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: #4046 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-08
• Released on: 2008-01-08
• 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's Book World/washingtonpost.com

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

Almost a great book
Academic. Readable. Redundant in places. Should have been longer in some ways, and shorter in others.

My primary disappointment was to finish the book with no perspective on how our American way of coping with death in the latter half of the 19th century fit with the European world. Was the concept of "a good death" peculiarly American? Did the Germans or English or French have systems for recovering battlefield corpses and notifying kin? Were the Eurpopean's horrified by the Civil War? Were our death rates for this war unusual compared to European wars? Why did Maine have a population larger than Connecticut in 1860? Was our civilian army unusual?

But it was an excellent book, and Ms. Gilpin should be commended for writing this social history on an under-examined topic. I think adding illustrations to it of folk-art responses to death would have been interesting - perhaps a companion volume?

Giving Life to Death
Readers of Civil War histories will inevitably come across the gruesome death statistics which are shocking even today after the wholesale bloodletting of the two world wars. What they won't come across, at least in my experience, is a thoughtful examination of the meaning and long-term implications of those statistics, at least until now in this wonderful examination of the subject. Ms. Faust sets the stage by highlighting two facts often given short shrift in discussions of the war's carnage: both sides' shock when they realized that the it likely would last years and not the months many had anticipated, exacting many more casualties than anyone anticipated, and that these deaths were not taking place on some foreign field where their impact was at least to some extent softened by the distance, but rather in a neighbor's field and sometimes literally on one's doorstep. On a more prosaic level, I would bet I'm not alone in never having pondered how the Civil War dead were identified or otherwise accounted for before the inroduction of "dog tags", how their remains were disposed of, whether an effort was made to return them to their homes, etc. Well, Ms. Faust certainly has done so and has produced a reasonably brief but obviously deeply considered volume which I believe will hereafter become an essential adjunct to a thorough understanding of the war and its consequences for the country.

War's Brutality
This book repudiates any romantic or sentimental view of the Civil War one may hold. It was a truly gruesome affair. I give the book three stars for dull prose and the introductory chapter seeming more like a conclusion. Faust was best when synthesizing primary materials - letters home, statistics, muster rolls... She seems to have been inspired, at least in part, by Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic - a much better read ultimately.