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Whistle Stopper - This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
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List Price: $27.95
Our Price: $13.65
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Manufacturer: Knopf
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.71
EAN: 9780375404047
ISBN: 037540404X
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 2008-01-08
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2008-01-08
Studio: Knopf
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: This Replubic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Comment: This book has a lot of quotes from Civil War soldiers and the imagery is spectacular. It is one of the best books on the Civil War I have read. Makes the war real.
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Summary: The Specter of Death touched all and changed the nation!
Comment:
The Specter of Death touched all and changed the nation
Dr. Drew Faust's The Republic of Suffering is an academic work that attempts to analyze how the horrific amount of death in the Civil War affected both the individuals involved, the genera noncombatant citizenry, and the nation as a whole. With so much death and misery everywhere, how did the nation come to grips with so much suffering? Never was the magnitude of the Civil War imagined when war broke out in 1861. Most in the North and South thought it would be a relatively quick "little war", with each siding predicting easy victory. Sadly, this proved not the case. By the horrific battle at Antietam, the reality of the misery began to sink in. Death hovered over the split nation and touched every household. The pre-war notions of the "good death" was challenged by the utter magnitude of the battles. Bodies piled on bodies and simply overwhelmed the sensibilities of those that survived. General Robert E. Lee eloquently summed it up at the death of General A.P. Hill, "He is at rest now, and we who are left are the ones to suffer."
I applaud Dr. Faust's excellent in-depth work. Although tedious at times, it represents an excellent scholarly work. To understand the true magnitude of America's most consuming conflict, one must understand the overwhelming suffering that everyone alive at the time went through. Whether soldier, citizen, child, slave, politician, government bureaucrats, or foreign visitor, all had to deal with the stench of death on equal footing. Only the dead were at peace, the living had to continue on and grapple with the debris of war. The Civil War was more than just battles and soldiers fighting. It was more than a clash of ideologies. It was more than ending slavery and a way of life. It was a seminal moment in our history, and like all seminal moments it was gut-wrenching. America would never again be the same and view the glory of war in the same way. Death and suffering took on new meaning. Even the most chivalrous of soldiers became savage gentlemen as they engaged in a new type of total warfare. The sheer immensity of it all simply could not have been imagined, and once experienced, change the nation forever. Death visited every doorstep and suffering was every man's shadow. America was changed forever . It was for future generations to determine if for the better, as those that lived through it suffered mightily and wept for the fallen and the lost of America naiveté.
Recommended for those interested in more than Civil War battles, strategies, and tactics. It is not a quick read but requires the reader to plough through a well written and well researched academic work.
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Summary: Informative, Restrained
Comment: While some might expect a book subtitled "Death and the American Civil War" to be a gore fest, "This Republic of Suffering" focuses instead on the psychological, emotional and spiritual impacts of the war. This is welcome relief, as most accounts of the Civil War spotlight battle strategies or glorify the "noble sacrifice" made by the soldiers and the families, to the exclusion of war's existential wounds and challenges. Author Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, has covered all the bases in dealing with the nation's reaction to the unprecedented of volume death caused by the war. She discusses the "work" of killing, and the naming and counting of the dead, all to show how Americans attempted to fit the war's unprecedented carnage into their moral framework.
Faust's basic thesis is this: In the mid-nineteenth century, Victorians were obsessed with the idea of "the Good Death" -- one in which the dying were surrounded by loved ones, had the opportunity to consciously affirm their impending fate and were able to express their belief in their eventual arrival in Heaven. Faust dissects the letters of soldiers -- dying and facing death -- who sought to assure their distant families that they were dying a Good Death. Their comrades, in post-mortem letters, toiled mightily to comfort families with tales of the lost one's battlefield bravery, acceptance of death and expressions of piety. What fascinates is how these writers, with every reason in the world to tell comforting lies, kept their death-bed tales within the realm of the truth. A soldier who showed no overt religiosity might be lauded instead for bravery that indirectly proved love of neighbor via his demonstrated love of country.
The task of locating, identifying and reburying the dead was enormous and often fruitless: up to 1/3 of the dead were never identified. But it says so much about civilians and their government that they were willing to go to enormous expenses of time and treasure to try. Faust details the way families dealt with death -- by seeking bodily preservation and transport from the newly-founded embalming industry. The sheer volume of the work -- which only began with the disposal of literally millions of pounds of putrefying horse and human flesh -- showed how brutal was this war, how daunting was the task of recovery and how naive was the nation about the ghastliness of modern warfare. Faust discusses the important role played by black Americans in honoring their white comrades. She also highlights the role of women in memorializing the dead and (in the case of Clara Barton) marking their graves.
The Civil War was a period during which the nation simultaneously tore itself to pieces and attempted to reassemble, repatriate and otherwise honor the butchered dead. "This Republic of Suffering" shows our nation working nobly to bring sense and value to a horrible experience. The task was relatively easy for the victorious Northerners, who could take comfort in having saved the Union and ended slavery. But Southern families needed comfort too, and their solutions (ultimately accepted by whites in the North) had a profound effect on the American political landscape for the next century.
