What America Lost, Buried, and Became

In 1916, the year of Verdun and the Somme, Carl Sandburg wrote, "The shovel is brother to the gun." Together they made trench warfare: one built protection, the other spewed fire. But Sandburg, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, had a different relationship in mind. Guns and shovels collaborate in war's basic business, death. One kills, the other buries. When the guns stopped in 1918, Sandburg added a third partner to the work of death, grass. "Pile the bodies high," ordered Sandburg in "Grass." Shovel them under and let me work—/ I am the grass; I cover all." After the killing and burying, grass heals scarred earth and conceals lost men, so that normal life resumes, so that "Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor: / What place is this? Where are we now?"¹ Once nature erases ugliness and fades memories, the work of death, the cycle of war, are primed to begin anew. Gun, shovel, grass. Gun, shovel, grass.

Like Sandburg, Drew Gilpin Faust sees death as war's fundamental work, but while Sandburg responded to World War I, a bloodbath known for spawning modern doubt and disillusion, Faust focuses on the American Civil War, a conflict that retains its romantic luster. The result, This Republic of Suffering, is staggering, profound, and transformative. Few of the countless books published on this most scrutinized war match Faust's for originality and significance. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of historians have argued that the war matters because it abolished slavery, saved the nation, expanded citizenship, empowered government, generated big business, and launched a world power. "But for those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War," Faust reminds us, "the texture of the experience, its warp and woof, was the presence of death" (p. xiii). The work of death—killing, dying, burying, justifying, mourning, consoling, and surviving—consumed the war generation and shaped all the historical changes attributed to them. The dead made new demands on American culture, government, religion, philosophy, and even the economy. To handle these burdens, Americans redefined their sense of self, society, and nation. In other words, neither freedom, equality, victory, nor prosperity made modern America. Death did.

Civil War soldiers faced the work of death first, and it posed unique challenges for them. First, the war denied thousands of men the rituals of dying enumerated in ars moriendi, centuries-old customs to insure a Good Death and Christian salvation. Nineteenth-century Americans believed people's conduct while dying reflected their life and eternal fate. Devout souls died like Christ: willingly, faithfully, and among family and friends who witnessed dying words, attitudes, and features. As Faust notes, "Civil War battlefields and hospitals could have provided the material for an exemplary text on how not to die" (p. 9). Separated from home, young men died instantly from shot and shell, unidentified in field hospitals, among enemies, unconscious with fever and disease, unattended in thickets and ditches. Soldiers of diverse faiths struggled to approximate a Good Death despite these conditions. They substituted nurses for kin, clasped family photographs while dying alone, and penned bloodstained last words. Comrades aided the process by writing formulaic condolence letters to families of the deceased. They detailed how the dying man accepted his fate, affirmed his faith, and sent his love. As Faust insightfully explains, warfare changed ars moriendi. Heroism and patriotism became emblems of a Good Death, supplanting piety as a sign of salvation and blurring duty to God and country. This conflation helped soldiers overcome a second challenge in death's business, killing. If duty to God and country were the same, with God on their side, Christian soldiers could kill without committing murder. Others justified the slaughter by claiming defense of self or home. Idealists argued that emancipation or another cause was righteous and therefore divinely sanctioned killing. Many used vengeance and prejudice to justify slaying a despicable enemy. Third, the heaps of war dead challenged soldiers...