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Death and the American Civil War
Knopf
January 2008
On Sale: January 8, 2008
368 pages
ISBN: 037540404X
EAN: 9780375404047
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
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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