This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
by Drew Gilpin Faust
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Book Summary Information
Author: Drew Gilpin FaustEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-01-06
ISBN: 0375703837
Number of pages: 346
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
Book Review: "The Vegetables Get More Tender Care"
Summary: 5 Stars
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage Civil War Library)
"[Bodies are] buried like potatoes to protect them from frost. But the Vegetables get more tender care." --Civil War Chaplain
Drew Gilpin Faust's exhaustively researched examination of death in the Civil War is powerful social history. Faust, a historian who was recently installed as President of Harvard University, examines the notion of `The Good Death," its religious and moral significance, and what the unimaginable carnage of war did to it. Drawing on personal correspondence and official reports, Faust treats the topics of Dying; Killing, Burying, Naming, Realizing, Believing and Doubting; Accounting, Numbering, and finally, Surviving."
Much like World War I which would follow in a few years, both sides were unprepared for the magnitude of the carnage. The Union expected the War would be over in weeks or months; the Confederates felt the same way.
The combination of Napoleonic tactics and industrial-age technology, coupled with medical treatment that was "at the end of the medical middle ages," resulted in simply incomprehensible numbers of casualties.
. "The Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day of combat in American history, left both Union and Confederate armies staggering.... Twenty-three thousand men and untold numbers of horses and mules lay killed or wounded. A Union surgeon reported that a week after the battle "the dead were almost wholly unburied, and the stench arising from it was such as to breed a pestilence." ("This Republic of Suffering, P. 66)
Profiteers and charlatans emerged from the shadows... despicable people who promised to return soldiers' bodies to their families...for a fee. The proliferation of death affected everything from transportation (the use of railways to transport bodies) to fashion(the elaborate array of "mourning clothing). The single most lasting effect of the Civil War was the beginning of the National Cemetery system: "Civil War Americans worked to change death in ways that ranged from transforming the actual bodies of the dead through embalming to altering the circumstances and conditions of interment by establishing what would become the national cemetery system and massive postwar reburial program."
Just as World War I would create its own literature -- Wilfred Owen, Sigfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke; the Civil War fostered the creativity of Walt Whitman, Melville , and Ambrose Bierce.
Faust writes: "Civil War carnage transformed the mid-nineteenth century's growing sense of religious doubt into a crisis of belief that propelled many Americans to redefine or even reject their belief in a benevolent and responsive diety."
Faust's book is carefully researched and eminently readable. Her "notes" are worth spending time on.
The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War
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