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 book explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Historian 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, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.
"The next selection gets back to the theme of death and dying. This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust was, to me, an extraordinary book because, as I said earlier, we have written so much and watched so many movies that we think we know all about the Civil War . But what the Civil War was about, when you break it down to its essential components, was mass killing on a scale that we had never ever dreamed of. I have seen one estimate that if we were to have the same number of people killed today, as a percentage of the American population, we would have lost six million people. The whole process of caring for the dead and burying the dead and documenting the dead was a totally new experience. There was no such thing as national cemeteries, for example, until the Civil War. Drew Gilpin Faust takes on this rather serious task of documenting and, through her research and writing, demonstrating just how impactful the Civil War was on the consciousness of Americans to deal with this rather grim reality of mass death and mass killing. Yes. Gettysburg is one of the sites that I write about in my book. The national cemetery there is one of the first that was developed in the country. Gettysburg National Cemetery was where Lincoln gave his famous Gettysburg address, so the task of reburying the Union dead at Gettysburg is directly connected to the speech that many believe is the greatest speech of American history. It gave new meaning to the Civil War. It wasn’t just about preserving the Union, now the civil war was going to be about giving us—to quote from the address—‘a new birth of freedom.’ This connects back to Eric Foner’s book. He has a whole chapter devoted to the Abolitionist movement, the Gettysburg address, and the new birth of freedom that resulted from the Civil War. Yes, she is able to use the Civil War as a platform to talk about a new understanding of the terrible cost of war in general, because this was a war on an unprecedented scale. The whole world came to understand just what the impact would be. There wasn’t another Great War until World War One . So we had nearly fifty years of peace. Not entirely of peace because, of course, there were wars in Europe and in Asia but not on the scale of the American Civil War."
