Such a poignant look at how the Civil War’s scale of destruction - and how unprepared both sides were for it - changed the view of death and the state’s responsibility to the fallen. ( )

Gilpin Faust discusses the notion of dying well, and how soldiers had to justify trying to kill others, even though it was against their beliefs. But then she goes into some subjects that were a bit surprising to me. Today, soldiers killed in combat or on the job, their remains are returned home to their families, and there are numerous National Cemeteries for them to be buried in. But many of these practices grew out of the Civil War. There was no formal method of identifying soldiers, no formal system for burying the fallen, or transporting them back to their families.

Gilpin Faust does a good job presenting the similarities and contrasts to the ordeals of those from the North and those from the South. There are lots of primary source materials, and a great deal of information in the end notes as well. There are a great deal of images in this rather short history book, but some people will likely find some of the photographs disturbing. This was the rise of photography, and people like Mathew Brady served as early photo-journalists, photographing camps, battlefields shortly after battles ended, or even sometime afterwards. So there are photographs of the dead- some lying where they fell, some along the process of burial, and one being embalmed before being sent to his family. These photographs, while squeamish, are necessary to demonstrate the various points she makes throughout the book.

A well written and documented book, I found it fascinating. If you would like to read up on a not often discussed social issues coming out of the Civil War, I highly recommend this book. This fall, the PBS program American Experience aired an episode entitled "Death and the Civil War", which is based on this book, which I would also recommend. ( )

An incredibly elocuent psychological history of the American Civil War. Every chapter stressing a different problem in the conflict.

The first chapter "Dying" talks about the importance of last words, the religious or patriotic connection with death, and what a "good death" would entail.
Despite clerical efforts, the boundary between duty to God and duty to country blurred, and dying braveyl and manfully became an important part of dying well.

The second chapter "Killing" is about the difficulty of killing your fellow human at first and then coming to terms with it by different psychological factors that military conflict ingrains in a soldier.
Human life diminished sharply in value, and the living risked becoming as dehumanized as the dead. Soldiers perhaps found it a relief to think of themselves as machines - without moral compass or responsability, simply the instruments of others' direction and will.

The third chapter "Burying" is about the value of having a good departure, in a sense of respect and the religious magnitude that it entails. It also talks about the different techniques to preserved corpses that are used to this day (yikes).
Families sought to see their lost loved ones in as lifelike state as possible, not just to be certain of their identity but also to bid them farewell.

The fourth chapter "Naming" comes to terms with the importance of individualizing the dead by finding who they were, building comissions from religious groups to help find the soldier's identities.
To die without identity seemed to Wormeley equivalent to surrendering one's humanity, becoming no more than an animal.

The fifth chapter "Realizing" describes the difficulties that civilians had to go through, from desease, grief, hunger, loss.
Wives, parents, children, and siblings struggled with the new identities - widows, orphans, the childless - that now defined their lifes. And they carried their losses into the acts of memory that both fed on and nurtured the widely shared grief well into the next century.

The sixth chapter "Believing and doubting" talks about the traditional view of death being challenged by the constant carnage that the war brought upon it. From changing the argument of why soldiers die, to connecting death with the tangible world and calling it spirituality.
Death was not loss, but both the instrument and the substance of victory.

The seventh chapter "Accounting" is about the postwar effort of some few to bring the fallen soldiers to their respective reburial places in their city of origin with new policies and financing. For northerners it was black civilians and soldiers helping to maintain their names and the places they were buried in order to find them. And for southerners it was mostly the women.
The reburial movement created a constituency of the slain, insistent in both its existence and its silence, men whose very absence from American life made them a presence that could not be ignored.

And the eighth chapter "Numbering" is about the importance of knowing how many... in order to have a context to deepened or altered the essence of the war.
They counted to establish the dimensions of the war's sacrifice and the price of freedom and national unity. They counted bacause numbers offered an illusion of certitude and control in the aftermath of a conflict that had transformed the apparent limits of human brutality. They counted, too, bacause there were just so many bodies to count. ( )

A discussion of the quarter million soldier deaths and countless civilian losses during our Civil war. The book was divided into chapters entitled "Dying", "Killing", Burying", Naming", "Realizing (Civilians and the Work of Mourning)", Believing and Doubting (the effects on Religious Convictions), "Accounting", "Numbering", and "Surviving". VERY SOBERING. ( )

An excellent and compelling piece of non-fiction, and a must-read for anyone working in death care in America. ( )

Excellent scholarship -- and an interesting lens to take a look at how the experience of the Civil War shaped the America that emerged from all that death and destruction, and the attitudes of Americans who were yet unborn. ( )

By focusing on the shared experience of death and loss Gilpin Faust frames the Civil War as a national experience rather than one of just North vs South. The author shows how the unprecedented carnage of modern warfare necessitated a shift in American understanding of death and dying that has pervaded the culture since. I can't help but read this account of crisis shaping culture in light of the current pandemic, especially the numbing effect of numbers.

