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Death and the American Civil War
Thorndike Press
September 2008
On Sale: August 20, 2008
645 pages
ISBN: 1410408310
EAN: 9781410408310
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.”
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