2008 Nonfiction Finalist This Republic of Suffering, by Drew Gilpin Faust

by James Marcus | Mar-10-2009

Each day leading up to the March 12 announcement of the 2008 NBCC awards, we highlight one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member James Marcus discusses Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf).

Few topics have prompted a greater outpouring of books than the American Civil War. Military chronicles, biographies, sociological treatises, fictionalized treatments of Lincoln’s melancholia, or the last thirty minutes at Little Round Top—out they pour, testifying at the very least to the conflict’s pride of place in our national psyche. Few authors, though, have approached it at quite so inventive an angle as the historian (and president of Harvard University) Drew Gilpin Faust. In This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, she argues that the long, bloody, fraternal clash not only transformed the patchwork confederation inherited from the Founding Fathers. It also redefined our very relationship to death, suffering, and identity—personal as well as civic.

How could this be so? As Faust points out in her preface, the level of carnage occasioned by the Civil War was beyond imagining: an estimated 620,000 soldiers died between 1861 and 1865, amounting to about two percent of the total population. In contemporary America, that would mean about six million deaths. Such industrial-strength slaughter caused Americans to reconsider the Victorian notion of a “good death,” which specified a peaceful, pious transition to the afterlife. It raised fundamental questions about the relationship of body and soul. Even the identification and burial of this mountain of cadavers, scattered across several states, required a new level of bureaucratic and forensic ingenuity.

To document this sea change, Faust goes back to a wealth of primary sources, some enormously moving, others speckled with black humor. (The book is also copiously illustrated, with images of annihilation that seem to split the difference between Winslow Homer and Goya’s Disasters of War.) Yet the author never succumbs to the historian’s occupational hazard: myopia. The big, bleak picture is always visible in the background. The war, she writes, forced Americans to find “the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individual lives—and deaths—at the same time that it redefined their nation and their culture. The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and demanding undertaking.” Faust’s eloquent and edifying postmortem should not be missed.