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This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | 
 enlarge | Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  54 reviews
Sales Rank: 9164
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 037540404X
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.71
EAN: 9780375404047
ASIN: 037540404X
Publication Date: January 8, 2008
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 49 more reviews...
 Chapter 2, Killing "The Harder Courage" October 8, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Biased history is a pet peeve of mine. This chapter illustrates whats wrong with most history found today.
A large part of this chapter was dedicated to the killing of black prisoners of war by Confederates, in fact several historical accounts of these events were covered in detail, but only the hint or suggestion that black Union soldiers may have been capable of the same acts. That "if" they did kill Confederate prisoners they were certainly justified to do under the circumstance was the main idea here. Not one account of known events, like Fort Gregg or Fort Blakeley was covered or suggested in relation to the killing of Confederate prisoners, only the Union prisoners and particulary the black Union prisoners were focused on.
Look how she treats the story of Captain Cailloux of the 1st Louisana Native Guards....
"Killed as he led his men in a charge at Port Hudson on May 27, 1863, Cailloux was the first of only a few black officers to die in the war. For all his courage and respectability, Andre Cailloux was in the eyes of the Confederates simply a man who deserved not just death but dishonor for his presumption in taking up arms against a superior race. Despite a truce called to permit the removal of te dead and wounded, rebel sharpshooters prevented Union troops from retrieving the bodies of black soldiers. Cailloux lay on the field until July 8, when Port Hudson surrendered. After forty-one days exposed to the elements, his body could be identified only because of a ring he still wore."
She goes on about Cailloux's funeral and then writes,.."Certainly, his death became a symbol for the northern antislavery cause and particulary for black abolitionist."
Certainly Cailloux's death had an effect on free blacks and their cause for full citizenship but the anti-slavery cause? she is leaving out some big facts. Captian Cailloux had been a 1st Lieutenant in the state militia of Confederate Louisiana prior to the fall of New Orleans. She mentioned he had been a free man but left out that he was part of a large community of free blacks in New Orleans that owned property, property that included slaves. How does she know why the Confederates kept the dead blacks soldiers from being removed from the battlefield, were they not most certainly looked upon as traitors to the South? She does not mention that Cailloux's men were sent out as cannon fodder by their white Union commanders to be hopelessly slaughtered. And the survivor's refused to take anymore commands from Union officers in the field during that fight.
For the novice reader Ms. Faust gives an idea of impartiallity with her writing skills but for the educated it is very obvious how much she left out.
 Excellent historical reference book on the Civil War September 30, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a very serious, thorough, well researched book, centered mainly on the aftermath of the Civil War in the United States. It is an enlightening book for the serious student of civil war history. It is not for the fainthearted, or those easily depressed by recounts of death and dying,and burial, which the book primarily focuses on. I found this to be a very compelling book to read, however, once I got through the first chapter. Thw wirter brought out a lot of things I had no prior knowledge of, particularly the views of the importance in our society of a "good death" and transmitting this to the survivors of a fallen soldier.
Managing the Civil War dead made more dificult by the mystery September 18, 2008
The vastness of the civil war dead are unimaginable. Deaths were six times greater than WWII, or given that rate(2%) and today's population, we would be confronted with 6 Million fatalities. Could we - would we stand for such inepitude in the political generals? Amidst these gross statistics, Faust tells the narrative of the individual--"the importance of the individual life, the husband and father who was just as dead...as the thousands who had perished in the din of dramatic battle. He was a man who counted even if he was not counted." The mystery is that more than half of the dead were never named. This narrative of Civil War mortality reflects on the morality and its meaning-- "the place of the individual in a world of mass and increasingly mechanized slaughter. It was about what counted in a world transformed in four years...Where did God belong in such a world."
 An important reminder of American history August 18, 2008
As we move towards the next election, this book serves as a timely reminder of how we became the nation that we are. By focusing on the dead, we are forced to consider how personal loss affected the mindset of so many families in the North and the South. These deaths remain alive for these families and their descendants and we would do well to remember their influence on contemporary politics. It is also appropriate to consider the religious zeal, so well described by the author, with which the majority of young men went into battle to meet death face to face. They were as convinced of eternal life in heaven as any suicide bomber today, and their relatives expected to meet them in heaven too. There is much to learn and much to ponder in this beautifully written book.
Intricate Work August 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a monumentally important work which will explain Americans' attitude towards our war dead. This is the short-term gain.
The long-term gain, the more provocative reading, is how the Civil War dead became a constituency in our Post-War Republic which tacitly spoke in favor of Manifest Destiny and the expanding American Empire.
Another reading would hint that American Individualism doesn't end with death.
All-in-all, a treasure trove of ideas about who we are and how we relate to death--specifically violent death in the name of "defending our country."
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