultimately did -- and did not -- face up to this new reality of war are Faust's haunting and powerful themes. If nothing else, this finely written book is a powerful corrective to all the romantic claptrap that still envelops a war that took as many American lives, 620,000, as all other wars from the Revolution to Korea combined.

The extent to which the Civil War found America unprepared to deal with its carnage at the most basic levels is fascinatingly horrifying. "As late as Second Bull Run, in August 1862, a Union division took the field without a single ambulance available for removal of casualties," Faust writes. "Burying the dead after a Civil War battle seemed always to be an act of improvisation." Two and a half weeks after Antietam, unfathomable numbers of corpses lay unburied, stacked in rows a thousand long or still scattered about the field. Coffins were practically unheard of; no provision of any kind had been made by military authorities. A Union surgeon who took upon himself responsibility for burying "those he could not save" after Gettysburg had to send out a foraging party to locate a shovel.

Nor had provision been made for notifying families of the deaths of husbands, sons, brothers. The chaotic record-keeping led to many heartrending incidents of survivors of battles erroneously reported dead, or vice versa. "I read my own obituary," recalled a Confederate soldier. Union private Henry Struble, misidentified as a soldier killed and buried at Antietam, laid flowers on the grave of the unknown soldier occupying his place every year afterward on Memorial Day.

Charitable organizations attempted to fill the information void but were overwhelmed by the task. After the bloody battles in Virginia in the spring of 1864, the Washington "Directory Office" of the volunteer Sanitary Commission was besieged day after day by distraught families and friends seeking to learn the fate and whereabouts of loved ones.

The increasingly helpless efforts of comrades, chaplains, families and compassionate onlookers to maintain the customary forms of solace and dignified treatment of the dead are the poignant backdrop to Faust's exploration of the byways of death in wartime. "I insisted upon attending every dead soldier to the grave and reading over him a part of the burial service," wrote a Confederate nurse, Fannie Beers, in the fall of 1862. "But it had now become impossible. The dead were past help; the living always needed succor."

Soldiers and families alike tried hard to cling to the Victorian notion of the "Good Death," so much so, observes Faust, that "letters describing soldiers' last moments on Earth are so similar it is as if their authors had a checklist in mind." In the mid-19th century, a dying person was expected to pass away surrounded by family, conscious of and at peace with his impending fate, reconciled to his Maker, leaving inspiring last words to be remembered by. War, especially modern war, shattered all those assumptions. Death was often unpredictable, excruciatingly painful, absurd and squalid, the dying departing full of fury and agony. It came far from home; and when delivered by explosive artillery shell, it sometimes did not even leave any identifiable remains. A man could be literally "blown to atoms," wrote a Union chaplain at Gettysburg -- a fate, Faust observes, that civilians found incomprehensible.

Faust shows how American institutions adapted to the staggering burden of this new kind of war and wholesale death with a blend of can-do humanitarianism, pragmatic improvisation, mawkish sentimentality, political cant, commercial hucksterism and downright fraud. Freelance embalmers flocked to battlefields in the aftermath of the fighting. "Bodies taken from Antietam Battle Field and delivered to Cars or Express Office at short notice and low rates," read the business card of one entrepreneur. "Bodies Embalmed by us NEVER TURN BLACK! But retain their natural color and appearance," boasted another. In 1863, a Washington undertaker was imprisoned on charges of making a practice of recovering and embalming dead soldiers without permission and then extorting payment from families that wanted the bodies returned.

Faust convincingly demonstrates that the trauma of the Civil War revolutionized the American military's approach to caring for the dead and notifying families. After the war, a massive and superbly organized effort by the War Department to recover, identify and rebury Union dead in newly established national cemeteries was an act of atonement for the nation's failings during the war itself.

Faust is less convincing in making a case that the war's confrontation with death produced a permanent transformation in American belief, politics, character, habits of mind and modes of expression -- something that Paul Fussell did so insightfully for World War I in The Great War and Modern Memory. She notes, for example, Ambrose Bierce's bitingly ironic humor, which grew very directly out of his war experience, but it would be interesting and important to learn how this brand of cynicism went over with most people. She suggests that the war's unprecedented suffering posed a challenge to religious faith, but beyond offering a series of interesting anecdotes she never really presents a clear argument that the war, in the end, had a lasting effect one way or another on American religiousness.

