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Loading... This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil Warby Drew Gilpin Faust
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Interesting and not as Union-biased as I expected (if more so than I might have hoped). Some chapters are more captivating and readable than others and work more toward coherent meaning. Overall, it could have made good use of footnotes to build up scholarly credibility without interrupting the narrative flow with repetitive examples. Faust has clearly done outstanding research with a lot of challenging primary sources, but she shows it off a little too much in the main text. (  ) TheBentley | Aug 14, 2009 |  This would have been better as a very long essay or as a shorter book, but regardless it was a great read. at the end you'll know all about how americans approached suffering and death during the civil war (a time when it couldn't be ignored). would also be a good starting place to learn about researching documents of the civil war--but maybe that's the librarian in me catching those bits. (  ) mikewick | Apr 22, 2009 | A fascinating read, and one that kept me glued from start to finish, despite not being fictional. That's rare: I often pick up and put down non fiction books, however interested I am. But this book - intense. (  ) flourishing | Mar 17, 2009 | A fascinating read, and one that kept me glued from start to finish, despite not being fictional. That's rare: I often pick up and put down non fiction books, however interested I am. But this book - intense. ( ) flourishing | Mar 17, 2009 | This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War By Drew Gilpin Faust This Republic of Suffering is a very different Civil War book. I'm used to Civil War books that tell the story of battles, campaigns and leaders. This is a book about how an entire society, North and South, dealt with the most pervasive aspect of the war: its indiscriminate slaughter. Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, 2% of the population, by far the bloodiest war ever fought by Americans. In a series of chapters most of whose names consist of just a single word—Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Believing and Doubting, Numbering—Faust examines death from every point of view: the soldiers who fought and died, the families that mourned them, their fellow comrades who struggled to bury them, the civic and religious leaders, writers, poets and ordinary citizens who sought to make sense of the war and its awful toll. Throughout the book it is the voices of ordinary citizens that we hear, mostly through their letters or diaries, and already in a chapter or two we are already aware of the trauma that this war inflicted on everyone. It changed the way war was waged; it changed the way the army and the society treated the memory those who had fallen. One of the scandalous aspects of the war was how many dead soldiers could not be identified or counted or buried properly. After the war ended the army and the society at large undertook an enormous effort to rebury and identify them. This led to a permanent change in the way the U.S. military operated; identifying the dead and protecting and preserving their remains became a core value of military service. Honoring the memory of those dead, through holidays like Memorial Day, was a lasting legacy of the Civil War. This is a work of immense scholarship, precise and eloquent prose, and lasting impact. (  )1  esigel | Mar 11, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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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.”
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400)
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