This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
by Drew Gilpin Faust
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Book Summary Information
Author: Drew Gilpin FaustEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-01-06
ISBN: 0375703837
Number of pages: 346
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
Book Review: Bringing Out The Dead
Summary: 5 Stars
Drew Gilpin Faust's recent Civil War book on the grim subject of suffering and death perched for weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list, and ranked among the ten best books of the year (2008), attesting to the reading public's hunger for new perspectives on the war that abolished slavery. "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," words taken from Frederick Law Olmstead's description of the casualties arriving at hospital ships in the Virginia peninsula, addresses a glaring omission among the more than sixty thousand Civil War books written since the end of the war. Biographies of heroes and fiends, and studies of politics and battle strategy fill bookshelves, but few address the terrible aftermath of battle. A search of the literature draws only a single parallel, the complementary "Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death" by Mark S. Schantz, which, in a startling case of convergence, was also published in 2008. While Schantz's narrative develops the argument that 19th century belief in an afterlife enabled soldiers and their families to accept the tremendous carnage of the war, Faust's book delves deeply into the prosaic management of mass mortality. If you've ever wondered who buried the dead after armies had moved on, or why the identity of so many bodies was unknown, Faust delivers long overdue answers.
"The work of death," Faust writes, "was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking," which "shaped enduring national structures and commitments." While tackling the logistics of mass death in comprehensive detail, she also addresses the emotional and social ramifications on the home front. In eight chapters, accompanied by forty-eight pages of notes, the story shifts between battlefield and Victorian parlor, soldier and civilian. Faust's extensive use of first person accounts, and other primary sources, illuminates the human suffering behind the statistics: 2% of the nation's population died in uniform; more than 90% of injuries and death were caused by mini-balls; 300,000 bodies of Union soldiers were relocated to seventy-four newly-established national cemeteries after the war, and at least half of all dead soldiers remained unidentified.
When the Civil War began it was critical for both sides to prepare for the coming mortality, in part because the "miasma" of decaying bodies was still thought to pose a serious health threat. Commanding officers established cemeteries near military hospitals where bodies and amputated limbs called for speedy disposal. But the cemeteries were inadequate for the sheer numbers of dead and dying. Neither side could spare men for formal burial details or organized grave registration; soldiers were often buried where they fell, the places marked by wood panels scavenged from hardtack and ammunition boxes, and crossed fence rails served as makeshift grave markers. In Richmond, it wasn't unusual for the bodies of enlisted men to lie for days waiting interment while the bodies of officers were packed in charcoal and shipped to Washington where they would be enclosed in metal caskets and shipped North to their homes. A stopgap system of notification of kin, letters written by officers, comrades or medical attendants, was soon overwhelmed by the chaos of battle. Many families waited months, and sometimes years, for word of their loved ones.
Faust, Harvard's first female president and author of six books on Southern culture and the Civil War, was born in the Shenandoah Valley. She has a doctorate in Southern studies from the University of Pennsylvania. This book was conceived in 1996, following on the heels of her previous work "Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War." The reader will find few shortcomings in this balanced account of the Civil War and its aftermath. In fact, where Faust, perhaps, falls short in developing the 19th century concept of the "Good Death" and pervasive belief in an afterlife, Schantz's book ably fills the gap for any reader seeking a more exhaustive understanding of a time when the shadow of death fell over every home.
Faust takes her readers into homes and onto battlefields, North and South, and in the end brings us to stand in cemeteries where "row after row of humble identical markers . . . represent not so much the sorrow or particularity of a lost loved one as the enormous but unfathomable cost of the war." (249) Encompassing research in a broad range of disciplines including demographics, material culture, and thanatology, the resulting book strips away, as Eric Foner writes, "any lingering romanticism, nobility or social purpose" from war.
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Summary of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation, describing 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.
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