BuzzFlash Reviews
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Hardcover)
by Drew Gilpin Faust
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
This book is fast becoming a bestseller because it reawakens our knowledge about how pivotal the Civil War was in the evolution of our nation to this very day -- and it does it by focusing on the massive carnage that incurred and the glorification of death in that hideous conflict.
About the author:
Drew Gilpin Faust is (the first female) president of Harvard University, where she also holds the Lincoln Professorship in History. Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 2001 to 2007, she came to Harvard after twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of five previous books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Avery Craven Prize. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
From Random House, the publisher:
"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."
An online reviewer:
It's difficult for us today to appreciate just how deadly the Civil War was. The numbers are staggering--620,000 dead soldiers, at least 50,000 dead civilians, an estimated 6 million pounds of human and animal carcasses at Gettysburg, etc--can't convey the concrete horror of a nation living day after day with the shock, disorientation, and despair caused by the bloodiest war in the country's history. The war years surely did transform the nation into a "republic of suffering" (a phrase coined by Frederick Law Olmsted).
Faust argues that the nation tried to keep its head above water by, for example, ritualizing the final moments of wounded soldiers to make them more compatible with mid-nineteenth century models of a "good death"; justifying increasing levels of battlefield slaughter by invoking God, patriotic duty, and justice (which frequently was vengeance); trying to identify and bury bodies of the slain in such a way as to preserve some semblance of their humanity, despite the horrible maiming many of them suffered; creating public and private rituals of mourning; holding "the enemy" accountable for the carnage; and keeping the memory of the slain alive after the war (feeding into Lost Cause sensibilities on the one hand and Bloody Shirt ones on the other). To a certain extent, as Faust acknowledges, similar kinds of coping mechanisms are adopted by Americans during any war. But context determines precisely how these mechanisms will be enacted, and she does an excellent job of making sense of how they manifested in Civil War America.
At the end of the day, Americans who lived through the Civil War needed to find a way to normalize their existences both during the actual conflict and afterwards, and to find some overarching meaning to the death and suffering that would justify the sacrifices. Given the war's unprecedented carnage, the task was as pressing as it was, ultimately, impossible. But in the aftermath of the war, the dead became, in the eyes of popular mythology, the sacrificial humus in which a newer, unified, and stronger nation would rise. Glorification of a nation's war dead may be inevitable. But it can also be a dangerous justification of future wars.
Faust's thought-provoking, sensitive, and ground-breakinig book will become a standard work. It's much more than a book about the Civil War. It's also a meditation on the meaning of war and the human need to somehow infuse meaning into an enterprise that often seems so bleakly wasteful and tragically brutal. Faust's book richly deserves at least the Lincoln Prize. Personally, I'd like to see it honored with a National Book Award.
From USA Today:
Anyone with any knowledge of the Civil War knows it was a horrible bloodletting for a young nation trying to cure the ills of slavery and reshape freedom and equality.
Drew Gilpin Faust's thought-provoking new book digs deeper to examine how the staggering number of deaths during those four violent years affected ordinary Americans and transformed the nation.
Faust's analysis will profoundly alter your understanding of the Civil War — perhaps of any war...
A respected Civil War historian and the first female president of Harvard University, Faust is a first-rate scholar who yanks aside the usual veil of history to look narrowly at life's intimate level for new perspectives from the past. She focuses on ordinary lives under extreme duress, which makes for compelling reading...
For those who would glorify the Civil War as a heroic epic of the Blue and the Gray, Faust's analysis is an ice-cold shower.
Without saying as much, she clarifies beyond any romantic doubt the hell that was the Civil War.
From Slate:
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University since 2007 and for decades a leading historian of the American South, provides plenty of numbers that are less well-known. Thirty thousand Northerners and 26,000 Southerners died in prisoner-of-war camps—almost 10 percent of all Civil War fatalities. As many as 50,000 civilians perished from war-related causes. And the dead, civilian as well as military, were black as well as white. About 35,000 of the 180,000 black soldiers who served the Union lost their lives, for the most part to disease. "Contraband camps" set up by the Union Army for African-Americans fleeing slavery (especially for women, children, and the elderly) experienced mortality rates up to 25 percent.
Most stunning of all: About half of the soldiers who died during the war—over 40 percent of the Yankees and a majority of Confederates—died as "unknown soldiers." These were often "men thrown by the hundreds into burial trenches; soldiers stripped of every identifying object before being abandoned on the field; bloated corpses hurried into hastily dug graves; nameless victims of dysentery or typhoid interred beside military hospitals; men blown to pieces by artillery shells; bodies hidden by woods or ravines, left to the depredations of hogs or wolves or time." The two armies' record-keeping—and even their interest in identifying individuals no longer capable of fighting—lagged far behind their firepower. Americans reeled at the number of deaths, but also at the threat sudden wartime death posed to individual identity. They were sickened by the prospect that young men might "die like dogs," as one woman volunteer put it, without the communal recognition of a marked grave symbolizing their departure for an eternal life with God...
At the same time, as Faust subtly shows, Northerners and Southerners kept on building separate collective identities, after the fighting stopped, as they honored their fallen men. Each region kept revitalizing its own nationalism in counterpoise with the other. Lacking the material resources commanded by Northerners, Southern white women in cities and towns alike mobilized to rebury the Confederate dead. In Winchester, a town in northern Virginia that had seen numerous battles throughout the war, women took the lead in gathering 2,500 bodies that lay within a 15-mile radius of the town and placing them in Stonewall Cemetery, built adjacent to a national cemetery for Yankee dead. They succeeded in identifying almost 1,700 men; the remaining 800 were buried together in a central mound encircled by the marked graves. Through this symbolically powerful public work, Southern women helped create the mythic Confederate nation that grew out of the ashes of the actual Confederacy.
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