| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. By Drew Gilpin Faust. (New York: Knopf, 2008. xviii, 346 pp. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-375-40404-7.)
"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" That verse from the Apostle Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians has long been a favorite scripture for funeral sermons. But in Drew Gilpin Faust's stunning new book, death carries a great deal of sting, and the grave often emerges victorious. In the boundless literature on the Civil War the neglect of death—a subject that adheres to virtually all others—is quite remarkable. To cite the most egregious example, battle studies typically pay precious little attention to those killed in battle or to the mortally wounded. By the same token, cultural and social historians studying death in America have often ignored the Civil War even when writing about the nineteenth century—no small feat in itself.	1
Bringing to the topic her considerable historical talents and anthropological sensibilities, Faust has written a book of fundamental importance for understanding not only the Civil War but nineteenth-century America and its historical legacies. Death as work is the metaphor employed throughout This Republic of Suffering, and there is as much attention devoted to mechanics as to ideas. The "work of death" involved preparing for death, dying itself, and dealing with the consequences. Time and again the reader is confronted with the enormous and unimaginable scale of the war. Even though the Civil War generation struggled to figure out how to deal with the massive number of deaths without losing sight of individual deaths, Faust is just as interested in the mundane and often horrific details. Any book with index entries for "bodies: odor and discoloration," "gangrene," and "maggots" is bound to be something of a stomach-churning read, but the squeamish should not shy away from this latest work by one of our finest historians.	. . .

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