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Reviews
This Republic of Suffering
Death and the American Civil War
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By Drew Gilpin Faust
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| (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Pp. xviii, 346. Illustrations, notes, index. $27.95.) |
| It may seem difficult to believe that, after the publication of tens of thousands of books on the American Civil War, one could still write a work on the subject packed with information unknown to most students of that war. But Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering surely constitutes such a book. She has chosen to examine the subject of the many deaths incurred on campaign and in camp—how they were counted, how they figured in religion and popular culture, how people coped with them in the practical sense of body recognition and disposal, and how major literary figures of the era wrote about them. |
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One of the important reasons that this subject has remained untreated is the intellectual insularity of Civil War studies as a field. The new social history inaugurated an interest in the popular conception of death. Many readers will recall the appearance, beginning in the middle of the 1970s, of Philippe Ariès's books on attitudes toward death in the Western world. There followed in the field of American colonial history David E. Stannard's The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (1977). The inventive Robert V. Bruce wrote a 1981 essay on "Lincoln and the Riddle of Death." But interest in the subject did not result in a comprehensive book-length appraisal in relation to the American Civil War until now. |
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Thanks to Faust, we learn a great deal about death in the Civil War, from embalming to spiritualism and changing views of heaven. She begins by explaining the conventions of the Good Death, detailing how soldiers, civilians, and politicians all strained to lend shape and meaning to the many war deaths by fitting them into that pattern. Once a student of the period reads her clear and readable treatment of the subject, hundreds of Civil War-era letters will never look quite the same again:
Letters describing soldiers' last moments on Earth are so similar, it is as if their authors had a checklist in mind. In fact, letter writers understood the elements of the Good Death so explicitly that they could anticipate the information the bereaved would have sought had they been present at the hour of death: the deceased had been conscious of his fate, had demonstrated willingness to accept it, had shown signs of belief in God and in his own salvation, and had left messages and instructive exhortations for those who should have been at his side (p. 17)
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Even more important ideas come in the last half of the book, where Faust examines religion, cemeteries, and statistics. I think she exaggerates the degree of religious doubt caused by Civil War casualties in the relentlessly pious and evangelical America of the mid-nineteenth century, but she certainly does a splendid and restrainedly fair-minded job of describing and analyzing the opposing, sentimental religious view of death embodied in the widely read work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (1869). Faust makes clear that the movement after the war to provide marked graves for all the Civil War dead reflected democratic values new to great wars. No longer was the conflict commemorated merely by a few heroic bronze statues of generals and politicians. The Confederate dead were not included in the Congressional Act of February 1867 "to establish and protect national cemeteries." The corresponding southern memorial movement, then, was much more "a grassroots undertaking that mobilized the white South" (p. 241). As Faust points out, these two sectional movements together created the powerful national abstraction of the Civil War Dead. |
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Faust's chapter on the now-famous statistics of total deaths resulting from the Civil War is shrewd, carefully pointing out the ways in which casualty figures in after-battle reports might be exaggerated (as a badge of courage) or diminished (to hide the army's true and dangerous condition from the enemy—a tactic of Robert E. Lee's, apparently). |
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Her chapter on religion is the second-longest in the book, but the subject deserves such extended consideration in light of the fact that Civil War casualties were accrued in an era of cultural domination by evangelical Protestantism. I think it is a shame, however, that Faust did not devote a chapter at least as long strictly to the subject of nationalism, since nationalism, as Benedict Anderson has reminded us, has a crucial quality of concern "with death and immortality," and ultimately probably offers the most compelling explanation of the Civil War Dead. |
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Mark E. Neely Jr. is the McCabe-Greer Professor of Civil War History at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He is the author of numerous books on the Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, including The Boundaries Of American Political Culture In The Civil War Era (2005), The Union Divided: Party Conflict In The Civil War North (2002), Southern Rights: Political Prisoners And The Myth Of Confederate Constitutionalism (1999), and The Last Best Hope Of Earth: Abraham Lincoln And The Promise Of America (1993).
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