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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:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 7282
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 48 more reviews...
 Excellent historical reference book on the Civil War September 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a very serious, thorough, well researched book, centered mainly on the aftermath of the Civil War in the United States. It is an enlightening book for the serious student of civil war history. It is not for the fainthearted, or those easily depressed by recounts of death and dying,and burial, which the book primarily focuses on. I found this to be a very compelling book to read, however, once I got through the first chapter. Thw wirter brought out a lot of things I had no prior knowledge of, particularly the views of the importance in our society of a "good death" and transmitting this to the survivors of a fallen soldier.
Managing the Civil War dead made more dificult by the mystery September 18, 2008
The vastness of the civil war dead are unimaginable. Deaths were six times greater than WWII, or given that rate(2%) and today's population, we would be confronted with 6 Million fatalities. Could we - would we stand for such inepitude in the political generals? Amidst these gross statistics, Faust tells the narrative of the individual--"the importance of the individual life, the husband and father who was just as dead...as the thousands who had perished in the din of dramatic battle. He was a man who counted even if he was not counted." The mystery is that more than half of the dead were never named. This narrative of Civil War mortality reflects on the morality and its meaning-- "the place of the individual in a world of mass and increasingly mechanized slaughter. It was about what counted in a world transformed in four years...Where did God belong in such a world."
 An important reminder of American history August 18, 2008
As we move towards the next election, this book serves as a timely reminder of how we became the nation that we are. By focusing on the dead, we are forced to consider how personal loss affected the mindset of so many families in the North and the South. These deaths remain alive for these families and their descendants and we would do well to remember their influence on contemporary politics. It is also appropriate to consider the religious zeal, so well described by the author, with which the majority of young men went into battle to meet death face to face. They were as convinced of eternal life in heaven as any suicide bomber today, and their relatives expected to meet them in heaven too. There is much to learn and much to ponder in this beautifully written book.
Intricate Work August 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a monumentally important work which will explain Americans' attitude towards our war dead. This is the short-term gain.
The long-term gain, the more provocative reading, is how the Civil War dead became a constituency in our Post-War Republic which tacitly spoke in favor of Manifest Destiny and the expanding American Empire.
Another reading would hint that American Individualism doesn't end with death.
All-in-all, a treasure trove of ideas about who we are and how we relate to death--specifically violent death in the name of "defending our country."
Death and the Civil War August 4, 2008
A beautifully written and conceived book. The author approaches the United States and civil war from the perspective of death; a perspective I have never seen addressed. Fascinating in her descriptions of a "good death" and in the stress, grieving and emotional toil knowing or not knowing, finding or not finding a deceased beloved, burying or not burying, had on the families and loved ones of soldiers who fought and died in the Civil War.
While the author does not make the conceptual or "time" leap to the present, the issues and themes are relevent for those who served, and their famiies, in Viet Nam, Iraq and other conflicts.
I was especially moved by the author's purposely emphasizing that one death has meaning, one death communuictes, one death can be devistating, even as she recounts the tens and tens of thousands who died, and what this mass killing and dying meant for the American psyche.
Anyone interested in the Civil War will learn from this book.
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