It was motivated in part by an undergraduate course that I taught for many years on war and the American experience. That course looked at the experience of war across the span of U.S. history, so that caused me to read about Vietnam, WWI and WWII and do a lot of comparative thinking about war. You find literature that says WWI was a dramatic departure in terms of the horror of war and the numbers of deaths and the amount of destruction changed how everyone thought about the world. A marvelous book by Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory, argues that point. But I think the Civil War had something of the same impact in the level of slaughter. Much of what has been said about the impact of WWI should in the American context be pulled back to the experience of the Civil War.

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The scope of this book is fascinating, but it can also be seen as sort of sad and even at times depressing. It’s also very realistic in its treatment of the Civil War. Do you think that the Civil War has been overly glorified or glamorized in popular imagination?

Part of what I wanted to say with this book is that when we forget the kinds of things I describe here—the centrality of the experience of death, the volume of death, the devastating impact it had on so many aspects of mid-19th-century civilization—we forget the reality of the Civil War for those who lived in that era. The mourning that must have gripped the nation is something that’s too easy to forget because we are not captured by it.

The experience of death in that war was so widespread that it infused American culture. One of the things I thought a lot about since beginning to work on this subject is how much of late 19th-century America should we understand through those events? For example, think of the people who never knew what had happened to their son—it’s 1863, and you never hear of him again after Gettysburg.  Let’s say you are a 30-year-old parent, you’re going to live another 40 years, and the rest of your life is shaped by that lingering uncertainty about the loss of that child. You can multiply that experience hundreds of thousands of times. I think as we consider late-19th-century Americans, we should be thinking about the ways in which they were shaped by the continuing presence of what I described in this book.

Some historians argue that a lot of Northern men didn’t participate in the military. Were there some people unaffected by the Republic of Suffering, or was it all-inclusive?

I think that there’s a distinct contrast between the North and South in this regard because of the level of mobilization in the South. For white and black Southerners, the presence of death was inescapable. I think in the North it was not as intense. As you suggest, there were many Northerners who managed not to have a direct role in the war. Sometimes I’ll be reading source material and I’ll just be stunned by this. For example, I was reading about Elizabeth Carey Agassi, the woman who founded and served as the first president of Radcliffe College, and her husband Louis Agassi, a scientist who taught at Harvard. They were traveling to Brazil to do research. As they were sailing down the East Coast she wrote that she looked over and saw all this smoke coming up from Virginia, and thought, “Oh yeah, that ‘s the Civil War going on.” I was so struck by this because there were numbers of individuals who served from Harvard and many students who died and so forth, yet somehow the Civil War was peripheral to them. I find that very strange, and I think we need to remember that people were differentially involved in the war.

That makes me think of Teddy Roosevelt, who felt guilty because his father didn’t serve.

Think about the Civil War memory industry—reunions, preserving and marking battlefields, the glorification of Civil War dead—and the impact that it had on the nation as the country moved toward the 20th century. I think that was a way in which Civil War influence spread beyond those who were direct participants and became a part of the entire American consciousness.

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