Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust has written an informative and troubling study of how antebellum Americans adopted and shaped a 'Culture of Death' during the bewildering and staggering carnage of the Civil War.
An estimated 620,000 soldiers were shot, blown apart by cannon fire, or killed by botched battlefield operations during the years that the war raged (1861-65). As the author points out, an equivalent proportion of the current U.S. population would be six million losses. Lincoln believed that the mass killing transformed a provisional organization of states into a unified nation, but it was a bloody process that forced families to adopt new social rituals to both make sense of and work their way through all the dying.
Faust describes in intricate but highly readable detail how bereaved Americans struggled to reconcile the systemized slaughter with a long-cherished belief in a loving and benevolent God. She uses the written memories of soldiers and their families as well as military leaders, chaplains, medical personnel, and even wartime poets to reconstruct the ways that those destined for the battlefield prepared themselves spiritually for violent ends, and how those they left behind reframed the losses so that spiritual bankruptcy and general despair did not result.
The huge death tolls experienced at Gettysburg, Shiloh, Bull Run, Antietam, and other battle sites resulted in new commercial enterprises, such as the undertaking profession. Embalming also became routine practice for the first time. On the military end, a federal system of national cemeteries was established for Union casualties, while the South honored its dead in private cemeteries that were also monuments to their lost effort.
Powerful and stirring, "This Republic of Suffering" provides a valuable new dimension to how we perceive the Civil War. |
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War Books In Print, Audio Books.