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  • The Significance of the Dead
  • Clay Lewis (bio)
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (Knopf, 2008. xviii + 272 pages. Illustrated. $27.95)

Prior to the Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust tells us, death was a family affair that was anchored in religious faith. In the 1850s the "Good Death," as described in Jeremy Taylor's The Rules and Exercise of Holy Dying (1651), was widely practiced in the U.S. It emphasized Christian forbearance at the moment of death and a mortal life that had arrived at a meaningful conclusion. Interwoven through the Good Death were midcentury codes of masculinity and patriotism. In the Civil War, however, this conception was mightily challenged by 620,000 military and 50,000 civilian deaths. To understand these mind-numbing numbers, consider that more American soldiers died in the Civil War than in all other of this nation's wars, including World War i and World War ii. Consider also that the incidence of death in the Civil War was six times greater than the incidence of death in World War ii. Death at this magnitude was a severe challenge. Traditional funeral sermons and formulaic letters of condolence no longer could move "symbolically out of the meaningless slaughter back into the mid-nineteenth-century assumptions about life's meaning and purpose." The Good Death conception, rooted in home, local and domestic matters, broke down.

Aggravating the situation was the fact that 40 percent of Union soldiers who perished on the battlefield could not be identified and were buried, often hastily, as Unknown. The Confederate percentage was much higher. After major battles thousands of young men disappeared from the face of the earth. As a result families and friends encountered not death but the agony of absence. When struggling with such a loss, many "cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost and thus [they] remain … mired in painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love." Here Faust wisely uses Freud's distinction between the active process of mourning the dead and the stasis of soul-killing and perpetual melancholy over the absent. Her discussion illuminates not only the aftermath of the Civil War but, as well, the 88,000 people that remain missing today from the battlefields of wwii, Korea, and Vietnam. Survivors of the missing often can "not exorcise the phantoms of war by transforming them into reassuring religious or patriotic narratives of self-sacrifice." Faust conveys a perspective on war that is rarely seen and is as relevant now as it was then: "The blow that killed a soldier on the fields not only destroyed that man but also sent waves of misery and desolation into the world of relatives and friends, who themselves became war's casualties."

I briefly digress here to illustrate Faust's claim. My great-grandmother, who was born in 1854, raised my mother, who was her namesake. As a child in a hamlet in Rowan County, North Carolina, my great-grandmother suffered the death of her two brothers, one killed at Sharpsburg and the other was captured and died of disease in a [End Page lviii] Union prison. Both were buried in unmarked graves. Her father, too old for the army, was nevertheless in 1865 mustered in with other old fellows, boys, and disabled veterans to defend Salisbury, North Carolina, against Stoneman's cavalry. It wasn't much of a fight. His remains were never located. She married late a limping survivor of Lee's army. At her knee my mother learned a rage-filled veneration of the Confederacy, which, I believe, was intensified by the magnitude in that family of soldiers' deaths and the absence of last remains. Drew Faust's perspective is valid: "The unknown fate of dead kin left a dread void of uncertainty that knowledge would never fill."

Unable to maintain the Good Death, how did soldiers and their families cope? "Denial and numbness were, in fact, prominent means by which civilians—like soldiers—attempted to cope with war's losses." Moreover a new understanding of military deaths emerged. Patriotism and piety converged, Faust maintains, into a...

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