Quote: "Americans had not just lost the dead; they had lost their own lives as they had understood them before the war." ( )

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust is an eye-opening, informative, and sober look at life up close and personal. When I thought of the Civil War I had never really thought of all the details of what it would be like other than tv shows. This book takes you down and dirty on the death and suffering of the dead and dying but those around those men. There are problems I would have never thought of. Heartbreaking, informative, and I cried at times for the terrible injustices that transpires. I read about the worst in some people but I saw the best in others.
In some ways the feelings are a lot like today. ( )

Not a light read but very interesting and enlightening. I was especially taken with the contrasts between how society processed so much death and destruction- then and now. Many aspects of how our nation deals with the tragedy of war stems directly for it’s experiences during the Civil War. ( )

Well written and presented but -- just too damned depressing. An account of the costs of our national nightmare. Not a tome to snuggle up with on a cold rainy day. ( )

An extremely grim, if absorbing, book. Faust takes a look at how both sides in the American Civil War treated the issue of their dead; he focuses mostly, though not exclusively, on the dead soldiers. The book marches through a logical progression, to wit: Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Realizing, Believing and Doubting, Accounting, and Numbering. One of the strongest things I got out of the book is how the war changed the way the United States dealt with its war dead; granted, the other wars previous to this (and subsequent to it) did not have the ferocious levels of dead that the Civil War did, it still strikes one that it was not just societal changes that made the treatment of the dead different. Technology, both in the killing and the recovery of the dead, had changed much. (After all, the railroads could send the boys to war, and bring their remains back.) The selection of illustrations is well-chosen. For the most part, Faust avoids trendy buzzwords in historiography (though gender stuff crops up a few times). Another thing, while I think of it, that crops up is how well Walt Whitman comes off in the book. The level of care he gave to wounded and dying soldiers says much about the man's basic decency; and of course, it enriched his own understanding and writing. A number of other reviews comment on how grim the book is. Undeniable, given the subject matter. If you can stick it, though, it's a good read. Recommended. ( )

One might say "another book about the Civil War, why?" but this is a remarkable effort. Gilpin looks at death in mid19th Century America with the focus on the Civil War and how the country handled the 600,000 plus deaths that came about because of the war. She organized the volume in chapters that focused on the idea of dying, the rules of burial, how to mark graves when you do not know the name of the soldier you are burying, the impact of all these deaths on the civilian population, what did the country owe to all these dead men in terms of recognition of where their final resting place was and the cost to the country and its people by the loss of all these men.

I approached this volume anticipating reading a scholarly tome but while she conducted great amounts of research and the notes and bibliography are immense, this turned out to be a page turner for me. Gilpin fills the pages with anecdotes from diaries, newspapers and memoires to illustrate her points. ( )

the book exams how both the north and the south deal with the huge number of dead in the civil war. in a word not very well! the number was overwhelming for each side. what interested me that before the war there was the concept of the good death. most people died at home surrounded by family and friends. the good death was when all would feel a sense of peace, that the person that died had lived a good life. that he or she was a important member of the family and the community. death was going to god's community. the civil war changed that. the solider died many miles from their home. they were not surrounded by family or community. often no knew they had been killed. perhaps if lucky members of their unit offer some comfort but it was not uncommon no one knew. the war changed how our nation viewed death. it became dark, lonely, and frightening. ( )

