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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 Drew Gilpin Faust is my new hero ( jjbalamut )
I read this book because Dr. Faust is the new president of Harvard and I wanted to see her scholarly contribution to Civil War history. This is a terrific book because it focuses on one narrow aspect of the Civil Ward: the huge death rate, and examines this topic from all possible angles. She doesn't stray from the effect of massive death and get hung up on one area. I especially liked the religious and philosophical treatment that she presents and how the loss of so much life shaped the attitudes of all who lived in the U.S. during the Civil War. Even though some reviewers disagree, I found her treatment of the suffering of all Americans, Northerners, Southerners, Slaves, freed slaves, very even handed. This showed me the massive toll the Civil War took on everyone and the politics that still is evident today. An extrememly interesting look by an incredible scholar and historian. READ THIS even if you shy away from history or scholarly texts. You won't be disappointed.
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Must read for Americans ( cbajohn )
I think the book is a must read for all Americans. It points out the numbing war statistics and the emotions attached to the deaths by from participants and the families. The complexity of the gathering of personal data re. each death or missing is well detailed. The chapters "Realizing" and "Naming" bring home, even after all of this time, the pain to the survivors and families of the dead and missing. It also shows Southern and Northern prejudices after the war and the early seeds of Jim Crow, the next chapter in racial conflict our country faced.
One big omission, however, in the chapter "Accounting", was not mentioning the compelling story of the establishment of Arlington National Cemetery on the family grounds of Robert E. Lee. It was led by Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, who commanded the garrison at Arlington House, appropriated the grounds June 15, 1864, for use as a military cemetery. A stone and masonry burial vault in the rose garden, 20 feet wide and 10 feet deep, and containing the remains of 1,800 Bull Run casualties, was among the first monuments to Union dead erected under Meigs' orders. Meigs himself was later buried within 100 yards of Arlington House with his wife, father and son; the final statement to his original order. Also, would have liked to read more on the movements (states and independent)that took place to remember the dead that led to the ornate monumemts as seen in Getteysburg, Antietam, etc.
Again, in my opinion, a must read for all as it brings to life the strife and suffering that the country went through during and long after the war that can be related to and understood today.
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Good Read ( davideck57 )
Surprisingly readable account on how death was perceived and dealt with during the American Civil War. I had expected a dry, scholarly tome, but was pleasantly surprised by Dr. Faust's fine study.
Those who are interested in the social aspects of the Civil War will find this quite illuminating. Those with a military interest will not be disappointed, either.
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 An Academic Look at Civil War Death and How It Changed America ( whjensen )
"This Republic of Suffering" is a strange book. A book on of the Civil War, it does not deal with battles but rather their aftermath - the death of over 600,000 soliders (and countless more civilians) as a direct result of the Civil War. A book that has garnered much attention on the awards front, it reads closer to the text book you would expect from the President of Harvard.
Faust puts out the theory that as a result of the Civil War, how our country viewed death changed dramatically. Each chapter of the book identifies a separate element from the killing to the burial to how people chose to die to the anonymity of the new type of war presaged by the Civil War. Taking each chapter individually feels like a tough slog. Her thesis is incredibly well documented with letters and documents, many of which become repetitious the fourth or fifth time you see a similar quote. It is only in reading the book as a whole and letting its threads come together that you start to see the bigger picture - that the Civil War created the underpinnings for our social welfare system (small though it may be compared to Europe) today, that the destruction of the Civil War created a search for meaning - accelerated in Europe by WW I - that did not include a God that would allow such terrible, terrible things to happen, that the Civil War did not finish in 1865 but still reverberates today.
In a Victorian culture used to a person dying at home, surrounding by family members, the Civil War was a jarring event. Faust captures the disconnect it caused quite vividly. The book, as I stated, is not an easy read. The writing style is academic in nature rather than narrative. Yet for those who are willing to invest the time, the energy, they will come out the other side with a better understanding of our society today.
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A Unique History of the American Civil War ( danbrigman )
Drew Gilpin Faust's remarkable account of the death of the American Civil War should not be taken lightly. It addresses a topic that is now rarely spoken of in this country: death. She spends much of the book assisting the reader in truly understanding what it must have been like to live during and after the war. Death became an omnipresent entity for many of the people during this period of time as the war's death toll grew as time passed. Faust's account should be studied by any serious scholar of the American Civil War and it should be read by anyone wanting a "new" take on the history of the war. It could also serve as a reminder of the sacrifice that our ancestors made to reunite the country. Finally, the book should reawaken interest in the subject of death that seems to go without discussion until someone has died.
Bravo, Ms. Faust for a well-written account of the war.
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