"This Republic of Suffering" is mostly intellectual and low-key, sometimes making for slow reading. But I ultimately found it to be worth the time.
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Summary: Coping with Death
Comment: Americans of the present day, who are generally appalled when battlefield deaths reach even double-digit proportions, have almost no real comprehension of the tremendous loss of life suffered during the American Civil War. Because it all happened almost 150 years ago, it is easy for most to simply gloss over even a number as large as the 620,000 total deaths usually attributed to that war. That kind of number just does not have an impact on most of us because we find it difficult to put it into its proper perspective. Readers of Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering will never make that mistake again.
Those who lived through the bloody days of 1861-1865 were almost overwhelmed by the magnitude of their losses. In addition to the estimated 620,000 soldiers who lost their lives during that four-year span, approximately 50,000 civilians died as well. All told, the United States lost about 2 percent of its population in less than half a decade of civil war, the equivalent of a 6,000,000 person loss if today's population were to suffer a similar rate of attrition. There was hardly a family in the country not impacted by the horrors of this war so it is little wonder that the country struggled to understand what was happening to it.
Faust details what it was like for small towns near the fighting when the townspeople could suddenly find the dead bodies scattered on adjacent fields to outnumber the townspeople themselves. She explains what it was like for the several hundred thousand families whose fathers and sons became part of the vast number of "unknowns" buried in unmarked or mass graves, lost to them forever. Equally importantly, Faust places human faces on those who struggled not only to cope personally with so much death but to create the very procedures modern Americans expect their government to use today in order to fully account for every soldier who has paid the ultimate price in service to this country. One cannot read this book without coming away with a new respect for the Civil War generation.
The best coping mechanism available to nineteenth century Americans was the concept of the Good Death. Parents and spouses were greatly comforted if able to determine that their loved ones had died a Good Death, one in which they were able to express an awareness and acceptance of their fate, a belief in God, and some message for those who were unable to be at their side when they died. Soldiers and hospital workers did their best to inform families back home that this was the case for those lost in the war but almost 50 percent of those who died were never identified, leaving families wondering for years.
Faust points out an interesting side effect of the widespread acceptance of the Good Death concept. In her estimation, although the religious concept of a Good Death offered comfort to mourners and helped prepare soldiers for the likelihood of their own deaths, the concept was also one of the things that "enabled the slaughter" in the first place. Soldiers, confident in their individual mortality, were more willing to face death both as a fulfillment of their duty and as a potential relief from the tortures they were enduring on a daily basis.
In the years following the war, the United States government, in response to the feelings of its citizens, formalized many of the procedures to handle soldiers lost at war that are still in place today. A system of national cemeteries was established and the government spent slightly over $4 million by 1871 to locate and rebury every Union soldier who had been lost in the South. Formal procedures were established in the military to account for every soldier lost on the field of battle and to notify next-of-kin in a timely manner. Military pensions and disability payments became the excepted way for the government to reward soldiers for their service. That none of this was in place before the Civil War illustrates just how unprepared the country was for a war of the magnitude of the one it faced in April 1861.
Of course, the new procedures were solely for the benefit of Union soldiers. Confederate bones were often left in the field to rot even after the bodies of Union soldiers had been recovered, ensuring that southerners would have to bury and honor their own dead through the use of private funds (most often raised by southern women), insuring the animosity of the South for decades after the war. The contempt shown by the Federal government for the soldiers of the South reinforced the hostility still present there and contributed to the sectionalism problems that persisted into the twentieth century.
This Republic of Suffering is more than a book for historians and Civil War buffs. This is a book with lessons for a country that even today finds itself in another long and challenging war.
Customer Rating:
Summary: INTERESTING book on serious issues after Civil War
Comment: 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.
During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today’s population would be six million. This Republic of Suffering explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. The eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, pondered who should die and under what circumstances, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.
Faust details the logistical challenges involved when thousands were left dead, many with their identities unknown, on the fields of places like Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. She chronicles the efforts to identify, reclaim, preserve, and bury battlefield dead, the resulting rise of undertaking as a profession, the first widespread use of embalming, the gradual emergence of military graves registration procedures, the development of a federal system of national cemeteries for Union dead, and the creation of private cemeteries in the South that contributed to the cult of the Lost Cause. She shows, too, how the war victimized civilians through violence that extended beyond battlefields—from disease, displacement, hardships, shortages, emotional wounds, and conflicts connected to the disintegration of slavery.
Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, and nurses, of northerners and southerners, slaveholders and freedpeople, of the most exalted and the most humble are brought together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War’s most fundamental and widely shared reality.
Were he alive today, This Republic of Suffering would compel Walt Whitman to abandon his certainty that the “real war will never get in the books.”
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