This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)

Excellent, excellent book. It was a national book award finalist, and as far as I'm concerned it should have won. Gilpin Faust does an excellent job of making events, culture, people, emotions, reactions, deaths, lives, even statistics immediate and interesting. The amount of research that went into this was stunning (although as president of Harvard she used her share of research assistants), but pulling it all together into a compelling and readable whole is an impressive task. She doesn't just talk about the gruesome deaths of soldiers, she delves into the process of dying, burials, philosophy, religion, literature, personal and governmental responsibility--everything possibly surrounding the concept of "death" around the Civil War. Even after reading the final chapters, I still find it difficult to grasp the monumental task of locating, identifying, and reinterring all the hundreds of thousands of dead, but I have a better conceptual understanding of the problems during and after the war of dealing with the practical realities and problems that arose. It's not sad or uplifting, it just is. Social history at its best. ( )

"This republic of suffering" suffers from the author's lack of familiarity with military and world history. She thus misinforms her readers, relying on the flawed book On Killing by Dave Grossman which in turn in part is based on false data. Her American readers are not given an international context to the casualties of the American Civil War. The carnage of the Napoleonic Wars was much larger. The Russia campaign of 1812 caused as many losses as the four years of war in America. Paraguay suffered a much higher proportional loss during the Paraguayan War. While Faust at the beginning mentions that most Civil War casualties died from sickness, she later reverts to a false battlefield hero narrative. She also fails to critically examine her sources, taking the written accounts of a soldier's death for the grieving families at face value. Neither the last words nor their sweet deaths are what happens in reality. These letters follow social conventions to ease the pain, especially as most of the dead passed away, in vain, from sickness, often after having to endure misery and pain for a long time.

The first few chapters thus are of questionable value which Faust redeems with a strong finish. One novelty and consequence of the American Civil War was the creation of national cemeteries. Up to then, common soldiers' graves went unmarked. Disposing of the bodies was solved by mass graves. Relatives were highly unlikely to ever visit the battlefield and even if they did, most would have been unable to read the name of the fallen. The American Civil War changed this. A literate, relative wealthy society started to care for their war dead. Not at the beginning but already during the war - laying the basis for Arlington cemetery. After the war, the North started to collect and rebury properly the hastily buried bodies in national cemeteries. The fallen Confederates were not accorded similar honors and had to wait for private efforts to match the government's lead. The large cemeteries of the First World War can be traced back to those efforts, to a change on how Americans regarded their dead soldiers: Citizens to be respected and cared for and worthy of an eternal hallowed ground. ( )

An interesting topic, but approached in a very academic way: a lot of material that (for a non-academic reader) seemed redundant, as if to show that proper research had been done. Nevertheless it was interesting to learn how American society adjusted to the unprecedented scale of death that the Civil War produced, and interesting also to see how many of the things that we take for granted (proper record keeping about casualties, notification of next of kin, military cemeteries) were created out of a mix of private, state, and federal improvisations during the war.

This is an excellent, original, informative, and, I believe, important work about the American Civil War and the culture of nineteenth century America. Before the Civil War, it was commonplace to the point of being naturally expected that human beings would die in or near their homes, on familiar land, and within the bosoms of their families and religious institutions. The Civil War transformed these expectations in horrid fashion, causing major convulsions over belief, identity, and the sense of belonging. Because bodies were often not recovered from the battlefield, and because their were so many MIAs, people had to do without the physical bodies of their departed, which transformed settled ideas about the human body, the human soul, and the place of human kind within a larger providential scheme. Essentially, all these notions came under question. ( )

Absorbing and informative! Prof. Faust's writing style flows smoothly & logically from chapter to chapter. ( )