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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | 
 enlarge | Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  48 reviews
Sales Rank: 4951
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 037540404X
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.71
EAN: 9780375404047
ASIN: 037540404X
Publication Date: January 8, 2008
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Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 43 more reviews...
 Almost a great book July 9, 2008
Academic. Readable. Redundant in places. Should have been longer in some ways, and shorter in others.
My primary disappointment was to finish the book with no perspective on how our American way of coping with death in the latter half of the 19th century fit with the European world. Was the concept of "a good death" peculiarly American? Did the Germans or English or French have systems for recovering battlefield corpses and notifying kin? Were the Eurpopean's horrified by the Civil War? Were our death rates for this war unusual compared to European wars? Why did Maine have a population larger than Connecticut in 1860? Was our civilian army unusual?
But it was an excellent book, and Ms. Gilpin should be commended for writing this social history on an under-examined topic. I think adding illustrations to it of folk-art responses to death would have been interesting - perhaps a companion volume?
 Giving Life to Death July 8, 2008
Readers of Civil War histories will inevitably come across the gruesome death statistics which are shocking even today after the wholesale bloodletting of the two world wars. What they won't come across, at least in my experience, is a thoughtful examination of the meaning and long-term implications of those statistics, at least until now in this wonderful examination of the subject. Ms. Faust sets the stage by highlighting two facts often given short shrift in discussions of the war's carnage: both sides' shock when they realized that the it likely would last years and not the months many had anticipated, exacting many more casualties than anyone anticipated, and that these deaths were not taking place on some foreign field where their impact was at least to some extent softened by the distance, but rather in a neighbor's field and sometimes literally on one's doorstep. On a more prosaic level, I would bet I'm not alone in never having pondered how the Civil War dead were identified or otherwise accounted for before the inroduction of "dog tags", how their remains were disposed of, whether an effort was made to return them to their homes, etc. Well, Ms. Faust certainly has done so and has produced a reasonably brief but obviously deeply considered volume which I believe will hereafter become an essential adjunct to a thorough understanding of the war and its consequences for the country.
 War's Brutality June 30, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book repudiates any romantic or sentimental view of the Civil War one may hold. It was a truly gruesome affair. I give the book three stars for dull prose and the introductory chapter seeming more like a conclusion. Faust was best when synthesizing primary materials - letters home, statistics, muster rolls... She seems to have been inspired, at least in part, by Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic - a much better read ultimately.
A Very Moving History of Our Country's First Experience with Massive Death June 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a profoundly moving book about America's first real experience with the massive death that war can cause. At the time, America did not know how to deal with the overwhelming death rate and the resulting confusions with burial, identification and keeping basic statistics. Sometimes it was years before families received any kind of closure on the death of their sons, brothers, fathers, and other relatives. Dr Drew Faust of Harvard has done an outstanding presentation of the era and the role of the religions, in particular, Spiritualism. Spiritualism, with its promise of reunion on the other side and continuous life had some of its greatest moments during this time. I found the chapter on COUNTING to be of particular interest. It reminded me of my research on the HOLOCAUST, where I had to remember that numbers are not just statistics, but records of the unrealized potentials of individual souls. Dr. Faust had created a beautifully written record of an uninvestigated part of our history.
More like a collection of essays or a survey June 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
than a flowing narrative about this overlooked topic. While many of the writer's statistics are informative and much information has been gathered little attempt was made to construct a compelling book or to draw wider conclusions from the data presented. I would like to see a book centering on deaths in one army or one regiment even and how those experiences reflected themes in the Civil War rather than this authors style of stitching together a series of essays on different topics related to death in the CW. The reader is left sifting through alot of vignettes about lost soldiers, grieving wives etc...
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