This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust | The "Good Death" in the Civil War

books:

This Republic of S...

	This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War Drew Gilpin Faust Knopf, 2008 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 55 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

The Civil War and the Harvest of Death

Most books on the American Civil War can be grouped into one of two categories. The first category consists of studies of the military history of the conflict, frequently focusing on individual battles or campaigns. The second category focuses on the political aspects of the conflict with much recent literature centered upon Emancipation and with the long delay following the Civil War in securing civil rights for the former slaves.

Drew Gilpin Faust's "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War" cuts across these two categories by studying in detail the extent of the death and suffering resulting from America's greatest conflict. Most studies of the Civil War, of the first or second category, do pay attention to Civil War death but in the context of other themes. There are relatively few studies which take death as the primary theme for a study of the entire War. (Faust has good precedent for her theme in Gregory Coco's "A Strange and Blighted Land" and other works by Coco, among other writers, of the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg).

Faust emphasizes the strongly religious and evangelical character of mid-19th Century United States and of the familiarity that society, in contrast to how many people view contemporary America, felt with death. She emphasizes the concept of the "good death" after a full life and in the presence of family, with the deceased having the opportunity to turn his thoughts towards repentance and religion. The Civil War and its carnage ran squarely into the concept of the good death as soldiers in the hundreds of thousands died from disease or bullets far from home in a manner that was depersonalizing, painful, and bleak. Casualty rates in the Civil War were extraordinarily high and difficult even today to measure precisely, especially for the South.

Faust describes how, at the outset of the war, neither the North nor the South expected a lengthy conflict and thus made no provision for handling the massive casualties that occurred. Ambulance service -- the retrieval of the dead and wounded -- medical care, identification of the dead, proper burial, and the notification of kin were all seriously deficient. Faust describes these and many other aspects of death and of the brutality of the conflict and of the efforts made, as the War dragged on, to improve the care given to the dead and dying.

Faust is insightful on the efforts of non-government groups, such as the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission, and of individuals such as Clara Barton, to relieve suffering during the war and to treat each soldier as a treasured individual rather than as a cog in the military effort. Similar efforts were made on a smaller scale in the South. She also describes well the efforts made after the war by persons such as Edward Whitman, by the Federal government, and by women's groups in the former Confederacy to find the dead, frequently buried in hastily-constructed graves, and to identify and inter them with respect and honor. This effort, Faust argues, presaged an expansive role for the government in the theretofore private affairs of individuals and marked a change in the way the culture viewed and responded to death.

The most impressive part of the book is the use Faust makes of contemporaneous literary accounts of the Civil War. Her book is replete with references to Civil War poetry which, whatever its shortcomings may be as literature, is a precious guide to how people living through the war responded to it. In addition to the popular literature of the day, she draws upon the works of Lincoln (the Second Inaugural Address)Whitman, Melville, Ambrose Bierce, Emily Dickinson, John DeForest (author of the 1867 novel "Miss Ravenel's Conversion"), and Oliver Wendell Holmes to show how the destruction wrought by the Civil War was viewed by contemporaries.

In a recent article in the New York Review, James McPherson has pointed out that Faust's book gives insufficient weight to other important results of the Civil War over and beyond the appalling casualties. Thus she does not address the preservation of the Union and the expansion of democracy, the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and the eventual, although delayed, extension of rights of citizenship to the former slaves. She also gives insufficient weight to the manner in which the war ultimately came to reunite the North and the South which had been bitter enemies during the conflict and in the immediate years thereafter. But there will be few readers who will be tempted to romanticize the Civil War after reading Faust's account. Her study reminded me of the terrible price Americans have had to pay to secure the government and the liberties we hold dear and all too frequently take for granted.

Robin Friedman

for more information click here

The "Good Death" in the Civil War

It is really hard to put this book into a category. In an unusual approach to an almost unknown aspect of the Civil War, the author has given us a book dealing exclusively with the subject of death during that conflict. That may seem odd and ghoulish, but the book is actually extremely well-written, and tells the reader many things that he or she has not thought about before when consdidering this war. We have chapters on finding the dead, burying the dead, numbering the dead, seeking a lost family member on the battlefield, and also establishing national cemeteries for the dead. This subject would, at first glance, appear to be exceedingly dull and boring, but it is not, and the reader follows chapter after chapter, learning numerous things not even considered before opening this book. This is well done, and it gives us more insight into the world and the people of that conflict, now a century and a half in the past.

for more information click here

Republic of Suffering - Excellent

This book is fascinating as an insight into the forces that produced the United States; a federation which holds together as a country.

When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd...

Harvard President Drew Faust's marvelous new book, "This Republic of Suffering," explains how the nation tried to make sense of the Civil War. It was, by all measures, a nearly impossible task that required every social and spiritual tool available -- silent prayer, civic religion, séances, philosophy, the visual arts, mortuary science, pulp journalism, public grieving, new forms of group fellowship and even government bureaucracy.

Much of Faust's book is devoted to the nation's spiritual response. In other words, how Christian America applied its 19th century concepts of "the Good Death" and domesticity to the unbelievable carnage of the war, which as first seemed to make a mockery of those very same ideals. We learn, for instance, how publishers printed customized memorial posters of missing solders so that family members (without a corpse or grave to visit) could at least have something tangible to grieve over.

Another example of this massive cultural adaptation was the founding of national cemeteries throughout the South to provide a "proper resting place" for the Union dead. (Confederate bodies were not allowed in, at least in most cases.) As Faust explains, just counting, collecting and reburying the dead took years of struggle -- not to mention the massive psychic toll on the burial teams (usually Black men) and families of the lost.

Every corner of American society was affected by this process of "coming to terms," including the burgeoning field of creative literature. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman wrote "When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom'd" -- one of the most powerful poems of the 19th century. (It's featured prominently in Faust's book.) Whitman grieved not just for the fallen president but also for the 620,000+ soldiers who died far from home. One part of the poem reads:

"Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle, as with companions,
and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars, and ghostly pines so still...

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?"

Today, 143 years later, we are still grieving. As I look out my window across downtown Battle Creek, Michigan, I can see a bronze Civil War memorial statue standing alone in the cool morning mist of early April.

"Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori"

(Or so we once believed...)

for more information click here

INTERESTING book on serious issues after Civil War

I enjoyed this book, but found it sad.It gives a good understanding of the truama that Americans went through during the Civil War.The South was especially traumatized for many reasons.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

products you might be interested in