This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (review)

For one of the few experiences shared by all living beings, death has been accorded remarkably little attention from historians. Anthropologists have long recognized the centrality of rituals surrounding the end of life to a society’s culture, but historians, with a few notable exceptions, have generally avoided a subject that might prove just as illuminating of larger meaning patterns as do far more popular topics, like birth and marriage.

One key moment of change in American conceptions of and responses to mortality was the Civil War. For those who lived through it, the experience was one, above all else, of death. So many Americans met their ends in this war (620,000 soldiers and perhaps 50,000 civilians) that the nation was forced to create new traditions of mourning, new technologies of preserving and burying bodies, and new spiritual conceptions that would allow them to reconcile the slaughter with their understanding of a benevolent God. One in five military-aged men in the South was killed during the war. Even for a society far more familiar with mortality than our own, these numbers were not just staggering, they were transformative. Death not only proliferated, it appeared in new guises. Matthew Brady’s battlefield photographs first introduced Americans to lifelike representations of the no longer living during this period. The shared experience of death’s proximity would form the grounds for reunion between the North and South in the later nineteenth century, overshadowing the end of slavery as the lasting legacy of war in the imaginations of Northerners.

Dealing with death took an enormous amount of work, and this “work of death” is the focus of Drew Faust’s gripping and surprising new history of the Civil War and its aftermath. Full of dramatic illustrations and grounded in careful research into a wide variety of primary sources, particularly the letters of soldiers, this study offers more than just an examination of an understudied element of America’s most amply studied war. This is a powerful portrait of nineteenth-century transformations in responses to death and mourning, of the introduction of the government and the market into burial practices, and of the evolution of our current understanding of a “good death.”

Central to this study is the idea that battlefield casualties, particularly sudden death, posed enormous challenges to the long-held American understanding of a “good death,” a peaceful and reconciled passing with the promise of salvation among one’s family at home. Soldiers not only had to square killing with their views of themselves as moral beings, they also had to accept the reality of their own ends and represent the deaths of their comrades, and sometimes themselves, to civilian survivors. Remarkably similar condolence letters were written to loved ones at home in the North and South, narrating the passing of a soldier in a manner that might reconcile his family to a death so unsettling to shared understandings of a proper end. In response, civilians developed new traditions of mourning. Many found they had to redefine their very faith.

Yet more work was required for officers and civilians to figure out ways to bury the staggering numbers of battlefield corpses. In one of the most fascinating chapters of this study, Faust shows how embalming, coffins, and a national cemetery system emerged as Americans faced the horror of mass graves, physical decomposition, and armies unable to properly bury their own, let alone the enemy’s, dead. In an era before the state took responsibility for accounting for soldiers, nearly half of Civil War corpses were never identified, their bodies never returned home, their whereabouts unknown. Soldiers went to great lengths to make sure news of their ultimate fates would make it home, most famously by pinning their names on their uniforms before combat. Only near the close of the war did Congress establish organizational principles for handling casualties, in response to the anguish of survivors of unconfirmed loss...