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

  • Approximately 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War between 1861-1865. That is about equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.

  • The Civil War’s rate of death was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities.

  • Approximately 2.1 million northerners and 880,000 southerners took up arms between 1861 and 1865.

  • In the South, three out of four white men of military age became soldiers. During the American Revolution the army never numbered more than 30,000 men.

  • Twice as many soldiers died of disease than war wounds.

  • One out of five Southern men of military age were killed during the war.

Drew Gilpin Faust’s harrowing account of death and its reckoning during the Civil War is filled with astounding facts like these, but the book’s power comes not from its numbers, but from its thoughtful, deeply moving journey through America’s experience with loss on a scale the young nation had never before witnessed or imagined.

How does a predominantly Christian nation reconcile the idea of divine providence with the seemingly random brutality of modern warfare? How does a Christian soldier justify killing, seemingly in violation of the codes of his faith? How does one die a ‘good death’ when faced with the possibility of instantaneous annihilation? What does a republic owe to its citizen soldiers who have fought and died, often times against their will? How does a government account for, inter, and catalogue the dead on such a massive scale across thousands of miles of open country?

We still seek to use our deaths to create meaning where we are not sure any exists. The Civil War generation glimpsed the fear that still defines us—the sense that death is the only end. We still work to live with the riddle that they—the Civil War dead and their survivors alike—had to solve so long ago.

These questions and more made up some of the unprecedented challenges facing Americans in the aftermath of the war, and Faust diligently tackles them all across 8 taught chapters with names like: Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Realizing, Accounting, etc.

But this is a book not just concerned with facts and figures, dates and battles; not just an outline of what people did, but what they felt, how they grieved, and how they described their experiences. It’s a book about what Americans wrote, sang, made and sold.

Faust tells powerful stories of grieving parents like Henry Bowditch who fashioned a watch fob from the button off his fallen son’s coat, of poets like Walt Whitman and writers like Ambrose Bierce who found their voice and purpose amongst the war’s destruction, of activists like Clara Barton who risked everything to help injured soldiers and who founded the American Red Cross. It’s moving stuff.

Faust is not only a first-rate historian, but she herself was a pioneering leader, being the first woman to serve as President of Harvard University. Though born in New York City, Faust was raised in the south, specifically in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, scene of so many of the Civil War’s most dramatic moments. She’s authored six books including this one which was a finalist for not only an American Book Award but also a Pulitzer Prize.

I found Faust’s writing to be wonderfully fluid, empathetic, and mostly free from any of the academic jargon or pretense you might expect from a Harvard president. Though the book loses just a bit of steam in the final chapters, it’s mostly a fascinating and engaging read.

I had originally added this book to my list not only because it seemed to be a constant presence in virtually every list of essential Civil War books that I came across, but also because I felt it would work as a good closing chapter to my readings on the war. And I felt like it delivered that in spades. This Republic of Suffering is a unique, compelling and necessary work. I would recommend it as part of anyone’s Civil War studies.