Despite recommendations from those in tune with my interests, I went out of my way to avoid reading This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust. Not only did the topic strike me as too gloomy and depressing, but I questioned the value of a book-length treatment of it. Then fate intervened and a copy came to me from an anonymous yet perspicacious “Secret Santa” via the annual holiday “Santathing” event sponsored by LibraryThing, the splendid online community especially fashioned for book nerds like me. Now I felt obligated.
As it turned out, This Republic of Suffering proved to be the perfect punctuation mark to my self-assigned intensive study of the Civil War during the sesquicentennial years. Over that time, I read some two dozen books on the conflict and its related themes, listened to countless hours of audio lectures in the car, watched film documentaries, visited battlefields – even digitized a rediscovered trove of Civil War correspondence and memoirs for a local museum, and spent a weekend seminar with legendary National Parks historian Ed Bearss that included tours of Antietam and Gettysburg. What could be missing?
As eminent historian and Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust brilliantly reminds us in this consequential study, what we have carelessly overlooked are the main characters: the sea of dead on both sides that totaled somewhere around 620,000 – about two percent of the nation’s population at the time, and a number equal to all dead in all other American wars through the Korean War! And these deaths did not simply epitomize a national tragedy, but they each represented a series of widespread individual tragedies for grieving mothers, fathers, wives, children and other members of extended families who were themselves victims of the Civil War even if they spent the war years hundreds or thousands of miles from the scenes of carnage that manifested these dead relations. This was a tangible and painful reality for millions of Americans touched by the war from a distance, but one that somehow had become lost to history until Faust neatly resurrected it here. It has been estimated that there have been in excess of fifty thousand books written on the Civil War since 1861, so it is somewhat astonishing when one is published that brings an entirely new perspective to what has been such an exhaustive study, but such is Faust’s triumph with This Republic of Suffering.
When we look back on mid-nineteenth century America from our twenty-first century standpoint, we cannot help but observe the prevalence of death for our relatively recent ancestors, in the explosive rates of infant mortality, in the numbers of women who perished in childbirth, in the much shorter average lifespans for those who lived in a time before modern medicine. But the inhabitants of that time could not see into the future. These grim realities were typical for their world. What was not typical, however, was the sudden loss of hundreds of thousands of men, most in their prime of life, over a brief four-year period. Two-thirds of these casualties may have succumbed to disease rather than bullets, but dead was dead, and these dead represented a significant segment of an entire generation that would be conspicuous in their absence for many decades after Appomattox. Faust deftly explores how this impacted both individual families and the nation at large, and how the survivors coped with such massive losses in practical, emotional and spiritual terms. Until This Republic of Suffering, this critical chunk of American history has been largely forgotten.
In the antebellum era, most Americans died at home rather than in today’s more commonly antiseptic hospital setting. Faust notes that there was a strong notion of an ars moriendi, a “Good Death,” that saw the end of life as a righteous path to heaven. The dead were tended to by their families; there were religious services and there was burial. The war changed all that. As Faust reveals, in the days before dog tags and databases, huge numbers of victims of munitions or measles went unidentified, leaving questions marks and a profound lack of closure for thousands upon thousands of families whose soldier boys never returned home. The task of seeking such closure was a significant priority after the war’s end, but so was the recovery of the remains, known and unknown, for proper reburial. For the victorious north, whose Union dead typically fell so far from home, this became both a private and a coordinated federal campaign. Embalming, then in its infancy, and sealed coffins capable of long distance shipment, all came into their own. So did the concept of great cemeteries to house the dead and memorialize them. And while charlatans who claimed to communicate with the other side preyed on many pitiful, grieving families, the more benign comforts of traditional religion and spirituality were also challenged and had to be refashioned for a different age that presided over losses of such magnitude in this cataclysmic war.
The Civil War still resonates to this day, which perhaps accounts for its ongoing fascination for us. Every great book about that war speaks to us for our own time, and this is true of This Republic of Suffering, as well, which contains a telling side note that seems to reinforce the notion that while the north won the war, it was indeed the south that won the peace. While I was reading this book, controversy was raging over the removal of Confederate monuments in southern cities. Those who sought to retain these often awkward shrines claimed that to remove them would be to dishonor Confederate dead. Yet ironically, as Faust reveals in her narrative, at least some of the north’s sense of urgency for recovering and relocating the bodies of the fallen was based upon the widespread reports of the deliberate defilement of Union remains in the states of the former Confederacy. Edmund B. Whitman, charged by the United States with heading up the effort to locate federals for reburial, noted that “he had witnessed the ‘total neglect’ or ‘wanton desecration’ of Union graves by a southern population whose ‘hatred of the dead’ seemed to exceed their earlier ‘abhorrence of the living.’” [p228]
This unpleasantness was to be set aside, along with much else, in the great reconciliation that marked the end of the nineteenth century, reestablishing legitimacy for the unfortunately “redeemed” south while trampling upon the rights of the formerly enslaved African-American population. In 1898, President McKinley made a speech heralding a new national policy to share in the care for Confederate graves. Frederick Douglass was gone by then, but had he overheard he likely would have chafed at the sentiment, an extension of honoring the dead of both sides which had gained currency some years before. “Death has no power to change moral qualities,” Douglass once lamented. “Whatever else I may forget,” he said, “I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.” [p269]
I am very grateful that I read this work; my initial reluctance was well trumped by its quality content. While there are parts of this book that go on for too long, and certain details that perhaps clutter up the narrative which might better have been left to footnotes, the writing is generally crisp and compelling. Moreover, This Republic of Suffering stands as a remarkable achievement for Civil War scholarship, and Drew Gilpin Faust deserves high accolades for her efforts. I would pronounce this as nothing less than a must-read for students of the Civil War era and its aftermath.

