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More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American

Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be

six million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin

Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only

individual lives but the life of the nation, describing how the

survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious

culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its

belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and

their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons,

nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a

vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely

shared reality.

List of Illustrations

Preface: The Work of Death

1. Dying: “To Lay Down My Life”

2. Killing: “The Harder Courage”

3. Burying: “New Lessons Caring for the Dead”

4. Naming: “The Significant Word UNKNOWN”

5. Realizing: Civilians and the Work of Mourning

6. Believing and Doubting: “What Means this Carnage?”

7. Accounting: “Our Obligations to the Dead”

8. Numbering: “How Many? How Many?”

Epilogue: Surviving

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

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From Publishers Weekly

Battle is the

dramatic centerpiece of Civil War history; this penetrating study

looks instead at the somber aftermath. Historian Faust (Mothers

of Invention) notes that the Civil War introduced America to

death on an unprecedented scale and of an unnatural kind—grisly,

random and often ending in an unmarked grave far from home. She

surveys the many ways the Civil War generation coped with the

trauma: the concept of the Good Death—conscious, composed and at

peace with God; the rise of the embalming industry; the sad

attempts of the bereaved to get confirmation of a soldier's death,

sometimes years after war's end; the swelling national movement to

recover soldiers' remains and give them decent burials; the

intellectual quest to find meaning—or its absence—in the war's

carnage. In the process, she contends, the nation invented the

modern culture of reverence for military death and used the fallen

to elaborate its new concern for individual rights. Faust exhumes a

wealth of material—condolence letters, funeral sermons, ads for

mourning dresses, poems and stories from Civil War–era writers—to

flesh out her lucid account. The result is an insightful, often

moving portrait of a people torn by grief. Photos. (Jan.

10)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed

Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Stephen Budiansky

Professional military men of the late 19th century were

generally unimpressed by America's Civil War. "A contest in which

huge armed rabbles chased each other around a vast wilderness,"

Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke contemptuously sniffed,

concluding there was nothing for the world's armies to learn from

such an unmilitary spectacle that had so little to do with the

established art of war.

But in 1901 a young member of the British Parliament accurately

read the war's central and overwhelming implication -- one that

would be borne out all too well in the bloody century of

industrialized slaughter to come. "The wars of peoples," warned the

26-year-old Winston Churchill, "will be more terrible than those of

kings."

The American Civil War was the first "war of peoples," and as

Drew Gilpin Faust vividly demonstrates, the unprecedented carnage

of this first modern war overwhelmed society's traditional ways of

dealing with death. The customs, religion, rhetoric, logistics --

even statistical methods -- of mid-19th century America were

unequal to slaughter on such a scale. How American society

attempted to come to terms with death that broke all the rules

about dying, and how the nation ultimately did -- and did not --

face up to this new reality of war are Faust's haunting and

powerful themes. If nothing else, this finely written book is a

powerful corrective to all the romantic claptrap that still

envelops a war that took as many American lives, 620,000, as all

other wars from the Revolution to Korea combined.

The extent to which the Civil War found America unprepared to

deal with its carnage at the most basic levels is fascinatingly

horrifying. "As late as Second Bull Run, in August 1862, a Union

division took the field without a single ambulance available for

removal of casualties," Faust writes. "Burying the dead after a

Civil War battle seemed always to be an act of improvisation." Two

and a half weeks after Antietam, unfathomable numbers of corpses

lay unburied, stacked in rows a thousand long or still scattered

about the field. Coffins were practically unheard of; no provision

of any kind had been made by military authorities. A Union surgeon

who took upon himself responsibility for burying "those he could

not save" after Gettysburg had to send out a foraging party to

locate a shovel.

Nor had provision been made for notifying families of the deaths

of husbands, sons, brothers. The chaotic record-keeping led to many

heartrending incidents of survivors of battles erroneously reported

dead, or vice versa. "I read my own obituary," recalled a

Confederate soldier. Union private Henry Struble, misidentified as

a soldier killed and buried at Antietam, laid flowers on the grave

of the unknown soldier occupying his place every year afterward on

Memorial Day.

