This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (National Book Award Finalist)

The preface was much more engaging than the book itself. Not that the book wasn't good; it was just chock full of footnoted facts. Kind of like a term paper; Faust would say something, then spend boring time proving it with too many footnoted examples. While scholarly, certainly, it disrupted the flow and the power. I thought the best chapter was that entitled "Believing and Doubting," a chapter on how faith developed and changed in the wake of such a horrendous body count. I have always questioned why so many men went so willingly into hand-to-hand combat. Running towards destruction. Some quotable tidbits from this chapter help explain the mindset; "Some historians have argued that, in fact, only the widespread existence of such beliefs [afterlife] made acceptance of the Civil War death tolls possible, and that religion thus in some sense enabled the slaughter." "Death offered these devout men (soldiers with faith) a 'change' but not an ending; the celestial skies of Glory became more alluring than the bloody fields of Georgia or Virginia." Also interesting was Faust's exploration on how the Civil War concepts of Christian after-life (which are still predominant today) came to be. It all started with the publication of a book called "Heaven and Hell" by Emanuel Swedenborg in 1758. This started a "movement away from a conception of heaven as forbiddingly ascetic, distant from earth and its materiality, and highly theocentric. Instead, a more modern notion of heaven began to emerge as a realm hardly separate or different - except in its perfection - from earth itself." The conversion of thought, the movement to "annex heaven as a more glorious suburb of the present life" started in the 18th century but was incomplete when the Civil War started. The Civil War solidified it because in the face of mass killing, Swedenborg's concept of heaven was comforting. And survivors, as well as soldiers not expecting to survive, clung to that comfort. It was in this atmosphere that spiritualism began to flourish; mediums, ouija boards, messages from the world beyond. People were desperate for closure and reassurance. And this desperation shaped religion in America. And still shapes it into the 21st century.

Written with a studied calm, This Republic of Suffering carefully teases out bits of meaning in the rubble created by the American Civil War. Unlike many war chronicles, there is little here to gratify base interest in the macabre – although it is a book whose central subject is the lineaments of corporeal mayhem. In addition to Ms. Faust's laudable ability to write cogently and engagingly, she has also structured her book in an immensely gratifying manner. The first few chapters read like a conventional history of a neglected aspect of the Civil War, but by the end of the book the repercussions of what she has described become clear. Consequently, the reader comes not only to understand some fresh aspect of our contemporary attitudes about death and warfare, but also that those selfsame attitudes are protean, impermanent, and trace their pedigree to very specific individuals and actions. Things we take for granted or chalk up as simple commonsense ideas (i.e., the rightness of recovering and honoring fallen soldiers) turn out to be shockingly modern. This knowledge casts new light on how our current behavior might affect the attitudes and behaviors of future generations; particularly since so much of the post-mortem activity that followed the Civil War was largely undocumented (even ignored) and yet decidedly precedent-setting. This is a meditation on death as well as our attitudes about sacrifice and community. As such, it is a great deal more rewarding than a typical historical account.

Josef Stalin: "One death is a tragedy, one million deaths are a statistic." Touched on or examined a number of very interesting topics: the idea of the Civil War as the beginning of the modern Federal state, because of the need to organize massive numbers of people, to raise and equip a new kind of modern army, and to provide services to cititzens as a consequence of their military enlistment; a move away from death as a private experience to a more public, shared one; the notion that the state now owed the soldiers and the public an accounting of their deaths - national cemeteries, filled with bodies recovered after the war and re-interred, were a post-war creation. As people tried to make sense of the catastrophic number of casualties, religious feeling became more intense, even as many turned to spiritualism or disbelief in large numbers.