Death and Civil War America: Interview with Drew Gilpin Faust

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What is the “Republic of Suffering”?

Frederick Law Olmstead, an administrator with the Union Sanitary Commission, was very involved with taking care of the wounded on hospital ships during the Peninsula campaign. Stunned by the misery and the sheer numbers of injured and dead, he made a remark about the country being turned into a “Republic of Suffering.” The scale of suffering was so huge, it seemed to encompass the whole country. I found it a compelling theme, and it comes out especially in the chapter on counting the dead toward the end of my book.

I also liked the idea of a Republic of Suffering as the title of the book because so much killing changes the role of public programs and government policies. The powerful democratic impulses of the war forced a reexamination of the neglect of the dead that was assumed and regularized in the opening days of the war. The Federal government took on new responsibilities for wartime dead through the national cemetery system, the effort at the close of the war to go back through the South and retrieve the bodies of the dead and try to identify them. The recognition that the state had a responsibility to the families of the dead, the bodies of the dead and the memories of the dead is also part of the Republic of Suffering.

Did the responsibility of the state to retrieve and reinter bodies also extend to Confederates?

No. Union agents would leave Confederate soldiers on the field but pick up Union bodies. That generated a response by private citizens in the South to take up the obligation to care for the Confederate dead. Women in particular mobilized in a series of ladies societies across the South, especially in areas near battlefields, to go out and organize search parties to try to find the graves of Confederate soldiers and collect them together in cemeteries like Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. There was also an effort on the part of organizations of Southern women to bring the dead back from Gettysburg and other fields in the border and Northern states where they were killed and reinter them in cemeteries. So private efforts grew up in the Southern states to compensate for the failure of the Federal government to include Confederate dead in the reburial program.

Would you agree that this book seems to be a departure from your previous work, which dealt with Confederate nationalism and plantation culture?

I’d say it’s a departure from my earlier work mostly because the North plays a large role in this book, and my previous work had been restricted to the South.  I think that’s the way in which it’s most dramatically different. The other issues I address in Republic aren’t so  different because I’ve always been interested in how societies and people  define themselves. I think that’s what attracted me to the Civil War, because war provides a moment of truth, because it forces people to prioritize their values and decide what’s most significant. I think death in a sense is the most dramatic instrument of that, and so I’ve spent my whole career looking for moments of truth in which individuals in societies reveal themselves.

How long did it take you to research the book?

It’s hard to say how long, because I found myself drawing upon work that I’d done for my earlier books, Mothers of Invention and The Creation of Confederate Nationalism. But I started thinking seriously about this project in 1995 when I was asked to give the  Fortenbaugh Lecture at Gettysburg College, a lecture that’s given every year at the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address on some sweeping aspect of Civil War history. I decided I wanted to focus on death in that lecture. That was my first exploration of the topic, and it was a rather synthetic, speculative rumination on this question.

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