This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust, Alfred A. Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95
Americans are no strangers to the destruction and horrific bloodletting that defined this nation’s Civil War. The more knowledgeable can no doubt cite the raw number of 620,000 dead, the words of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Fredericksburg who characterized war as “so terrible” or identify the battlefield in one of Mathew Brady’s photographs of dead soldiers. Drew Faust, a leading Civil War historian and the president of Harvard University since 2007, does something much more significant in This Republic of Suffering. She analyzes how the war challenged prevailing assumptions surrounding death and dying, and how soldiers, their families and the nation struggled to come to terms with the changing conditions wrought by war.
At the center of Faust’s study is what Americans in the mid-19th century dubbed the “good death.” Americans understood death as a private affair, which took place behind closed doors, in the company of family, and allowed the dying an opportunity to comfort loved ones by properly preparing for the end and their own salvation. While much of this book catalogues the immense sadness brought about by the burgeoning technology of war, Faust reminds us that any measurement of suffering felt by the living must be understood in light of the way the war forced Americans to accommodate battlefield death as “good death.” “It is work to die, to know how to approach and endure life’s last moments…to worry about how to die…to manage death…to deal with the dead….The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.”
Faust does an excellent job detailing the logistical challenges faced by both the U.S. and Confederate governments in the shift from limited to total war. While Faust goes further than any historian to date in analyzing the work of embalmers, the introduction of military graves registration procedures along with a federal system of national cemeteries for Union dead and the creation of private cemeteries in the South, arguably her most significant contribution is the assigning of the war’s deepest meaning to its dead. At the same time, historians may conclude that Faust has gone too far in this regard and has ignored the extent to which soldiers on both sides viewed their service and potential sacrifice along ideological lines. Indeed, apart from her analysis of black Union soldiers, Faust has little to say about the significance of slavery for white Union and Confederate soldiers as a motivating factor and justification for war.
This Republic of Suffering has received a great deal of attention, which it clearly deserves. If you read only one book on the Civil War this year, make it this one.
Originally published in the June 2008 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