Charitable organizations attempted to fill the information void

but were overwhelmed by the task. After the bloody battles in

Virginia in the spring of 1864, the Washington "Directory Office"

of the volunteer Sanitary Commission was besieged day after day by

distraught families and friends seeking to learn the fate and

whereabouts of loved ones.

The increasingly helpless efforts of comrades, chaplains,

families and compassionate onlookers to maintain the customary

forms of solace and dignified treatment of the dead are the

poignant backdrop to Faust's exploration of the byways of death in

wartime. "I insisted upon attending every dead soldier to the grave

and reading over him a part of the burial service," wrote a

Confederate nurse, Fannie Beers, in the fall of 1862. "But it had

now become impossible. The dead were past help; the living always

needed succor."

Soldiers and families alike tried hard to cling to the Victorian

notion of the "Good Death," so much so, observes Faust, that

"letters describing soldiers' last moments on Earth are so similar

it is as if their authors had a checklist in mind." In the mid-19th

century, a dying person was expected to pass away surrounded by

family, conscious of and at peace with his impending fate,

reconciled to his Maker, leaving inspiring last words to be

remembered by. War, especially modern war, shattered all those

assumptions. Death was often unpredictable, excruciatingly painful,

absurd and squalid, the dying departing full of fury and agony. It

came far from home; and when delivered by explosive artillery

shell, it sometimes did not even leave any identifiable remains. A

man could be literally "blown to atoms," wrote a Union chaplain at

Gettysburg -- a fate, Faust observes, that civilians found

incomprehensible.

Faust shows how American institutions adapted to the staggering

burden of this new kind of war and wholesale death with a blend of

can-do humanitarianism, pragmatic improvisation, mawkish

sentimentality, political cant, commercial hucksterism and

downright fraud. Freelance embalmers flocked to battlefields in the

aftermath of the fighting. "Bodies taken from Antietam Battle Field

and delivered to Cars or Express Office at short notice and low

rates," read the business card of one entrepreneur. "Bodies

Embalmed by us NEVER TURN BLACK! But retain their natural color and

appearance," boasted another. In 1863, a Washington undertaker was

imprisoned on charges of making a practice of recovering and

embalming dead soldiers without permission and then extorting

payment from families that wanted the bodies returned.

Faust convincingly demonstrates that the trauma of the Civil War

revolutionized the American military's approach to caring for the

dead and notifying families. After the war, a massive and superbly

organized effort by the War Department to recover, identify and

rebury Union dead in newly established national cemeteries was an

act of atonement for the nation's failings during the war

itself.

Faust is less convincing in making a case that the war's

confrontation with death produced a permanent transformation in

American belief, politics, character, habits of mind and modes of

expression -- something that Paul Fussell did so insightfully for

World War I in The Great War and Modern Memory. She notes, for

example, Ambrose Bierce's bitingly ironic humor, which grew very

directly out of his war experience, but it would be interesting and

important to learn how this brand of cynicism went over with most

people. She suggests that the war's unprecedented suffering posed a

challenge to religious faith, but beyond offering a series of

interesting anecdotes she never really presents a clear argument

that the war, in the end, had a lasting effect one way or another

on American religiousness.

But the real lesson may be the remarkable human capacity to

forget and gloss over even the ugliest realities. Walt Whitman, who

visited tens of thousands of wounded soldiers during the war and

came to know its death and terrible suffering firsthand, wrote (in

a speech he never delivered) the famous words, "The real war will

never get in the books." But he then added, "I say will never be

written -- perhaps must not and should not be." Those who read

Faust's powerful account of "the real war" will almost surely beg

to differ.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Those who fret over the state of American universities will embrace

this history by Drew Gilpin Faust. Academics appreciate how Faust

explains so many social and cultural changes by recentering the

story of the war on its massive toll in lives: the estimated 2

percent who died, or 620,000, would be equivalent to 6 million

today. She also breaks new ground by reexamining the relationship

of the war to modern institutions like the welfare state. Yet Faust

constructs This Republic of Suffering in a way that will appeal to

every reader?

书籍介绍

More than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. In This Republic of Suffering , Drew Gilpin Faust reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation, describing how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality.