This Republic of Suffering

Drew Gilpin Faust. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Vintage Books, 2008.

The American Civil War did a lot of things. One of the most profound outcomes of the war was the sheer number of lives it claimed. War, at its most basic level, is about killing people. For Americans who lived through the Civil War, the experience of death on an industrial scale challenged antebellum notions of mortality and humanity. Aside from the political and moral issues at stake, the Civil War unleashed a quantitative and qualitative overload of carnage both corporal and psychological on American society.

Faust organizes her book thematically, moving from "Dying" through "Killing", "Burying", "Naming" and so on. She notes in the beginning that Americans of the mid-nineteenth century were more accustomed to the first-hand experience of death than most contemporary Americans are--most people died in their homes then, and the antebellum notion of the "good death" predominated. A "good death" meant that the person dying was prepared for his or her demise, at peace with their fate and ready for a (Christian) afterlife. Also, their death was in the home, witnessed by family who were there for comfort--a comfort for both the dying and the bereaved, whom needed confirmation that their loved one had met his or her end in a manner befitting both gender norms and religious strictures.

The experience of sending thousands of young men off to die in strange places far from the people who knew them and loved them was a massive shock, then, and one which forced society to alter old expectations to accommodate new realities. Patriotism was often substituted for faith as the guiding principle at work, because while there was no way to confirm that a dying soldier had been ready to meet his maker, the death of a soldier could, by default, be said to have been sanctified by service to country.

The ways in which the scale and industrial savagery of the war challenged older assumptions and mores was matched by the ways in which it created entirely new problems and relations. The question of what to do with the dead, how to memorialize them, and how to compensate the families they left behind had massive consequences, ranging from an expanded role for the national state (particularly regarding pensions for Union veterans), to the landscaping of national cemeteries.

It is often said that the Civil War was the first modern war, a break from those that came before and a precursor to those which would follow. Faust has found a new way in which to make that old argument.