This Republic of Suffering:  Death and the American Civil War.  By Drew Gilpin Faust.  (New York:  Vintage, 2008.  Pp. xviii, 346.)

            Drew Gilpin Faust’s Republic of Suffering is a fascinating examination of the far-reaching effects that the Civil War’s high death tolls had upon American society.  Faust suggests that the extreme death tolls created by the war caused Americans to challenge many of the fundamental assumptions upon which American society had been founded.  She further argues that the war’s “republic of shared suffering” created by death “transformed society, culture, and politics” in the United States (xv).  Accordingly, Faust demonstrates that the war was instrumental in shaping modern America.

            Faust examines the impact of Civil War deaths in a number of different areas.  She shows that the war dramatically altered the traditional American method of dying, which involved heartfelt expressions of religious faith to family members gathered around the bed of the individual who was dying.  Due to the war, military companions and nurses served as proxy for the family members, often relating the scene to the family via letter.  To further aid in mourning, the war led to an increased use of embalming and extensive efforts to provide names and identities for the deceased.  Although these conventions honored the war’s growing number of dead soldiers, they principally served to comfort family members and friends who were worried about the eternal state of the departed soldiers.  Faust further argues that through these practices, the living took upon them the task of ensuring the immortality and memory of their dead.

            As a part of the effort to honor the dead and provide closure for the living, both Northerners and Southerners initiated massive reburial campaigns to identify and provide a proper burial for dead soldiers.  Faust suggests the effort to identify and properly bury Civil War soldiers explains the development of the numerous Civil War societies, as well as the establishment of the Lost Cause mentality in the South.  Through her discussion of these campaigns, Faust shows that the efforts to memorialize the dead began well prior to the reunification efforts and monument building of the 1890s.  Further, she shows how Southern women took up the banner of the Confederacy and asserted themselves and their commitment to the Lost Cause in overtly political ways.  Hence, their mourning provided Southern women with an increased sense of agency.  In the North, reburial efforts gave rise to new ideas about the government’s responsibilities to care for its dead and the widows they left behind.  As something of a precursor to American progressivism, the governments efforts to care for its dead created new expectations in the minds of the American people about the help that they could reasonably expect from the government in times of crisis.

            While Faust successfully demonstrates the enormous impact of Civil War deaths upon American society, she has a tendency to focus upon aberrant responses rather than the impact of the war upon mainstream Americans.  For instance, she devotes a significant amount of space to the topic of spiritualism and the efforts of some Americans to reconnect with their dead by means of séances and other spiritualistic mediums.  Additionally she relies heavily upon the writings of Ambrose Bierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville to demonstrate that the war challenged some of the underpinnings of American faith and religious devotion.  Bierce and Holmes, in particular, came to disavow the existence of God in the wake of the war’s large death tolls and perplexing questions.  While these responses deserve recognition and certainly demonstrated the profound impact of death upon their participants, such responses were the exceptions rather than the rule.  Although it is certain that the war caused numerous Americans to ask serious questions of their faith, very few abandoned their faith like Bierce and Melville.  Such individuals were thus far from illustrative of the whole of America, and ought to be treated as exceptional, rather than representative, examples.

            As a whole, however, Faust has made a significant and groundbreaking contribution to the historiography of Civil War America.  In addition to proving the generally assumed argument that the war had produced untold suffering among American civilians and soldiers, Faust ably demonstrates that this suffering helped to transform the country’s ideas and institutions.  By emphasizing the role of suffering and the cost of the war to homes and families, Faust demonstrates that the war influenced the deepest recesses of the American psyche and left a list of casualties that far exceeded the traditionally cited statistics of 618,000 dead.  In reality, the impact of the Civil War went well beyond the battlefield, affecting nearly every home and family, and dramatically altering the makeup of American government and society.

Brett D. Dowdle