[Note: A great web link sponsored by the Civil War Trust that explores Civil War casualties in some detail can be found here: http://www.civilwar.org/education/civil-war-casualties.html ]

My review of: "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," by Drew Gilpin Faust, on my book blog http://wp.me/p5Hb6f-62 ( )

Ah hah. This book answered a lot of questions I've had about the combination of death, military service, mourning customs, and patriotism. i would even say, you cannot begin to understand Memorial Day without reading this book. Even if I don't approve/sanction it all, at least now I feel I know where it's coming from. This is not (just/only) history; this is understanding where a lot of our assumptions and practices come from. If you're a thinking participant in this republic, read this book. ( )

A fascinating and obviously grim chronicle of how both the Union and Confederacy coped with the unprecedented vast carnage on the battlefields. A vividly detailed, richly layered, exceptionally well-written work of history. ( )

[This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War] by [Drew Gilpin Faust], current President of Harvard University, has done a yeoman’s job of undertaking a topic that has been successfully avoided by authors up to this point in time. The topic is that of death both during and after the American Civil War.

Reviewing chapter headings that include:
The Work of Death
Dying and Killing
Burying, Naming, Realizing
Believing and Doubting
Accounting and Numbering and Surviving

should give anyone thinking about reading the book the clear idea that it will deal with this serious topic in its many aspects in a straight forward manner.

I could do an exhaustive review of the book but will leave that to others with the exception to say that I did not know prior to reading this book the part played by the Union internment of Union soldiers in the South to the exclusion of Rebel soldiers and the part that it played in energizing of the Lost Cause following the signing at Appomattox Court House.

Also, one of the reasons for establishing National Cemeteries in different states following the War were the depredations by Southerners of unsupervised Union graves in the years following the end of the war.

It certainly is a book all should read and although well written there does seem to be a lot of redundant padding of material where it is not necessary and a tendency to rhapsodize at length on various topics. But those parts can be easily skipped over with no problem.

In summary, a very worthwhile and draining book to read.

A microhistory of death during the civil war. How did the sudden increase in death effect the American concept of death? How did people of that era grieve loss and deal with the practical requirements of burial for hundreds of thousand? All the questions of the consequences of war are carefully examined and expounded in this excellent volume. ( )

I recommend this book to die hard Civil War buffs and US History teachers. It is a very detailed and, at times, fascinating examination of how the number of deaths in this conflict had an impact on a young nation - morally, socially, religiously, economically - and on the individuals who experienced it firsthand.
Due to its very scholarly nature, it took me a very long time to complete. I also think that it's fair to say that the reader gets the point before reading halfway through the book.
Excerpts would be very useful in a class discussion on the Civil War ( )

Death, dying, and killing in the Civil War. Faust argues that the scale of the Civil War transformed the meanings and modes of death, both for fighting men and for the civilians left behind—often left for months in ignorance of whether the soliders they cared about had survived or perished. Her accounts of how soldiers performed, or attempted to perform, “a good death” showed just how much social meaning shapes us, even in extremis. Race of course played a big role, both in how willing Southern whites were to kill Northern soldiers and in how living and dead black soldiers were treated. Before the Civil War, no one kept track of soldiers’ deaths in a systematic way; after, there was a massive effort both to identify the dead and change recordkeeping so people wouldn’t lose track of so many bodies and gravesites. Really interesting read. ( )

This history was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I don't know which book won the history award that year, but I can't imagine it was a better book, but it probably had a more pleasing subject than death, which is the focus of Ms. Gilpin's study. Death during the Civil War in the form of what the mid-19th century man considered a "good death," how important it was that each soldier die such a death, how that was determined, who determined it, what the burial arrangements were (or weren't), how the burial procedures were created, changed, and eventually were changed again, how the families reacted, how the nation reacted, how the commanders reacted, how the end of the war helped/changed/hindered the process, how and why the final casualty numbers were arrived at, and how the survivors reacted. I was fascinated from page one to the end and recommend this book highly to those who want a more full view of the Civil War and its effects. ( )

A fantastic book covering death in the Civil War. Gilpin Faust discusses 19th century American's performance of the Good Death and how that reverberated through the entire life and death process, and subsequently had an impact on post-war society. I wish I'd had a better grasp on Civil War history in general before reading this; if you're going to read this and McPherson, I'd say read the McPherson first - I wish I had.

Another bonus is the photographs included. I find it amazing to think there are photos from this era, how amazing. If terribly, terribly bleak. ( )

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.