But the real lesson may be the remarkable human capacity to forget and gloss over even the ugliest realities. Walt Whitman, who visited tens of thousands of wounded soldiers during the war and came to know its death and terrible suffering firsthand, wrote (in a speech he never delivered) the famous words, "The real war will never get in the books." But he then added, "I say will never be written -- perhaps must not and should not be." Those who read Faust's powerful account of "the real war" will almost surely beg to differ.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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

Customer Reviews

Chapter 2, Killing "The Harder Courage"
Biased history is a pet peeve of mine. This chapter illustrates whats wrong with most history found today.

A large part of this chapter was dedicated to the killing of black prisoners of war by Confederates, in fact several historical accounts of these events were covered in detail, but only the hint or suggestion that black Union soldiers may have been capable of the same acts. That "if" they did kill Confederate prisoners they were certainly justified to do under the circumstance was the main idea here. Not one account of known events, like Fort Gregg or Fort Blakeley was covered or suggested in relation to the killing of Confederate prisoners, only the Union prisoners and particulary the black Union prisoners were focused on.

Look how she treats the story of Captain Cailloux of the 1st Louisana Native Guards....

"Killed as he led his men in a charge at Port Hudson on May 27, 1863, Cailloux was the first of only a few black officers to die in the war. For all his courage and respectability, Andre Cailloux was in the eyes of the Confederates simply a man who deserved not just death but dishonor for his presumption in taking up arms against a superior race. Despite a truce called to permit the removal of te dead and wounded, rebel sharpshooters prevented Union troops from retrieving the bodies of black soldiers. Cailloux lay on the field until July 8, when Port Hudson surrendered. After forty-one days exposed to the elements, his body could be identified only because of a ring he still wore."

She goes on about Cailloux's funeral and then writes,.."Certainly, his death became a symbol for the northern antislavery cause and particulary for black abolitionist."

Certainly Cailloux's death had an effect on free blacks and their cause for full citizenship but the anti-slavery cause? she is leaving out some big facts. Captian Cailloux had been a 1st Lieutenant in the state militia of Confederate Louisiana prior to the fall of New Orleans. She mentioned he had been a free man but left out that he was part of a large community of free blacks in New Orleans that owned property, property that included slaves. How does she know why the Confederates kept the dead blacks soldiers from being removed from the battlefield, were they not most certainly looked upon as traitors to the South? She does not mention that Cailloux's men were sent out as cannon fodder by their white Union commanders to be hopelessly slaughtered. And the survivor's refused to take anymore commands from Union officers in the field during that fight.

For the novice reader Ms. Faust gives an idea of impartiallity with her writing skills but for the educated it is very obvious how much she left out.

Excellent historical reference book on the Civil War
This is a very serious, thorough, well researched book, centered mainly on the aftermath of the Civil War in the United States. It is an enlightening book for the serious student of civil war history. It is not for the fainthearted, or those easily depressed by recounts of death and dying,and burial, which the book primarily focuses on. I found this to be a very compelling book to read, however, once I got through the first chapter. Thw wirter brought out a lot of things I had no prior knowledge of, particularly the views of the importance in our society of a "good death" and transmitting this to the survivors of a fallen soldier.

Managing the Civil War dead made more dificult by the mystery
The vastness of the civil war dead are unimaginable. Deaths were six times greater than WWII, or given that rate(2%) and today's population, we would be confronted with 6 Million fatalities. Could we - would we stand for such inepitude in the political generals? Amidst these gross statistics, Faust tells the narrative of the individual--"the importance of the individual life, the husband and father who was just as dead...as the thousands who had perished in the din of dramatic battle. He was a man who counted even if he was not counted." The mystery is that more than half of the dead were never named. This narrative of Civil War mortality reflects on the morality and its meaning-- "the place of the individual in a world of mass and increasingly mechanized slaughter. It was about what counted in a world transformed in four years...Where did God belong in such a world."