Review: Faust, This Republic of Suffering

[truepenny]

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about how the Civil War changed the way Americans dealt with death, both on the spiritual level and the intensely practical level of, we have all these dead bodies. What do we do with them? I found her most interesting when talking about the practicalities of burials (and reburials) and identifications and the way in which the modern armed forces ethos of bringing all soldiers home was born because of the problems created by this massive wall of death across the early 1860s, where you have civilian families on the one hand desperate to know what has become of their loved ones---are they alive? are the dead? where are their bodies?---and soldiers on the other trying to find ways to be sure that their families will receive that information. And the Army as an institution had nothing to do with it. It was up to volunteers and charitable workers and fellow soldiers to try to reconnect the broken tie. Sad and fascinating.



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