“A soldier’s death only lasted a moment but for his family, his death was literally endless. As his work was over, theirs had just begun.” This statement can be considered the basis of Drew Gilpin Faust’s book, This Republic of Suffering. Faust explains death in the Civil War in terms of dying, killing, burying, naming, numbering, mourning, and ultimately realizing death itself. Her book defines the bloodiest time in American history as one of extreme loss. The dead were obviously lost, but as Faust explains, survivors of the Civil War may have experienced the greatest lost, their own way of life and understanding of it.
Faust explains how after battle many dead bodies lay unburied as bones would soon litter the battlefields. In the South, 18 percent of white males of military age were killed during the Civil War alone. Decomposing bodies would create an unbearable stench that locals would have to deal with. Due to the fear of soldier’s identities being forever forgotten, many confronted death with scribing their names on paper and pinning it to their uniform. Confederate dead were often carrying a Bible with their personal information in them and some Union soldiers carried silver badges proclaiming the life it shielded. By doing this, the soldiers could at least attempt to control one aspect of dying. “If he could not save his life, he would at least try to preserve his name.”
Mourning for these slain soldiers was often something new to individuals and funeral sermons became life lessons. Reverend Charles Seymour Robinson declared that “Patriotism will come in to aid in mitigating the sorrow. These times are historic.” For most families, shared mourning was easier mourning. Civil War death redefined its survivor’s idea of life and its meaning. Survivors were changed by the war by what they had seen, felt, and lost. Citizens lost family but also the understanding of their own lives before the war.
James F. Russling defined treatment of the fallen as the sign and test of democracy, as well as an indicator of progress and modernity. Counting the dead helped shift focus from individual to total, from death to Dead. Faust argues that counting the dead sought to preserve the meaning of the individual but these numbers also undermined the individuality and democratic urgencies of the war. The process of burial, naming, and numbering was an evolutionary one. The evolution runs from men left rotting on battlefields, to being gathered by family, to hopefully buried in an individual grave, to organizations like the sanitary commission, to a National Cemetery system being established. The Civil War dead ultimately became powerful and immortal that would shape American public life for the next century plus.
Through This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust explains that Civil War death belonged to the entire nation. The dead and everything it symbolized-warfare, disease, burial, counting bodies, and realizing loss, all gave Americans a responsibility to those who gave their lives for the continuing freedom of America. Faust’s understanding of Civil War death vividly shows the amount of work done after killings on the battlefield. The book was helpful to grasp the fact that the Civil War affected every American in some way. Survivors lived the rest of their lives with grief, loss, and a duty to honor those who lost their lives for the greater good of the nation. Faust, like many Americans try to make sense of the numbers 360,222 Union deaths and 258,000 Confederates killed. It seems inconceivable to understand the meaning of that many deaths but trying to grasps that vastness of death is a way of tribute and honor to the victims.
